Alternatives for Girls – Detroit, MI
Alternatives For Girls (AFG) is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help girls and young women avoid violence and teen pregnancy by helping them access support, resources, and opportunities to make positive choices and be safe. AFG primarily serves at-risk young women and girls of color, including those who are experiencing homelessness, human trafficking, and domestic violence. AFG’s workforce development services provide multiple pathways for at-risk women for social and economic mobility which include integrated career exploration and planning, training, and placement services. In the course of its work, AFGs has developed various partnerships with local employers and training providers.
Support from the Fund for Workforce Equity enabled AFG to implement a participatory evaluation of its Workforce Development Hub (WDH) program. The WDH provides comprehensive, integrated workforce development to AFG participants who are BIPOC girls and women experiencing homelessness, human trafficking, domestic violence, and/or other trauma-related factors in Detroit, Michigan.
Participatory research encompasses research designs, methods, and frameworks that use systematic inquiry in direct collaboration with those who belong to or represent the interests of people who are the focus of the research. To date, AFG has set up a worker equity fellowship program, central to the evaluation design, as well as project staff/evaluator grantee training. Their workforce equity fellows have completed a four-week training program on participatory research evaluation methodology. Fellows will engage in a year-long immersive research study of the WDH in collaboration with the AFG’s Workforce Development Hub staff and Evaluation Strategies, AFG’s local evaluator.
Through this evaluation project, AFG hopes to yield strong data and learn insights into worker-learner perspectives that help identify: the root causes of local workforce challenges for BIPOC youth/young adults, how worker-learners navigate these challenges, and gaps between worker-learner priorities and current WDH programming.
AFG’s participation in the Fund’s learning community has enabled them to learn more about centering workers’ voices in program design and implementation and to connect with grantees around the country.
“AFG is excited about the long-term impact of this funding and support as we look to implement a participatory evaluation process of our other programs and services in the future to better meet worker and learner needs.” said Sandra Romocan.