Helping Youth Facing Barriers to Employment: When Small is an Advantage
Q&A with Andrew McKnight
Andrew McKnight is the Executive Director of The Challenge Program, one of Delaware’s leading workforce development nonprofits, and founder of its social enterprise, CP Furniture. A graduate of Duke University, Andrew has over 20 years of experience helping youth ages 18-24 who confront serious employment challenges. He has been recognized over the years for his work in the community. In 2008, he received the Jefferson Public Service Award. In 2017, Delaware Governor Jack Markell awarded Andrew the "Order of the First State" for his "meritorious service to the citizens of Delaware." Andrew is also an accomplished woodworker and LEED Accredited Professional.
Meredith Cass Callanan: Tell us about The Challenge Program’s work, your approach and the impact that you're having.
Andrew McKnight: The Challenge Program is a nonprofit training program for youth ages 18-24 facing significant barriers to employment. I co-founded it in 1995. We teach construction and life skills, paying our trainees wages and providing wrap-around case management services as we work to overcome their employment barriers. The goal is to give our clients the direction, training and confidence to become self-sufficient.
We aren’t big, and that’s on purpose – to the dismay of some funders. Annually, we matriculate about 20 trainees and provide supplemental services to 100 more who have either interrupted their training or require post-graduate support. Our ultimate success is measured by how many of our graduates are self-sufficient. In 2017 we reviewed the status of all our graduates over the preceding 10 years, and at that time, 65% were employed and not in the justice or welfare systems.
I like the “learning-by-doing” model. It took time to figure out our ideal vehicle for instruction. We’ve tried building small boats, modular houses, and timber frames. We’ve renovated townhouses, even a railroad car. The product isn’t the important thing. What matters is that our trainees relate to and take pride in what they do. Otherwise they won’t show up. On one level we’re teaching basic carpentry and construction skills. Really, we’re teaching them how to become employable: how to show up on time, be presentable, follow instruction, and receive criticism without becoming defensive. We offer a place trainees want to come to and an activity they want to do.
The Challenge Program’s multi-trade training model, completed by each trainee during the program (The Challenge Program, Wilmington, DE; 2023).
We’ve also learned that six or 12 weeks isn’t enough time, considering the breadth of challenges our kids face. We need a minimum of six months and more like 12 to help our trainees get onto a constructive path. Even that is often not enough. Our trainees’ lives are unstable. They rarely make it straight through the program. They leave after a while, make some bad choices, get in trouble. In time they come back. The cycle can repeat a few times before they eventually learn that bad choices aren’t worth it.
Also, relationships cannot be built quickly. It takes time to build trust. And trust is necessary for our instructors and case manager to learn the individual circumstances, the deep issues, each youth contends with.
Callanan: You mentioned case management services – elaborate on why they are essential for achieving your outcomes.
McKnight: They make all the difference. You can’t hand a trainee a tape measure if he can’t get to the shop in the first place – or doesn’t understand fractions. The services we provide include help with navigating the justice system, getting SNAP (food) benefits, arranging counseling and receiving housing assistance. Then there’s preparing for job interviews, conducting a job search, assisting with transportation, and getting a driver’s license. We also help with getting vital documents, such as birth certificates and social security cards, and studying for a GED. The absence of any of these could be a barrier to a job.
Along with concrete services comes an understanding of the mindset of our trainees. They live on the margin, often in a dangerous environment. Their default mode is to be defensive. Criticism is an attack. A fight-or-flight instinct is easily triggered. It can be very difficult to establish trust and teach. A psychiatrist once explained to me that our youths haven’t learned to calm themselves and self-regulate. Our trainees don’t have a lot of resilience. If you yell at them, they’ll walk away and not come back. Those of us who work with this population are walking a tightrope between holding people to a standard that they need to be held to while giving them leniency and grace because, most of the time, they can't live up to that standard – yet. They don't have the tools, and they need a lot of help to get them. That said, soft bigotry – low expectations – is a real problem. People need to feel like you have high expectations for them.
Callanan: Tell us more about the young men and women you serve – they’ve been called “opportunity youth,” defined as those neither enrolled in school nor participating in the workforce. The Aspen Institute estimates there are about 5 million such youth in the U.S. What in your trainees’ lives has led them to you? And how do they find out about you?
