Springfield’s Workforce Development Board serves 7 counties in our region. The board is a City department, but they receive no money from the City’s General Fund. Their funding is solely dependent on Department of Labor and Health and Human Services (HHS). Funding levels have been steadily declining.
The Workforce Development Board is grateful for Hack 4 Good’s support when low funding would prevent them from developing a pilot project. Depending on the success of this pilot project, this project could potentially be expanded to all 14 job boards throughout the state.
What is the problem?Workforce Development has many people coming in their door. People who have more barriers. People who are harder to start. They are working to outreach to different populations they have never had to reach before. They’ve found people cannot come to the Career Center anymore.
Many job seekers are underemployed, and have difficulty visiting the Job Center to look for a better job due to their existing work schedules, transportation barriers, and childcare barriers.
How can Hack 4 Good help?We can help people find good high-paying jobs in their local neighborhood. We can help make Workforce Development job listings more easily available to those in need. We’ve been asked to help build an app, “ Portal to Work ”, that will show the job seeker nearby available jobs based on travel time from their home.
Portal to Work should be able to map out jobs within the geographical area near the job seeker. Jobs should be sorted by travel time. Our app will limit their search to jobs they know they can get to without a 4 hour bus trip across the city.
