How JobsFirst NYC and the Scranton Area Community Foundation are Closing the Gap between Collaboration and Change
Laura Ducceschi faced a dynamic that many regional leaders would recognize: collaboration can spark great ideas, but sustaining momentum for those ideas requires more than just collaboration.
As President and CEO of the Scranton Area Community Foundation (SACF), her team spent years bringing partners together and supporting others’ convenings — and those conversations were consistently productive because of the Foundation’s strong reputation and trusted relationships.
Over the past several years, NEPA Moves, NEPA Thrives, and other SACF-led initiatives have built durable collaborations that continue to drive meaningful coordination. These efforts demonstrated not only strong alignment and shared purpose but also a clear readiness for the next step: establishing regional infrastructure that could help accelerate implementation and deepen long-term impact.
Yet once the collaborative meetings ended, the work often needed a dedicated owner to carry it forward. As Laura Ducceschi reflected, the opportunity ahead was not to fix collaboration — because collaboration in NEPA is strong — but to complement that strength with the added capacity, coordination, and accountability needed to sustain and scale the work over time. Convening created alignment; building the mechanisms to act on that alignment was the opportunity ahead.
“We kept asking ourselves: what comes after the task force?” Ducceschi recalls. “We needed something capable of not just coordinating conversations, but sustaining solutions.”
The answer came from an unexpected partnership: a guest faculty advisor for the 2023 Northeastern Pennsylvania Aspen Institute Workforce Leadership Academy that SACF was hosting.
Marjorie Parker, President and CEO of JobsFirstNYC, was invited to share insights from her organization’s two decades of experience building workforce solutions in New York City. But as Parker listened to NEPA leaders describe their hard work along with their challenges — fragmented programs, misaligned investments, collaboration fatigue — she recognized something familiar but also promising.
What they had were all the ingredients for change! Dedicated leaders, trusted institutions, real momentum. What they needed and were asking for together was regional infrastructure to hold the process and keep it moving forward.
That single engagement has now sparked a two-year partnership that’s now creating a replicable model for regional workforce & economic mobility interventions, one that is officially set to launch in the first quarter of 2026 in the form of JobsFirstNEPA and the NEPA Workforce Funder Collaborative.
The Gap Between Collaboration and Change
The problems Northeastern Pennsylvania (NEPA) faces aren’t unique from a national perspective, but they are regionally long-standing and complex. Across the country, similar regions struggle to move beyond well-intentioned collaboratives and partnerships toward a more permanent combination of partners and processes that creates lasting change. To the credit of SACF and regional partners, they have built unusually strong, durable collaborative structures through initiatives such as NEPA Moves, NEPA Thrives, and other cross-sector partnerships. These collaboratives have created alignment, strengthened relationships, and advanced meaningful shared strategies. The challenge is always that as collaborative tables form, strategies get discussed and drafted, but if dedicated capacity and resources to implement and sustain that work are not in place, long-term progress can become uncertain.
NEPA, which as partners have initially defined as Lackawanna, Luzerne, Monroe, and Wayne counties, is home to nearly 800,000 residents. In this region, some of the major problems were clear:
- Nearly 12,000 young adults (about 12 percent) are out of school and out of work
- Average wages are 22 to 27 percent below Pennsylvania’s own state average, let alone the national average.
- The region has lost ~39,000 jobs and $1.5 billion in wages over two decades.
- Workers and employers remain disconnected despite overlapping efforts to help them among the largest industry sectors of healthcare & social assistance, retail trade, and transportation & warehousing.
A 2019 workforce study funded by the Weinberg Foundation had even gone so far as to diagnose some of the core issues and proposed possible solutions: NEPA needed a regional workforce intermediary to align efforts, strengthen coordination, and sustain focus. The question wasn’t what to build—it was how.
Building the Solution: JobsFirstNYC Invited into NEPA
JobsFirstNYC brought more than expertise to the partnership—it brought a proven framework. The organization’s CommunityINC initiative was designed specifically to build the infrastructure that helps communities like NEPA move from collaboration to coordination to systems change.
CommunityINC works by adapting JobsFirstNYC’s successful New York City approach for different regional contexts, providing:
- Partnership development and technical assistance
- Workforce development research and labor market data
- Resource Development
- Access to a national network of practitioners
- Strategic community convenings
- Project management support
But the key insight? Local leadership has to drive the work.
“When we were invited to consider NEPA, it was clear the region already had the foundation for change,” Parker explains. “At JobsFirstNYC, we know that local partnerships matter. That’s why we took on this challenge—to support the development of a workforce intermediary that is rooted in place, led by local voices, and designed to create economic opportunity.”