McKnight: Our focus is on helping youth most in need of services. According to our internal data, 90% of our trainees are food insecure; 75% are in the justice system, 75% have experienced homelessness, and 70% have been expelled from or dropped out of traditional high school. This age range, 16-24 (in our case, typically 18-24), is a critical developmental window: youths who by age 24 don’t acquire the skills they need to become net economic contributors are unlikely to do so. The economic burden this imposes on society, to say nothing of the personal toll these youth endure, is enormous.
We also have to acknowledge gun violence as a defining feature of the community we serve. It, or the threat of it, is present every day. It's normalized. Many trainees think it's how you deal with issues. Spread that out across a population that already has problems with emotional control, that lives with a near-constant fight-or-flight reaction, and we’ve got a massive problem.
As for how our trainees come to us, it’s typically by word of mouth – an existing trainee or graduate tells a friend. We also receive referrals from parents, guardians, parole officers and judges on occasion.
Callanan: What is the impact your program has on the trainees’ lives?
McKnight: To begin with, we get them off the street, give them a safe place to be. Then we pay them a wage – starting at $12 an hour at The Challenge Program, $15 at CP Furniture, our step-up social enterprise. When they leave us, our graduates typically get jobs in construction, painting, building maintenance, warehousing, or as security guards or flaggers. Starting pay is generally upwards of $18 an hour. At that point, they’re paying taxes and are relatively settled.
Our graduates tell us that we provided a stable place and role models. This is often the first time they’ve had a steady job, been able to take care of their kids, pay their car insurance and rent. They’ll say, “You guys showed me what was possible.” In many cases, they haven't had somebody like me or the other staff members to support them. Many employers are not able to do this. With The Challenge Program and CP Furniture, there is always somebody who's here, who will listen. We provide stable relationships that model a better way to live life.
Callanan: You started CP Furniture as a social enterprise in 2015. Why did you venture into social entrepreneurship? Why is it important to the model today?
McKnight: The social enterprise idea actually started in 2010. It was a time when federally-funded programs like The Challenge Program were at risk of being defunded. U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-Delaware) encouraged me to diversify funding streams to reduce the risk of being defunded. Different funders suggested using our construction training program as a way to earn money and set up a business so we wouldn’t be completely dependent upon federal contracts.
So, in 2012, we decided to try modular housing. We did two houses – and lost money. We learned the hard way that to have any chance of making money in that line of work, we needed volume to get economies of scale. Around the same time, we were using reclaimed wood to build furniture for a restaurant – and we were actually making money. So we went back to the foundation that had funded the modular initiative, and they encouraged us to put in another application to focus on the furniture business.
Good advice. It’s been a success in a couple ways. First, we’ve proven the concept – we can make furniture people want to buy, and we can do it profitably. Second, we can hire graduates of The Challenge Program, provide them with additional training and give them another year to develop. Some of our kids need that.
Callanan: You’re building a new shop for CP Furniture. What do you hope to achieve?
McKnight: This is our strategy for scaling our work. Our current shop space is too small, about 4,000 square feet. It caps our annual throughput to about $500,000 in sales. To expand output and increase the number of trainees we can accommodate, we decided to build a new shop, which will be almost four times larger. Importantly, it is also a demonstration project that highlights the capabilities of our trainees. It’s a very cool timber-frame structure that our trainees helped to build. They cut the timbers. They raised the timber frames. They’re helping with the drywall. It’s very much a trainee project. It’s scheduled for completion near the end of 2023.
Trainees and staff of The Challenge Program take a break from building their new furniture shop (Wilmington, DE; 2023).
Callanan: What is the opportunity that CP Furniture provides to your trainees?
McKnight: We're fundamentally still a training program. As much as we say our product is furniture, our real product is successful graduates. We’re a middle ground: more demanding than the entry level experience provided by The Challenge Program, but still a forgiving space that allows trainees to continue to mature.
I’ve got to say, serving two masters is tough: making enough furniture to pay the bills, while upholding our training mission. As soon as we have a trainee who is doing well – reliable, fine-tuned and capable on all the machinery – then we place that individual in an external job, and we start over with another trainee who has a lot to learn. It’s not exactly a recipe for maximum efficiency and profitability. But it serves our training mission.
