Workforce & Jobs

Formed in May 2021, the workforce backbone is a collection of various nonprofits & CBOs, government agencies, and business & community leaders that serve Stockton’s workforce. The collective thesis of the workforce backbone is:

To reverse brain drain in Stockton by investing in workforce; to do that, we recognize that:

  • robust economic opportunity must increasingly be local, high-quality, equitable, and measurable;

  • the community must support, connect, and sustain young people with career pathways.

Edge Collaborative leads & convenes this forum and drives the thesis by supporting coalition partners with various resources across the key workstreams of (1) building organizational capacity, (2) driving data capabilities, and (3) community benchmarking. These include investing into individual organizations (e.g. financial resources) and into shared community resources (e.g. shared data tools). A full overview of the workforce backbone can be found here.

Workforce System Map
The workforce system map below includes local and regional assets that serve Stockton’s workforce ecosystem, through supportive services, job training, funding, employment, recruitment, and other functions. This first version of the system map includes 25 organizations, each affiliated with the workforce backbone, and broadly relates them by their function within Stockton’s workforce ecosystem.

Star Map

Our team has mapped our workforce backbone partners into four buckets: community resources, economic development, education & training, and employment pathways.

We broke these buckets down further into service tags that categorize the services our partners provide.

To explore this interactive map, zoom in with your trackpad or mouse and click and drag your pointer to move your focus. To learn more about each organization, click ‘Open link’ and you will be directed to their website.

Find another orientation for the system map to the right, to show where workforce assets exist in Stockton. To move around the map, point and drag any point on the map. To add or remove different types of organizations and services, check/uncheck the boxes on the right hand side. Click on a dot to reveal more information about that organization.

Street Map

Curious to understand more?

Case Study: Supporting Workforce Ecosystem in Stockton (2017-present)

The workforce ecosystem is Stockton is vast, and due to the nature of Stockton’s relationship to the Northern California Megaregion - many of its workers are known for some of the longest commutes in the country. This dynamic has drawn attention to a very real challenge of brain drain. That’s why local workforce stakeholders - including public, private and community-based organizations, coordinate their work and broader regional strategies to support high-quality, local economic opportunity. Read more to find out how we’ve started to build the infrastructure of this work over the last several years.