We’re using the first four days of September to spotlight four big ideas shaping the future of New York’s workforce. Each day, we’ll share a new perspective on what it will take to create good jobs, expand opportunity, and build an economy that works for every New Yorker. Then, right after Labor Day, we’ll release our calendar for the year ahead. Today: the fourth and final installment, which proposes ways to grow and better integrate workforce funding streams.
As Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su has described, a bridge is only as strong as the strands that hold it up. New York City’s workforce system has plenty of strands, including programs, funders, agencies, and employers, but too few are woven together. The result is a system weaker than the sum of its parts. This final installment of NYCETC’s “Four Days, Four Big Workforce Ideas” looks at how to better connect them.
With slow job growth, AI disruption, federal immigration crackdowns, and rising demand for talent in sectors from care to advanced manufacturing, there is growing consensus that NYC needs to do more to meet its labor market challenges. But two major barriers stand in the way of meaningful action for jobseekers, workers seeking advancement, and businesses in need of skilled talent.
The first is that, despite significant investment, particularly in programs for young people, NYC still lacks the funding needed to pursue a truly transformational workforce agenda. The second is that the stakeholders who control the purse strings, above all government and philanthropy, are not on the same page about priorities, metrics, and overall strategy. So long as this is true, we will struggle collectively to take big swings at the most intractable problems, even with ample resources.
What follows are our ideas for how New York City can grow its pot of workforce funds, derive more value from each dollar, and shift what those dollars buy us, from low-wage job placements toward real economic mobility.
Part One: Gridlock: Too Little Money or Too Little Alignment?
Funding decisions play out in countless negotiations, from budget debates in Congress to family foundation boardrooms. Ultimately, dollars will follow political pressure and the flow of events. At the local level, as NYCETC detailed in its 2025 report, Putting Our Dollars to Work, New York City has significantly increased support for workforce programming that serves youth and young adults, but city investments in most other populations, above all working adults, have not kept pace. Federally, investment might be best described as “uncertain, and under threat.”
For context, in Fiscal Year 2024, New York City spent $589 million across its major workforce programs. Of that total, the city itself contributed approximately $363 million, or 62 percent. (New York State contributed just $11 million, or 2 percent.) But the impressive topline city figure obscures a significant imbalance. Most city funding is concentrated in youth programs, particularly the Summer Youth Employment Program. Programs serving working-age adults rely much more heavily on federal dollars and operate at a far smaller scale.
Of that $589 million total in FY24, federal funding accounted for about $215 million, or 37 percent. The largest single source comes through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), signed into law by President Obama in 2014. When WIOA passed, it ended a decade-plus of brutal cuts to federal workforce spending that hit New York City especially hard: In nominal dollars, the city’s annual federal workforce allocation under the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), which preceded WIOA, plunged from nearly $97 million in Program Year 2002 to under $63 million in PY 2013. Adjusted to constant 2024 dollars, that represented a 50 percent cut.
Annual WIOA funding to NYC has fluctuated substantially since then, with a sharp dip in 2017-18 and a relative peak in 2023-24. Since President Trump returned to office in 2025, his administration’s budget requests have proposed consolidating WIOA’s core Title I programs into a single block grant at roughly 30% below current funding, while eliminating WIOA Title II adult education and Job Corps entirely. Congress declined to adopt the consolidation for FY2026, though House appropriators have since advanced an FY2027 bill with deep cuts of their own.
In addition to local and federal funding, philanthropy is a third major source. New York City stands second to none in the depth and commitment of its foundations that support workforce development. In fact, based on a survey by the NYC Workforce Funders Collaborative (NYCWF), collective annual philanthropic support for workforce programs and services is comparable to what the city gets each year under the WIOA. Philanthropic support totaled approximately $92 million in 2024, compared to $99.4 million in WIOA funding for the roughly contemporaneous Program Year 2024. Of course, that $92 million is the sum of dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller grants—each with its own objectives and milestones—to provider organizations, intermediaries, and other groups.
