It is with great pleasure that we offer three case studies to complement the report Calling All Leaders: An Action Guide to Workforce Development Transformation. The action guide outlined the grand dimensions of the challenge by the numbers, and contrasted the need for workforce development services with the limited resources available. These case studies show that Gateway City leaders are undaunted. They rise each day and doggedly search for creative solutions to help workers hone new skills and grow regional economies.

We are grateful to the change-agents who allowed us to capture their efforts. They warmly welcomed us into their world, candidly explained the considerable obstacles they face, and openly offered advice to others on how they might get a start on responding to common challenges. This project benefited tremendously from Jodi Wilinsky Hill, a consultant to MassINC, who travelled the state with us collecting these narratives. Her years of experience delivering workforce development services through small nonprofit organizations gave us invaluable perspective distilling lessons-learned.

In addition to reading these case studies, we strongly encourage you to visit our website to view highlights from our interviews. Llyr Johansen and Aaron Van Leesten expertly captured the conversations and produced compelling videos that bring these stories to life. MassINC’s video library is growing faster than our research library. At a time when understanding is limited about how government seeks to respond to the complex challenges we face is limited, this video archive is a trove of documentary evidence that can be mined and shared in many different formats to reveal examples of strong and well-intentioned public leadership.

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Watch these videos and you will also see the green shoots of renewal shooting up in Gateway Cities across our Commonwealth. By working collaboratively for “systems change,” Gateway City leaders are establishing roots. Our hope is that, in due time, these roots will better support Massachusetts’s most vulnerable residents as they mount their pursuits of the American Dream