For 45+ years, Fulfillment Fund has supported under-resourced students to achieve their life goals, focusing on a path to and through college as a way toward a brighter future. Today, we are seeing that a college degree alone does not guarantee a well-paying job, job security, or the ability to keep advancing your opportunities in life. With careful guidance during college, we can influence a student’s career trajectory and that early exposure to various professional paths, coupled with support to achieve their goals, can have a remarkable impact on upward economic mobility for low-income youth.

To disrupt cycles of poverty and to ignite economic advancement, Fulfillment Fund is expanding and deepening our career programming. This ensures our students (who are 99 percent BIPOC, and 93 percentlow-income) have the tools and experiences to close the gap from college graduation to their first meaningful job.

Thanks to LA2050’s “Youth Economic Advancement” grant, we are able to enhance and expand Fulfillment Fund’s career readiness initiatives for high school and college students. Our goals included leveraging our curriculum-building expertise to teach soft and hard skills, broadening our base of corporate partners and volunteer professionals to build a network of student-centric resources, developing our alumni program to add support beyond college graduation and community among alums, and creating a new staff position to offer a deeper range of career-related services.

Since the fall, we began developing a new career readiness curriculum using our expertise along with that of our wonderful volunteer network of professionals, built an online classroom, and, last month, formally launched Fulfillment Fund’s Career Readiness online modules for students in our College Success Program. Accessible 24/7, this new virtual space is comprised of a series of video tutorials and interactive tools designed to guide students through the process of developing proficiency in essential skills and knowledge as they move toward their future professional goals. For instance, one module teaches students to create a resume, practice creating a draft of their own, and then gives them the ability to submit it and get personalized feedback from their Fulfillment Fund advisor.

We have also been creating new opportunities to engage with our students as they grow in their careers.  Early in the Fall semester, we hosted a mixer for Fulfillment Fund alumni and our ScholarBridge auxiliary group (volunteer professionals who focus on career advice, networking, and financial support for our students) to network and connect. Through ScholarBridge and a partnership with fellow nonprofit CareerSpring, we are also bridging connections to volunteer career professionals for coaching and exclusive jobs and internships.

Fulfillment Fund conducted comprehensive research and market analysis on career advisor roles at other organizations, locally and nationally, to learn best practices for our Career Readiness Advisor position so the new hire will be set up to succeed, and to gain knowledge to build our baseline success measures. Additionally, we have gained several new partnerships since receiving our grant, including ones in which Fulfillment Fund manages scholarship applications for other nonprofits and companies and provides those students with our College Success Program and career readiness services. We have also successfully enhanced existing partnerships, such as with Los Angeles City College, which recently began providing office space for one of our College Success Advisors on their campus, enabling us to meet in person with our students and smoothly guide them to LACC’s on-site resources, including their career services.

Over the next six months, we plan to grow our internal capacity around Career Readiness, training program staff to incorporate age-appropriate career readiness practices into discussions with students and offering professional development. We intend to provide students with resources, knowledge, and tools, such as job market projections, trends, and graduate school options. We also expect to post our new Career Readiness Advisor position, based on our extensive landscape analysis, and aim to have someone in place by the fall. Finally, we plan to evaluate our impact by developing measures of career success for our graduates and will elicit feedback from students as well as gather outcomes data.

We remain deeply grateful to partners like LA2050 and our award sponsor Conrad N. Hilton Foundation for their support in helping low-income students compete for those lucrative first jobs that truly propel families out of poverty. This award allows us to deepen the foundation to create generational change in our community.