Ask a dozen stakeholders in New York City’s workforce development ecosystem what the system is supposed to accomplish, and you might get a dozen different answers. The absence of a guiding principle or goal renders it almost impossible to attempt change at scale, a constraint that becomes more painful as labor market conditions deteriorate. Worse, government itself seems to be working at cross-purposes, as different agencies at both the federal and city levels follow the dictates of program design and funding restrictions, often with little coordination across them.
In Washington, the Trump administration has articulated a strategic vision for workforce policy but has undermined it through repeated proposed funding cuts and its broader attempt to reorganize the Cabinet, which has badly strained the U.S. Department of Labor’s capacity. Meanwhile, Congress appears to be punting on WIOA reauthorization altogether, likely delaying any meaningful reconsideration of the law until at least 2029.
Closer to home, multiple efforts across previous mayoral administrations to define a larger guiding vision never came to fruition. Bill de Blasio’s Jobs for New Yorkers Task Force, the Future of Workers Task Force, and Executive Order 22 during Eric Adams’s mayoralty all faltered after City Hall turned its attention elsewhere. Without shared objectives and a forceful mandate to work in concert, city agencies largely carried on as they traditionally have.
The result, often lamented by workforce veterans, is that our field seems stuck in an endless loop of discussing how siloed the system remains, and what that costs us in terms of scale and service quality.
Part Two: The Bridge – A New Compact for Mobility
Part of what makes that unending conversation so frustrating is that it has occasionally surfaced ideas with the potential to break the cycle. In its final report released in 2023, the Future of Workers Task Force proposed a Talent Investment Fund, in which leaders from philanthropy and government would blend resources to create a pool of dollars that they could jointly disburse through a grant process. The explicit justification was to create the Fund “as a vehicle for collaborative co-investment of public and private dollars based on shared criteria.” In theory, this vehicle could align objectives, standardize definitions, milestones, and metrics, and foster innovation.
The jump from report to reality is long and daunting, and the Talent Investment Fund proved unable to stick the landing. Government and philanthropic leaders were unable to resolve questions of ownership and administration, tricky city procurement and budgeting rules, philanthropy’s concern that it would not have an equal voice in strategy or investment decisions, and a failure to identify a clear guiding principle, such as a focus on economic mobility or apprenticeships.
These obstacles are real, as are concerns on both sides about potential hostile federal audits, skeptical foundation board members, and resentment from organizations that see this potential change as a threat. They’re also all surmountable, if the parties decide that the benefits of a blended fund matter more. For system leaders, these benefits include greater strategic clarity and, vitally, a mechanism to force common ground on priorities and practices. For grantees, combining dollars would mean a lighter reporting burden and lower opportunity costs associated with scrambling to fill program budget gaps and then figuring out which funding streams can cover which services. With limited dollars, boosting the return on public and philanthropic investments is a significant win.
With all this in mind, it’s time to try again. The good news is that the two biggest pieces are already in place.
On the philanthropic side, the foundation already exists. The New York City Workforce Funders Collaborative (NYCWF) pools resources from 12 foundations and corporate philanthropies, establishes shared priorities, and makes collective grant decisions. Its 2026–2028 strategy focuses specifically on middle-wage careers and economic mobility through research, high-potential pilots, and public-private partnerships. NYCWF is strongly positioned to serve as the philanthropic partner, or even the initial fiscal and grantmaking home, for a broader Talent Investment Fund. That is precisely the role philanthropy can play: absorbing the risk of early experimentation so that government can invest with greater confidence and scale what works.
Meanwhile, the NYC Workforce Development Board has provided a public sector starting point. Its plan to utilize $1 million in WIOA funding for a Workforce Innovation Fund offers a practical seed-and-match model. The Talent Investment Fund could absorb or build upon that structure, enabling the combined capacity to both launch promising approaches and test, strengthen, and expand them. That public sector commitment could serve as the foundation for a broader investment architecture, drawing additional resources from economic development activity, publicly controlled assets, philanthropy, and employers.
