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Challenges: 

• Recruitment of program participants. The WNJ program implemented in a boom economy with regional unemployment rates as low as 1 percent. This made recruitment a major focus of activity at all sites using methods that included such approaches as distributing fliers, publishing newspaper ads and collaborating with dozens of partner agencies. Grantees reported that there was a tradeoff between recruitment and sustainability; if recruitment had not required as much attention, more time would have been devoted to ensuring sustainability.
• Sustainability of the program. Three months after TCWF funding ended, two of the original sites were not implementing the WNJ program. One site was no longer eligible to offer pre-employment training programs due to changes resulting from legislation that dramatically changed the structure and delivery of employment services nationwide. Another site lost an important contract and was in the process of laying off many of its employees. The third integrated the WNJ program into its basic agency services.
• Comparisons of WNJ re-employment figures to other programs. Part of the difficulty in sustaining and further disseminating the Winning New Jobs program is that it was difficult to compare Winning New Jobs re-employment rates to those from government-funded re-employment programs. An investigation of re-employment rates from other programs in California led Initiative evaluators to conclude that almost all re-employment figures are based on information that does not follow individuals closely or long enough to provide trustworthy re-employment information comparable to the follow-up data available from the Winning New Jobs.

Lessons Learned: 

• Employment programs can be important vehicles for health promotion. An important element of the Winning New Jobs program is that it brought a health promotion program into employment agencies that traditionally do not consider the health of their participants. All three sites responded very positively to the information and education about the health and mental health promoting aspects of employment and the deleterious impact of unemployment. Evaluation data show clear evidence that key mental health variables were improved through this intervention.
• Even excellent programs may face insurmountable political and financial barriers to sustainability. Unlike almost every other job search training program, the WNJ program can boast a scientific evaluation demonstrating its effectiveness. It is also a program extremely well liked by the people who use it. These characteristics alone are not sufficient to ensure the program’s capacity to compete with other programs. Factors such as its expense to agencies, where it fits in funding streams, and agencies’ commitment to programs they have developed themselves all figure into the sustainability equation.
• Program sustainability needs to be addressed from the top down as well as from the bottom up. Most of the efforts toward sustainability for WNJ were “bottom-up” approaches, working with staff at the implementation sites to secure commitments from their superiors to keep the program in place and “selling" the program to other agencies, primarily through contacts at the program level. More efforts to influence widespread adoption of the program and sustainability at a policy level through counties and state government might have been fruitful.