We’ve found that getting the product mix right is key to profitability and growth. We’re learning which pieces hit a sweet spot – items that are not too difficult to make, that permit a high degree of trainee involvement, have a certain client appeal and command a decent profit margin. Tables are a good example.
Callanan: You mentioned that you’re purposely not a large organization and how that is sometimes undervalued by funders who want you to scale. Why is “small and nimble” so relevant and advantageous to your work with youth?
McKnight: For organizations like ours that work with this population of youth, it’s akin to a parental relationship. Trainees’ experience with The Challenge Program and CP Furniture is only as good as their relationship with the staff – whether it's an instructor or case manager or program director. It’s that one-on-one experience. Being small and nimble means we're able to adapt to each person. If we were working with 120 kids instead of the 20 we currently have, we could not reach each young adult as deeply and meaningfully as we do. We couldn't adapt our approach that many times and ensure that each of those 120 people is having a quality experience that meets their particular needs.
A second advantage is that we've been able to quickly shift the type of work we do, whether it’s boats, modular homes, timber frames, or furniture. And a third advantage relates to talent. Attracting talent is hard. It’s a special person who wants to work for less than could be made in the for-profit world, while dealing with a population that can be challenging. As much as we like to keep things light, we’re never far from trauma. It can be taxing. Candidates for this kind of work typically value deep personal connections with other staff and with clients. We foster camaraderie, almost a familial sense. The larger the organization, the more difficult that becomes. Our small size, and the atmosphere it allows, is a draw for the kinds of employees we need.
That applies to me, too. There are many great things about my job: being my own boss, creating an organization that will hopefully outlast me, constructing these awesome buildings, working with these kids and my super-motivated staff, making a difference for people. I have a lot of job satisfaction. If it wasn’t my business, and instead I was working for Job Corps or PowerCorps, would I feel the same way? I don’t think so.
We’re not unique. I know a number of other small nonprofits with the same kind of special energy and commitment. One of my peers created a glass-blowing social enterprise. Another runs a brewery. She organized it as a B-corp and employs previously incarcerated men and women. These leaders are less motivated by money, more motivated by the opportunity to run their own shop, to find creative solutions, to make deep connections with their clients and community, and to establish a legacy.
Callanan: You have developed a strong working relationship with REDF, the foundation that focuses on social enterprises addressing barriers to employment. How have they been helpful to you?
McKnight: REDF is a big nonprofit that incubates small employment-related social enterprises all over the country. They really get involved. They identify and help to resolve pain points. Their staff can advise on a full range of issues, including legal, HR, marketing and production, and they provide interns from top business schools to work on specific issues. In the past, REDF worked with several larger nonprofits, but they’ve recently adjusted their model. They invited me to speak to their Board, many of whose members had created successful large companies, where I explained that trying to scale up programs like ours will not achieve the same outcomes.
Callanan: I think it's a great point for many of us who have come from large corporate environments and foundations to shift our thinking. There's a very vibrant small business community in this country – why can't that be the same in the nonprofit community?
McKnight: Absolutely. I'm trying to educate foundations that continue to say that there's got to be a model, a formula, to turn these kids around. But it doesn’t work that way. As I see it, we have to be less corporate and more familial. It’s not as squishy as it may sound. It takes a lot of individual attention and a lot of work to tailor our approach to each trainee’s unique set of challenges.
People often ask what I want to work on the most, what I would fix first. Is it the welfare system? Or absentee fathers? There is no single solution to this: prenatal nutrition, word deficits, inadequate early childhood education, lack of childcare, domestic abuse, drug addiction, absence of male role models, homelessness, involvement with the justice system, gun violence, and the list continues. It’s all of the above. Find the small, nimble, and innovative organizations that are addressing these issues, and support them. That’s how we’ll continue to make progress.
Callanan: That's a perfect place to end! Thank you, Andrew, and good luck with the new shop.
About the Author:
Meredith Callanan was a senior leader at T. Rowe Price Group for many years, focusing on marketing and communications, corporate responsibility, and philanthropy, before participating in the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative as a Fellow in 2019. As a Senior Fellow in 2020 and 2021, she conducted national research on leadership diversity and development in the U.S. early care and education (ECE) sector which culminated in her establishing the Early Years Leadership Diversity Initiative to address barriers to advancement for rising leaders in ECE.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.