Bridges to Healthcare

Collaborators 

Lead Organization: TBD

Contact: TBD ; Email: TBD ; Phone: TBD

Known/Likely Collaborators: Rochester's Adult Literacy Program (Hawthorne Education Center) ; United Way of Olmsted County ; Workforce Development Inc

Potential Collaborators:

Related Projects

Adult Basic Education (ABE) ; Bridges to Careers ; Pathways Toward Prosperity and Well-Being Program ; Pathways to College and Careers (Emerging Leaders Program) ; Rochester Works

Impacts 

Major Impact: 

PlanScape Impacts :

Level 1: Medical Services, Workforce Development

Level 2:

DMC Impacts:

Community Health Impacts:

Type of Project

Programming  

Link to original article 

 When Suzana Deng, 34, came to Rochester, Minnesota, in the winter of 2003 as a Sudanese refugee, she wound up at an education hub familiar among English Language Learners in town: the Hawthorne Education Center, the Rochester Public Schools’ adult basic education program. But she didn’t stick with her classes long.

Feeling more immediate financial pressure to help support her family members, Deng found board and employment at a meatpacking plant in Worthington and spent the next two years commuting home on the weekends. Eventually, she decided it was time to give Hawthorne another try. So she enrolled in the center’s literacy program and eventually settled on nursing as her career interest.

Now a mother of three little girls, Deng is heading into her third — and final — year at Hawthorne, where she’s preparing to enroll in a nursing program at Rochester Community and Technical College (RCTC). It’s a stepping stone that’ll help her go from working part time at a nursing home to finding employment as a certified nursing assistant (CNA) at Mayo Clinic, she hopes.

By entering the center’s “Bridges to Healthcare” pathway program, Deng is able to avoid having to take remedial coursework at RCTC — that’s non-credit-bearing coursework that still would have cost her thousands in tuition costs. And because staff on both ends of the pathway have worked to ensure that academic expectations are consistent throughout, Deng trusts that they’ve set her up for success once she transitions to college.

“Hawthorne is a good place to start. They’ll help get you to the level you’re supposed to be,” she said. “They are so honest, because…. it’s better to tell you something to your face. Then you can fix it.”

This heightened level of collaboration to remove barriers for low-income and nontraditional students looking to find employment in the health-care field was recently recognized as a mark of innovation by researchers at Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. There’s strong buy-in from Mayo, which has employed about 100 graduates from the program since August 2013.

“We were particularly compelled by how the program managed to coordinate among multiple stakeholders to address a critical employment skills gap – all the while targeting low-income adult learners, including immigrants, refugees, and minorities, that were eager to advance their education and career,” wrote Christina Marchand, a senior associate director at the Ash Center. “[We] were deeply impressed by the rate that participants not only completed their training, but at how many were able to obtain related employment in the healthcare industry. It is a real success story that we feel could be replicated by healthcare and hospital employers and adult education and community colleges across the country.”