Supporting career internships has long been at the heart of The Pinkerton Foundation’s mission to help level the playing field for young New Yorkers.

Today, our workforce is engaged in a renewed examination of equity within our field. Philanthropy is hosting “equity in workforce” webinars, workforce organizations are arranging equity trainings for their staffs, and workforce conferences are mounting panels to reassess our field through an equity lens. Nearly without exception, this examination of equity is defined primarily in racial, and sometimes gender, terms. Which is, without argument, essential. But what is missing?

For 45 years I’ve worked to create better jobs for low-income workers. I have supported African-American enterprises in rural Virginia and North Carolina, worker buy-outs of threatened factories in New England, and large-scale service cooperatives in the inner cities of the South Bronx and Philadelphia.

How do you train hundreds of unemployed women of color and provide them stable jobs? You build a company that embeds training and employment within a single, seamless strategy. For over 30 years in the Bronx, Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA) has honed that strategy, producing off-the-charts results: Of 630 jobseekers enrolled annually, 94 percent graduate with a portable credential and 85 percent are employed as home health aides. Of those, 68 percent remain employed after one year.

“Employer engagement” is the current battle cry of funders and policymakers as they urge workforce practitioners to become ever more “market driven”— meeting the needs of employers and, in the process, providing lasting benefits to low-income jobseekers.