Despite all the obstacles, community development organizations remain firmly entrenched in the employment and training business. A significant fraction of CDCs and CBOs continue to be actively engaged in all manner of job training, placement, and counseling activities. Others have expressed a strong desire to enter, or re-enter, the training field.

BUILDING BRIDGES BETWEEN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT AND EMPLOYMENT TRAINING

Sometimes CDCs' employment training is conducted through formal, legal contracts, based on part of the nationally funded but locally managed Job Training Partnership Act. In other cases, CDC directors and staffers have left, or have been forced out of, the JTPA system, and depend on other sources of training funding, such as religious groups, or they subsidize their employment training out of existing resources, however scarce.

Several CDC directors and staff members endorse the view, widespread in the private sector, that they should not directly operate training programs. Rather, they should limit their roles to providing advocacy, brokering referral services to their constituents, and relying on specialized agencies and other organizations to handle training and placement. The mature CDCs are more likely to have withdrawn from the field. Other CBOs said they would like to be more actively involved in private-sector job-training programs in their locale, such as the much-praised Boston Compact, which links high schools and large private employers. But those CDCs and CBOs do not want to operate the training programs.