STRIVE students in the classroom
Over its 40+ year history, STRIVE has demonstrated tangible, real-world impact in creating access to opportunity for individuals who are motivated to pursue gratifying careers and financial mobility. Through its latest two-year partnership with MDRC, a leader in public policy and research, STRIVE has accelerated its efforts to garner and document quantitative results and outcomes data as it seeks investment from major national philanthropic and corporate funders, many of which are requiring evermore proof of their return on investment.
STRIVE is committed to this high level of rigor while nationally scaling its sector-based program approach and site footprint. This is an ambitious goal, especially in a challenging nonprofit funding environment, and STRIVE is intent on maintaining program quality as it grows. In partnership with MDRC, STRIVE is demonstrating a data-driven approach to draw insights from historical data, develop tools to improve its data systems, and to advance its research and development agenda.
With the goal to continue building toward rigorous impact evaluation, in 2023 STRIVE initiated a partnership with MDRC’s Center for Data Insights on STRIVE Forward, a data science project designed to strengthen STRIVE’s programs and contribute to the broader sector training field. This work follows STRIVE’s evaluation roadmap, which outlines steps for STRIVE to build toward rigorous program evaluation capacity.
As part of this project, STRIVE is replicating WorkAdvance, an evidence-based sector training model to assess program readiness among participants, as well as program fidelity. While there is solid data showing the sector-based approach to workforce development helps low-income individuals become employed, we do not see evidence that these individuals become better off financially. This is in part because these jobs were low-paying with no room for advancement. Thus, our approach is to leverage WorkAdvance findings to develop strategies to improve outcomes through controlled evaluations of both sector-based initiatives and job retention and advancement initiatives which show promise.
STRIVE students in the classroom
For more than 40 years, STRIVE has supported students with both career and personal development. In 2023, it launched a national scaling plan to serve 10,000 people annually by 2033.
STRIVE Forward focuses on two key programs: Career Path, which includes job readiness and occupational skills training (OST), career coaching, job placement and lifelong services; and Fresh Start, a re-entry program that incorporates moral reconation therapy, motivational interviewing, OST and transitional jobs.
For this project, MDRC and STRIVE assessed existing logic models for Career Path and Fresh Start, assessed data practices and built data tools to support scaling and improvement, and created new falsifiable logic models to continue guiding STRIVE’s scaling and expansion.
STRIVE’s commitment to providing person-centered wraparound services to its communities’ most vulnerable populations is the foundation for the program logic models.
Logic models illustrate how inputs and activities connect to outputs and outcomes. STRIVE’s integrated tailed support services—from needs assessments during intake, to class, and life skills achievements position STRIVE as a leader among workforce development agencies at a time when more and more agencies are beginning to offer these services.
Recent data system investments have improved STRIVE’s student data quality, enabling better service delivery.
MDRC’s review of student data from 2018 to 2025 revealed that key demographic and background fields were often incomplete prior to 2023. Since then, STRIVE’s data analytics team has standardized data entry and system structure and introduced validation rules to ensure essential fields are completed. These improvements help STRIVE better understand and support its diverse student population.
STRIVE students in the classroom
Career Path and Fresh Start serve individuals facing structural barriers to economic mobility. Students complete milestones and find employment at rates comparable to other leading sector training providers.
Most STRIVE students are male and Black or Hispanic/Latinx, many have children or other dependents, and few have higher education degrees or jobs at intake. Experiences with houselessness and the criminal justice system are common. STRIVE enrolls individuals with layered barriers to employment without screening out those who may need or benefit from intensive support and case management.
MDRC and STRIVE co-developed and tested two CRM-agnostic tools: a predictive analytics toolset to support student success, and an employer partner quality dashboard to strengthen the training-to-job pipeline. MDRC trained STRIVE staff to use and manage the tools independently.
Using data on STRIVE’s New York Career Path program, MDRC developed code to integrate predictive models into STRIVE’s data monitoring practices. The toolset predicts a student’s likelihood of achieving program success using1 only application data, aligning with STRIVE’s goal to identify support needs early.
MDRC and STRIVE developed a tool to assess employer partnerships, which are critical to program success.2 STRIVE sought a tool to address structural barriers to good jobs by focusing on employers.
The Employer Quality Index transformed student-level job placement data to evaluate partnerships across two dimensions: reliability (a “satisfied customer” view) and quality (“high-road” job characteristics such as wages, benefits, and retention).As well, MDRC built a dashboard using “traffic lighting” to visualize partnership quality and the strength of each attribute. The tool provides real-time insights into which employers are expanding opportunities for STRIVE students.
STRIVE’s strong program implementation and equitable outcomes position it well for future rigorous evaluation. STRIVE and MDRC are continuing to partner to define milestones for the next stage of scale and learning. With success rates comparable to other leading sector training providers and improved data systems, STRIVE is ready to build stronger evidence. STRIVE now has the tools to monitor and strengthen its programs as it grows nationally.
1Running complex machine learning models can be resource intensive on data servers and may add only marginal value to predictive accuracy at the cost of transparency and interpretability. See: Preel-Dumas, Camille, Richard Hendra, and DakotaDenison. 2023. Keep It Simple: Picking the Right Data ScienceMethod to Improve Workforce Training Programs. OPRE Report2023-058. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation,Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and HumanServices.
2LawrenceF. Katz, Jonathan Roth, Richard Hendra, and Kelsey Schaberg, "Why DoSectoral Employment Programs Work? Lessons from WorkAdvance," NBER WorkingPaper 28248 (2020), https://doi.org/10.3386/w28248.
About STRIVE
STRIVE is a national workforce development solution for people ready and motivated for a new start. We offer tuition-free skills and job-readiness training, one-on-one support and lifetime personal coaching. We create partnerships with employers that result in pathways to life-changing careers while helping employers close critical gaps in their workforce.