Building a Resilient and Inclusive Workforce Ecosystem in Alexandria
City: Alexandria, Virginia
Reporting to: Mayor
The Challenge
Alexandria has been hit hard by federal layoffs. In the first nine months of 2025, the city’s unemployment rate increased from 2.2 percent to 3.8 percent—a non-pandemic ten-year high. The situation is exacerbating income disparities and burdens on communities who have faced significant barriers to accessing career and workforce services. As city leaders seek to attract and retain new employers, they want to ensure that the city’s workforce training and development programs benefit residents with low incomes, immigrants, youth aged fourteen to twenty-four, and older adults.
Through the city’s Workforce Development Center, Alexandria has consistently worked to help job seekers develop skills and job readiness and connect them to growing and meaningful careers. The Alexandria Economic Development Partnership has also supported this work by attracting employers that create jobs in Alexandria. To build on this work and address both pre-existing disparities and new challenges, the city worked with the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative’s Innovation Track to put together a cross-departmental team of Alexandria employees. The team is engaging a wide range of Alexandrians, community groups, and business leaders to identify barriers to employment and disparities in workforce development services. They are also developing innovative ideas for overcoming these inequities, using human-centered design principles to co-create potential solutions alongside the people they’re intended to serve. By the summer of 2026, the team will have developed a portfolio of promising ideas to be piloted and developed into new policies, programs, and partnerships.
To deliver results for residents, city leaders want to see the Innovation team’s ideas piloted and evaluated. Data and feedback from these pilots will be used along with research on best practices from other cities to refine and develop the plans needed to fully implement the most promising solutions.
Key questions include:
- How can ideas be piloted and implemented to deliver sustainable impact and ensure buy-in from key stakeholders?
- How can existing employment programs run by the city’s Workforce Development Center and community partners be built upon and improved?
- How should solutions identified through the Innovation Track be prioritized to ensure effectiveness and sustainability?
- What metrics and data collection practices can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of solutions?
- What lessons can Alexandria learn from similar work in other cities?
- How can city leaders ensure that solutions address disparities and serve Alexandrians equitably?
What You’ll Do
The summer fellow will lead the next phase of the Innovation Track team’s work by advancing the portfolio of ideas they co-create with residents. This will involve developing implementation and evaluation plans and directly leading a pilot of at least one proposed solution. The fellow will engage with a range of stakeholders, including residents facing unemployment and underemployment. Stakeholders inside City Hall include the Departments of Community and Human Services; Human Resources; the Office of Analytics, Innovation, and Data; and the Office of Communications and Community Engagement. External stakeholders include business associations, educational institutions, small businesses, and partner agencies involved in workforce development.
Key deliverables include:
- Review the portfolio of ideas proposed by the Innovation Track team and research relevant best practices and lessons learned from other cities.
- Design short-term small-scale pilots for three to four of the solutions proposed by Innovation Track team.
- Execute at least one of these pilots and analyze data and feedback to identify opportunities for improvement.
- Create implementation plans for solutions identified by the Innovation Track team.
- Develop evaluation tools and metrics to measure the effectiveness of implemented solutions.
What You’ll Bring
The fellow will be expected to possess the following skills:
- Data Analysis
- Design Thinking
- Policy Analysis
- Qualitative Interviewing and Analysis
- Writing, Editing, and Communications
- Design
