Policy Doesn’t Implement Itself: How Collaboration Powers CEJA’s Workforce System

By Nianchi Xie, Policy Fellow at CJC

Illinois stands at a pivotal moment. As the state moves to decarbonize its economy and deploy clean energy infrastructure, it needs workforce funding to ensure that workers and communities across Illinois can equally access clean energy jobs. The Illinois government has directed hundreds of millions in state and federal funding toward Climate and Equitable Jobs Act (CEJA) initiatives since 2021, including new resources flowing from the Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act that expand grid investments and energy efficiency programs. 

The Climate and Equitable Jobs Act (Public Act 102-0662) created a set of workforce development programs aimed at preparing Illinoisans for careers in solar, wind, energy efficiency, electric vehicle maintenance, and related industries. These are programs administered by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) that prioritize equity and job access across the state. CEJA’s workforce programs are designed to serve as a foundation for Illinois’ clean energy transition, but the return on the state’s investment depends on effective, sustained coordination among state agencies, educational institutions, community workforce organizations, and employers. 

CEJA workforce grantees perform three distinct but overlapping roles: Clean Jobs Workforce Network Hubs, Climate Works Pre-apprenticeship programs, and Energy Transition Navigator services. These programs are for training, recruitment, and barrier reduction support. Yet the agencies must work not only with grantees, but with each other, to ensure that navigators funnel jobseekers into meaningful training pathways and that hubs are to help trainees to connect them to employers.

Chicago Jobs Council has been working with CEJA workforce grantees to support implementation and help address the coordination challenges that are inherent in large, multi-partner initiatives. For CEJA, these included information that moved slowly, demand for workforce services that consistently outpaced capacity; and timelines of legislative design that did not always align with the realities of community-level implementation. Communication and coordination were lacking, and grantees were left juggling intensive service delivery with complex requirements.

  These challenges are all pointing to deeper issues: how the system itself was designed to communicate? When agencies, grantees, and program partners operate in parallel processes rather than shared ones, even well-resourced programs struggle to reach their full potential. So instead of asking why coordination was difficult, we began asking a different set of questions that are more constructive and more actionable:

• How can we design systems that talk to each other?

• What infrastructure is needed to support large-scale coordination?

• What information needs to be shared, by whom, and in what form, to make implementation work? 

We’ve made three major changes throughout the last fiscal year. We first redesigned our survey format for better collecting feedback from our grantees as well as for better data analysis purposes. Meeting structures were also redesigned for coordination and collaboration, ensuring that everyone in the ecosystem was working from the same level of understanding and clarity.

We also centered community partners as essential intermediaries between policy design and implementation. Our partners know the workforce system. They understand where workers are coming from and what barriers they face. We trusted that expertise. By working closely with regional navigators/hubs, we were able to trace down barriers and solve them at the very early stage.

    Finally, we use Technology of Participation (ToP), a framework that uses guided discussion and consensus-building techniques to move groups toward shared decisions. We ensure conversations are moved toward our shared goals rather than simple separate discussions. This reduced duplication and increased alignment over time.

Our grantees consistently emphasized the value of having dedicated space for open discussion, brainstorming, and debate. Our newly established one-on-one meetings before each convening are being held as a critical complement to the CEJA Table, as they allow participants to express concerns, problems, or challenges directly and privately with CJC. We also set up our first navigators-only meeting based on the feedback from the last convening survey. These shifts were reflected in participant ratings: 5-star evaluations of CJC’s ability to coordinate marketing and outreach for maximum impact and avoid duplication of services increased from 36% to 79%. Similarly, ratings of the CEJA Table’s effectiveness in ensuring consistent messaging across workforce programs rose from 31% to 71%. Most notably, while only 39% of grantees initially gave a 5-star rating to the CEJA Table’s ability to foster collaboration as a unified workforce system, this figure increased to 100% following our implementation of new communication methods.

CEJA is intended to deliver equitable access to the benefits of the clean energy economy for communities that have historically faced environmental and economic inequality. Over the past year, we’ve redesigned how interagency communication works in Illinois’ clean energy workforce ecosystem. Now, we are asking everyone, from state departments and elected officials to community organizations and workforce intermediaries, to help us carry the next phase forward. The promise of CEJA and of the clean energy investments now emerging through affordability legislation depends on our collective effort. By holding ourselves accountable, we can provide more jobs, opportunities, and eventually to build a better workforce system.