
Click here to access the Connecting Students to Wraparound Services and the Workforce Project Summary 2024
From 2021 through 2024, the League for Innovation in the Community College convened four community colleges across the state of Arizona—a variety of rural, urban, and tribal institutions—to participate in a project focused on improving student connections to wraparound services and the workforce. The project, “Community Colleges and Communities: Collective Impact – Workforce Development with Wraparound Services” was generously funded by the Garcia Family Foundation. The goal of the project was to multiply the effectiveness of community resources in addressing students’ basic needs while connecting students to careers and jobs related to their academic goals. The League and the participating colleges—Arizona Western College, Coconino Community College, Pima Community College, and San Carlos Apache College—sought to:
- Increase students’ job placement in fields related to certificate/degree completion.
- Enhance broadband access for participating colleges, students, and communities.
- Enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of wraparound services to colleges in addressing students’ basic needs by creating communities of care.
- Create an evolving community of practice for sharing best practices and learnings within the project colleges and agencies that might expand across the League’s ecosystem.
The League took an innovative approach to facilitating this project work, encouraging college teams to focus their efforts around one or more of the above objectives and to create unique projects that supported both institutional needs and project goals. The League paid particular attention to helping colleges better understand the unique needs of marginalized populations, including African American, Latinx, and Indigenous communities; first-generation learners; low-income students; and those struggling with mental health challenges and/or basic needs insecurities.
Over the three years of the project college teams used various approaches to ameliorating students’ basic needs insecurities, enhancing student support services, and connecting students to opportunities in the workforce and in their communities. College teams were supported by the League’s partners on the project, experts in innovation (Eureka! Ranch), workforce development (Pipeline AZ), research and evaluation (Center for the Study of Community Colleges), and social justice (Changing Perspectives). The final report (here) summarizes the project’s major accomplishments as well as persistent challenges and future areas of focus.