Evaluating the Workforce Innovation Fund
Highlights
- Funded by the U.S. Department of Labor, the Workforce Innovation Fund (WIF) developed and built evidence on strategies to improve employment outcomes in the public workforce system.
- WIF required the 43 grantees to demonstrate how their proposed innovation was supported by past research and how it would be evaluated to generate future evidence.
- As the WIF National Evaluation Coordinator, Abt documented WIF interventions and evaluations as well as successes and challenges in conducting the evaluations.
The Workforce Innovation Fund (WIF), funded by the U.S. Department of Labor, was an initiative to develop and test new services and strategies in the public workforce system. WIF required that the 43 grantees each demonstrate how their proposed innovation was supported by past research and how it would be evaluated to generate future evidence.
As the WIF National Evaluation Coordinator, Abt Global documented WIF interventions and their evaluations as well as successes and challenges in conducting the evaluations.
WIF was a substantial accomplishment: the 43 grantees developed and implemented a range of innovative projects and procured external evaluators who conducted evaluations and produced reports on the projects’ interventions and outcomes. While the evaluation component was one of the more challenging aspects of WIF for some grantees, and the evaluations varied in their strength, all grantees met the evaluation requirement, and many gained significant knowledge from the experience. Further, as documented in the report, the grantees and their evaluators produced a broad and useful array of findings on the many and varied interventions, contributing important information to the evidence base.
Relevant Resources:
The Workforce Innovation Fund (WIF): A Synthesis Report on Evaluation Findings and Experiences