Work-Based Learning Labs

The Work-Based Learning Labs team works with partners to embed and enhance work-based learning opportunities for students in The Bronx and NYC. Work-based learning opportunities offer real work contexts to explore career paths, apply academic learning, develop technical skills, and build a professional network. Work-based learning opportunities also provide young people with the perspective to make important academic and career decisions, develop a deeper sense of their passions, and build their workforce readiness.

The Work

HERE to HERE provides expertise, training, and work-based learning tools to encourage educational institutions to partner with employers and youth development non-profits, and integrate work-based learning into curriculum, school design, and accredited occupational pathways based on HERE to HERE’s key distinguishers work. 

Raising Student Voice

To achieve our vision, stakeholders must align, but all too often we discuss and make changes without engaging those most affected by institutional change: young people. Recognizing this, we work to amplify student voice by supporting initiatives for students and by students. By placing student voice at the center of systems change, we hope to motivate an authentic culture shift that recognizes the needs of the most important voice in the room: young people.

Check out some footage from our Winter 2020 Work-Based Learning Student Summit and our student-driven Language Guide.

Connecting Educators to Employers and CBOs 

Critical to demonstrating effective work-based learning programs in high school and postsecondary spaces is working with employers. Working alongside our employer and CBO partners, HERE to HERE provides employers with the framework to develop quality opportunities for youth and new ways to bridge educational standards and necessary skills for the labor market. The Work-Based Learning Labs team then connects educators to these employers and CBOs, so that schools can offer opportunities to their students.

Making Best Practice Common Practice

The Work-Based Learning Labs team also works closely with the HERE to HERE’s Policy and Impact team to identify demonstrations that work and to determine paths for scaling strategies to reach a wider, more-meaningful percentage of young people. By advancing a suite of effective strategies, HERE to HERE’s practice does not focus narrowly on the success of just one program or initiative, but on the achievement of lasting, public and private institutional change needed to braid work with learning for all NYC students.