Our flagship series features monthly conversations with national leaders and innovators who are reimagining workforce systems to center equity, create good jobs, and drive lasting change.

The Childcare Crisis – Why Job Quality Matters for Families and Providers

The childcare crisis isn’t just about affordability—it’s about job quality. With nearly half of working parents forced out of jobs due to unstable and unaffordable childcare, the ripple effects touch every part of our economy. At the same time, childcare workers—disproportionately women and people of color—struggle with low wages, high credentialing barriers, and limited support. In this episode, we’re joined by Amy O’Leary executive director of Strategies for Children, Gloria Valentin, a family childcare educator, and Stephanie LaPierre a childcare educator at Boston University Children’s Center to explore what’s really at stake and why improving job quality is key to helping both families and providers thrive.

How Skills-Based Hiring Creates Equitable Career Pathways

In this episode, we’re digging into a powerful shift that’s gaining momentum across industries: skills-based hiring. For too long, traditional hiring practices have relied on degrees as a proxy for talent—reinforcing occupational segregation and shutting out millions of capable workers.

But what if we reimagined hiring to focus on what people can do, not just where or if they went to school?

We’re joined by Audrey Mickahail, Senior Vice President of Private Sector and Membership Experience at Opportunity@Work. Together, we’ll explore how skills-based hiring can create more inclusive career pathways, break down systemic barriers, and help employers access a deeper, more diverse talent pool.

We’ll talk about who STARs are—and why they matter. We’ll discuss some of the changes employers need to make and the systemic barriers we can begin to dismantle when we center skills in hiring and advancement.

BONUS! Introducing State of Our Workforce: Unpacked

In this special mini-episode, we’re excited to introduce a brand-new addition to our podcast channel: State of Our Workforce: Unpacked. Michelle Wilson sits down with Henry Danner for a quick conversation about what listeners can expect from this new LinkedIn Live series.

Unpacked takes the national conversations from State of Our Workforce and brings them to the ground level—spotlighting how workforce equity shows up in communities across our network. It’s where our “Nationally Powered, Locally Driven” ethos comes to life.

Tune in for a behind-the-scenes look at why we created this new series, what stories we’ll be telling, and how you can be part of the conversation.

Advancing Workforce Equity: Five Years Later

The year 2025 marks a momentous anniversary at the National Fund. It has been five years since the Advancing Workforce Equity project got off the ground, in which we dug into the root causes of inequities using deeply disaggregated data. This project was extremely impactful for the National Fund and our network partners and has been essential in our direction since then.

We are joined by three key collaborators who worked on this project at that time. Vice President of Research at PolicyLink; Sarah Treuhaft, Director of Policy and Partnerships at The Institute on Race and the Political Economy at the New School; and Jonathan Osei, Workforce Development Fellow at the Project for Pride in Living.

The four of us will take a journey back five years and consider what it was like to begin the difficult, messy work of equity at a time when equity was still a “dirty word.” We consider the lasting impact of our work and how we can continue to move it forward now to create a truly equitable economy where all workers, businesses, and communities are thriving.