About D4AD
Choices about education and job opportunities are among the most consequential decisions that individuals will make for their financial well-being. Yet, most people – especially low-income Americans from disadvantaged backgrounds – make these decisions with less data-driven insight than is the case when choosing a movie to watch at night. An estimated 13 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed, in many cases because they don’t know where to go to get the information they need to navigate the labor market. Opportunities are out there, but workers are simply not able to find them or to get the training needed to obtain them. This not only hurts the neediest in our society—low-income Americans from disadvantaged backgrounds—but also hurts overall economic growth as productive jobs and skill needs go unfilled.
The Data for the American Dream (D4AD) initiative aims to support innovative efforts to expand access to education and career data through partnerships that might include both public and private agencies and organizations. The goal of the D4AD initiative is to help students and jobseekers make better career decisions in a changing economy through data-driven information, and especially to help low-income, lower-skilled, underemployed, and unemployed Americans access better jobs and education opportunities.
D4AD Grantees
Colorado Workforce Development Council
Powered by a multi-agency, public-private data trust, My Colorado Journey will unite the existing fragmented ecosystem of data and allow for the creation of new datasets that connect services, programs, and education and employment opportunities.
Michigan Department of Technology, Management & Budget
Operating in partnership with Michigan’s Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, a regional workforce development system, and academic and research institutions, this project will focus on creating a suite of tools that will aid displace workers and unemployed or low-income individuals in making the transition to successful, sustainable employment.
New Jersey
Department of Labor
Targeted at customers of the state’s human services programs and other disadvantaged populations, New Jersey’s D4AD project will build an interactive website containing smart disclosure tools that will help jobseekers make informed decisions about training. Project partners include state agencies and organizations from the non-profit and private sectors and academia.
NEWS
Data for the American Dream is hosting a series of virtual learning sessions to provide more information about important aspects of building and sharing effective jobseeker tools for our changing economy. We are happy to invite our network to join us for three of these. Head over to the News page to learn more about the sessions and register!
New resources available! Visit the Resources page to read the Aligning Education and Training with Career Opportunities: Can Data Lead the Way? brief and view the accompanying infographic. Also, check out the Tackling Procurement Challenges resource through which we share five common procurement challenges and strategies for addressing them based on the experience of D4AD grantee partners
We have a variety of briefs, infographics, and reports on the Resources page. Please visit the page to read more about what we have learned through the D4AD initiative.
Check out NJ D4AD’s Medium blog Engineering Matters: An Interview with Team D4AD’s Lead Engineer Anne LoVerso to learn more about the team’s user-centered approach.
@D4ADream
We have released additional resources that include topics such as how to reach your audience, cross-state data sharing, and how data can help better align education and job opportunities. Find all our resources at: https://d4ad.com/resources/
Check out our Resources page where you'll find briefs about jobseekers’ needs, supports they have traditionally had access to, existing barriers, and solutions: https://d4ad.com/resources/ . More resources to be added soon!
OUR PARTNERS
