We make collaborative, innovative, and effective investments of private and public resources to improve regional workforce skills, expand access to family-sustaining job opportunities, and enhance adaptability in a changing employment landscape. SOWIB’s Mission: “Maximize regional collaboration, effective innovation and coordinated investment of public and private resources, to optimize equitable
access to family-sustaining employment.”
Through private grants, donations, and public funding we create job training, skill upgrade, apprenticeship, and internship opportunities, focusing on employment benefiting the individual and the community. Our work is guided by data and the perspectives of a wide variety of regional employers, economic development groups, local educators, and local governments. Together we design and implement innovative strategies that build a strong, highly competent, and adaptable workforce in Southwestern Oregon's Coos, Curry and Douglas Counties. Our goal is to create a thriving regional population that attracts, and benefits from, businesses providing family-sustaining jobs. We create and invest in regionally appropriate workforce development strategies, with an eye to the latest regional demographics. These include educational attainment levels and employment; projected demand and wage rates for specific occupations; perspectives of employers and labor leaders; and local economic and community development goals. Perhaps most importantly, SOWIB seeks to build a workforce ready to adapt as new opportunities arise. Implementation of our mission is accomplished by a range of strategies, including some that we have pioneered. They include contracting with partners to provide training suited to a particular existing or emerging industry sector; creating basic entry-level orientation to a workplace and its norms; advising on adjustments to or augmentation of existing government training programs; partnering with community colleges to create or expand access to high-value certification or career training; and/or innovating to make career and technical guidance, internships and apprenticeships more realistically available for youth and the unemployed. Ensuring truly equitable access to job training and skill development is of paramount concern. Our network of partners serving diverse constituencies enables identification and elimination of “hidden” factors that may discourage or prevent access to training. Discretionary funds, especially private donations and grants allow us to do what makes sense -- and quickly, without a lot of red tape. To date, our approach has produced highly cost-effective, documented gains in employment in multiple industries, with additional highly promising results from newer pilot projects.