These two ideas aren’t exactly the same, but it’s hard to believe they can’t be reconciled. Motivation to try should be particularly strong on the city side, given the restrictions on how WIOA dollars can be used. For instance, a proposal to expand high-quality sector training probably could not include a budget line to assist participants with wraparound supports such as childcare or transportation, leaving gaps that providers would then need to fill through other means. A Talent Investment Fund could remove that need, streamlining the process for providers while ensuring a higher share of the award goes to services for jobseekers, workers, and businesses.
The possibilities are already visible. New York City Economic Development Corporation’s (EDC) Economic Mobility Networks reflect a straightforward idea. When the city invests in major development projects, residents in the surrounding neighborhoods should be positioned to benefit from the growth those projects create. Its cruise terminal community funds offer another model, demonstrating how fees, leases, concessions, and publicly controlled assets can generate sustained community investment rather than one-time grants. And the Northwell School of Health Sciences, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, shows how the pieces fit together. Philanthropy creates room to innovate, government provides the infrastructure for scale, and an employer builds a talent pipeline around its own needs. That it is happening in a sector where demand is urgent and the careers on offer are durable makes the model all the more worth building on.
Through its first eight-plus months, the Mamdani administration has largely kept quiet on workforce issues. Given the mayor’s focus on affordability and commitment to working-class New Yorkers, this omission is puzzling. This administration has a specific economic justice lens, an affordability mandate, and new leadership at EDC with skills in value capture and operational expertise. Announcing a Talent Investment Fund would break the silence and align with the team’s vision for the city.
Deputy Mayor Julie Su has described the Brooklyn Bridge’s cables as a collection of individual wires that, when brought together, become strong enough to hold up the bridge. That is how we should think about workforce funding. Each investment may be valuable on its own, but if these investments remain standalone pieces, they will not hold up over time or get New Yorkers from point A to point B.
Doing that requires a complete vision, sufficient investment, and a clear understanding of what the investment is supposed to accomplish. The goal is not simply to spend workforce dollars, but to connect New Yorkers to opportunities across the city and move them toward genuine economic mobility.
The problem is not that we do not know what works. We do. Across this city, we can point to successful training programs, employer partnerships, apprenticeships, and career pathways that move New Yorkers into good jobs and help businesses find the talent they need.
Workforce investment should be part of the economic development deal from the start, not an add-on at the end. When public action creates economic value, whether through a subsidy, rezoning, major development, public contract, or other investment, the question of who gets access to the resulting opportunity should already have an answer. Businesses and developers that benefit should help build and finance the talent pipelines that make their growth possible, with public and private investment working toward the same goal of expanding economic mobility.
That compact cannot begin with employers. It has to begin at City Hall.
This mayoral administration has an opportunity to plant a flag and say clearly that this is how New York City will pursue economic success and economic justice together. This is what we will invest. This is what we will expect from those who benefit from public action. These are the outcomes we will measure. And this is how we will hold ourselves and our partners accountable for delivering them.
And accountability cannot end when the deal is announced. We should track commitments, measure outcomes, and publish results. Which investments created pathways into good jobs? Which employers hired, trained, and advanced New Yorkers? Which public investments produced economic mobility, and which did not? Transparency should allow government, employers, labor, philanthropy, and communities to see whether we are collectively delivering on the compact we made.
We know how to build successful pathways. What we have lacked is the joint commitment to connect them, invest in them, and hold ourselves accountable for whether New Yorkers can actually reach them. City Hall should set that expectation, demonstrate it through its own investments, require it of those who benefit from public action, and show New Yorkers the results.
This is what economic mobility looks like: connecting New York’s strongest ideas into a bridge from precarity to prosperity. The alternative is a city that keeps generating extraordinary wealth on one side of the bridge, while leaving working New Yorkers stranded on the other.