In June 2024, SACF and JobsFirstNYC formally launched the planning process with NEPA Thrives leaders. In the months that followed, local partners worked within the CommunityINC solutions framework—supported by SACF—to surface shared priorities, examine regional data, and explore potential pilot strategies. This phase focused on understanding NEPA’s unique challenges and opportunities, laying the groundwork for pilots that could later be tailored to the region’s specific needs.
The result: JobsFirstNEPA, a regional workforce intermediary to advance solutions for economic mobility in the region, is set to launch in January 2026.
What JobsFirstNEPA Actually Does
Unlike traditional workforce interventions, JobsFirstNEPA does not provide direct services to job seekers or employers. Instead, it will function as the connective tissue the region has been missing—building local capacity, promoting shared accountability, and maintaining the infrastructure needed for effective collaboration over the long term.
The incoming Executive Director will work closely with SACF, JobsFirstNYC, and regional partners to implement strategies already co-designed through this extensive process. Think of it as a permanent resource dedicated to aligning strategies, data, and investments to expand economic mobility for young adults and their communities.
More Than Members and Money, But a Movement: The NEPA Workforce Funder Collaborative
Infrastructure such as this requires coordinated investment. That is why SACF and JobsFirstNYC spent the past year building something equally critical for this region, through the development of the NEPA Workforce Funder Collaborative.
This coalition of eleven founding funder organizations—formally committing in October 2025 supported with an award by Marci Hunn at the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation —represents a significant shift in how workforce development will be advanced in the region. As the first collaborative of its kind locally, these funders are coming together to work and learn collectively, building a coordinated, pooled approach that complements their individual portfolios. The Steering Committee is currently composed of co-chairs Danielle Breslin, President & CEO of the Moses Taylor Foundation, and Laura Ducceschi of the Scranton Area Community Foundation, along with fiscal agent the AllOne Foundation leadership, John Cosgrove, and Jesse Ergott. With JobsFirstNYC serving as the Technical Assistance & Advancement Agent, we help ensure funders have access to high-quality learning and experts, research on how best to leverage collective resources, and strategic advice as they position themselves to be a vehicle for impact and investment in the region.
Their shared vision is “a thriving and equitable Northeast Pennsylvania where collaboration and inclusivity drive innovation, ensuring all individuals have equitable access to family-sustaining jobs and the resources needed for sustainable economic stability.”
The NEPA Workforce Funder Collaborative will officially launch in the first quarter of 2026.
Two Pieces, One System
JobsFirstNEPA and the NEPA Workforce Funder Collaborative are distinct entities, but they are designed to work in tandem—much like the infrastructure that created JobsFirstNYC nearly two decades ago.
Together, they create lasting regional impact by:
Building capacity: JobsFirstNEPA strengthens coordination, drives data-informed strategies, and maintains cross-sector partnerships.
Ensuring sustainability: The funder collaborative aligns public, private, and philanthropic investments for the long haul.
Modeling systems change: They demonstrate how well-organized infrastructure can address complex regional challenges that no single organization can solve alone.
This is the core of this work: transformation happens when communities invest in the infrastructure to hold collaboration intentionally.
Why This Model Matters Beyond NEPA
For Ducceschi, this initiative represents years of regional partnership finally reaching critical mass.
“In Northeastern Pennsylvania, workforce challenges are part of a larger ecosystem of barriers—transportation, housing, childcare—that demand connected solutions,” she says. “That’s why true cross-sector collaboration is essential. Through NEPA Thrives and our work with JobsFirstNYC, we’re laying the groundwork for long-term, region-wide impact.”
But the implications extend far beyond one region. NEPA is proving that the gap between collaboration and change can be bridged—not through better meetings or more task forces, but through deliberate investment in permanent infrastructure.
Through local leadership, bolstered by national strategic partners and experts such as Robert Sainz at New Ways to Work and John Martinez at MDRC, Northeastern Pennsylvania is demonstrating what becomes possible when communities stop treating collaboration as the end goal and start treating it as the foundation for something more permanent.
The 2026 launch will mark the beginning of that next chapter—not just for NEPA, but for the JobsFirst approach that other regions are already watching closely.
Because when infrastructure works, it doesn’t just create change, it makes change last.
About the Partnership: JobsFirstNYC and the Scranton Area Community Foundation are working together through the CommunityINC initiative to expand economic mobility for young adults by incubating and accelerating place-based workforce intermediaries and funder collaboratives. To learn more about bringing this model to your community, contact info@jobsfirstnyc.org.