Per Scholas

But I was cur-curious, uh, when I was researching this episode to see, are nonprofits also restructuring, and are they not hiring new people? Are they maybe also laying people off because, uh, AI can do that job? Though we do have-- we have s-done some case studies about, you know, intake and how having an AI, uh, handle some of the routine questions that come in at intake for a shelter, for example, can help your staff spend time on the more difficult questions, more complicated, challenging questions, uh, have time to call people back when they left a, a message, a voicemail.

Um, so it's interesting to see how are workforce development nonprofits responding and how are nonprofits, is this also impacting nonprofits? So in terms of workforce development, um, I looked at one nonprofit, Per Scholas.

They do workforce development, uh, getting people into jobs.

Uh, they launched an AI solutions developer course for alumni this year, and last fall, they saw the writing on the wall and said that they were slowing down software development training for coding jobs because those jobs had dried up or were drying up.

... look at what we have done at aggregate and say the results are modest.

And so then folks point to a program like Per Scholas, for example, and say, "Well, Per Scholas is doing, doing this great work," right? Um, but, but how do you bring that to scale? [chuckles]

Can you just describe to, to some listeners who might not know Per Scholas-

Yeah

... how that sectoral training program works and its track record?

How am I gonna cover that so that I can be in class or show up for this interview?" Or, "Gas is really expensive.

How am I gonna cover my transportation costs to get to and from where I need to get?" So it really combines, you know, that demand-driven industry engagement with the career navigation, technical training, durable skills, and wraparound supports that I think research has shown time and time again to be the kind of special sauce of really high-quality workforce development programs.

So Per Scholas is doing that in the tech space, and they're often lifted up as the exception, the high-quality program.