Bill Kerr: While the pandemic drove home the critical contributions of frontline workers, that recognition hasn’t translated into a corresponding improvement in their economic circumstances. Often what’s lacking among employers, policymakers, and social entrepreneurs is an appreciation of the wider context and a willingness to experiment and innovate. What’s going to move the needle toward systemic change?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host Bill Kerr. My guest today is Rachel Korberg, co-founder and Executive Director of the Families and Workers Fund, a donor collaborative focused on economic opportunity and upward mobility. The fund’s members include a big-tent assembly of philanthropy stalwarts and newer organizations, such as MacKenzie Scott, the Ford Foundation, and Schmidt Futures. The fund looks to promote reform in the public social sector and to promulgate a model of sustainable employment or good jobs capable of providing economic security and upward mobility. The collaborative has a goal of creating 1 million good jobs and leveraging $1 billion in external funding by 2026. We’ll talk about the collaborative philanthropy model, public-private partnerships, just what constitutes a good job, and how employers can benefit by creating more of them. Welcome to the podcast, Rachel.

Rachel Korberg: Thanks so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.

Kerr: Rachel, maybe we can begin with a little bit of your personal background and how you came to direct the Family and Workers Fund.

Korberg: The first chapter of my career was in humanitarian aid work. The second chapter of my career was in Frontier’s market investing and impact investing, and then in philanthropy at the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation. For me, this opportunity to found and run the Families and Workers Fund is really blending this appreciation I have for frontline work and change on the ground with really creative ways to use capital to scale impact. But on the personal side, for me so much of this work is about my grandparents. They were Jewish second-gen kids whose parents came here from Eastern Europe, fleeing violence, seeking opportunity like so many immigrants today. For us, they were really the start of our family’s economic mobility story. While they were brilliant and hardworking, I know that none of that would’ve translated into this solid pathway into the middle class if it hadn’t also been for public investments and education and unemployment insurance that helped to smooth out those rough patches, and in really a different perspective from business on diversity in the workplace. So I want there to be more stories like my family’s, and I feel like that’s what I’m doing today at the Families and Workers Fund.

Kerr: Your fund is a donor collaborative, and so maybe you can begin by defining what that means for our listeners. And also, with your experience, how does it differ from other models of social entrepreneurship?

Korberg: At core, the idea is that we can do more, we can have greater impact, if we work collectively. I think sometimes in philanthropy and many industries, the incentives are for attribution instead of contribution. We started with six, but we’re now at about 25. We all have different expertise, talents, resources. And these problems, these challenges of economic inequities, of how to create a future of work that creates opportunity for all, it’s really going to take all of us at the table, including unlikely partners working together. So the idea is that we pool some money and we make hard decisions about how to use those resources together, and also that we start to take other types of collective action together, building partnerships using our voices and platforms.

Kerr: The Families and Workers Fund started as a response to Covid-19. Can you tell us a little bit more about its precise origin and then how it’s been evolving over the last couple of years?

Korberg: I have to take you back to a time that most of us really don’t want to remember, which is March of 2020. I was working at the Ford Foundation at the time. Ford is a $14 billion institution that is one of the oldest foundations in the country. I had the honor of supporting a number of nonprofits that were directly working with frontline workers. I will never forget getting a call from one of these nonprofits. And they said, “Ninety percent of the restaurant workers that we support have become unemployed in the last two weeks.” I then got another set of calls about workers who would later be deemed essential workers, who were very much not being laid off but were often facing pretty unsafe conditions as we worked out the science of the pandemic in those early days. So it was very clear to me that we did not have the system set up to ensure that the workers who were being laid off would be able to navigate this and, ultimately, keep a roof over their head, food on the table, their kids taken care of. Likewise, for those workers that were really making the difference between full-scale social collapse—getting us our groceries, delivering medications, caring for our aging parents and children—we needed to make sure that they actually had good quality jobs and that they were being taken care of and they could have pathways to upward mobility and would be safe in the workplace. So I immediately sprung into action, along with Ai-jen Poo at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Sarita Gupta at the Ford Foundation, Martha Gimbel at Schmidt Futures, who’s now at the White House. Together, we started imagining what a large-scale collective impact effort could look like. We were really thrilled and grateful to Amalgamated Bank, the Ford Foundation, and Schmidt Futures for taking that first early risk and getting this started.

Kerr: There was such uncertainty at that point. Going back to March of 2020, we didn’t know whether the pandemic was going to last for much longer than it ultimately did, were we going to be able to find vaccines. Tell us a little bit about just how you approached such an uncertain problem. How did you make early traction? Or what kind of time horizon were you working on for impact?

Korberg: Initially, we were a rapid-response fund. It was all about essentially supporting the groups that could get emergency cash to the folks who had lost their jobs, and trying to do some early work around essential worker policy and supportive systems for them. Only several months later we would go from being in a time of really a once-in-a-generation public health crisis—I hope it’s a once-in-a-generation public health crisis—and this really profound unemployment. Fifty percent of the lowest-paid workers were laid off at some point in 2020—to what was essentially the opposite in 2021. The labor market really picked up steam. We’re now in a historically tight labor market. We have seen really ground-breaking major policies, major public-sector investment into the economy, into the workforce, such as through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. So, in many ways, these two moments were on opposite ends of the spectrum, and it really required us to completely shift and transform our strategy in 2021.

Kerr: So, Rachel, tell us a little bit more about the demographic profile of the population that you’re serving.

Korberg: So we think about every person in this country who is working or every person who is struggling to make ends meet and maybe out of work temporarily or otherwise. But our focus is especially on people who are earning the lowest wages, usually in the bottom third or so of the labor market and are living in or near the poverty line. That’s about a third of the workforce that is fully employed but still unable to make ends meet. And then that number can come up to as high as nearly 50 percent, if you add in people who are really living in poverty and may not currently be in the workforce. Another important characteristic of our priority population is that the people who are struggling the most economically are people of color, women, people with disabilities, young people. So a lot of our work focuses deeply on equity, racial and gender equity, disability equity is really key to our work.

Kerr: Philanthropy has a long history of fighting against poverty against specific identified needs. Tell us about the role you see for it in addressing the future of work, something that’s out there. It’s around the horizon.

Korberg: It’s true. Bottom line, I think philanthropy has a critical role to play in ensuring that the future of work is a future where work actually pays, where it adds up to economic security and opportunity and a life of dignity. I think what I’m proposing isn’t actually a radical role for philanthropy. The role of philanthropy in history, as you were alluding to, is often little understood. But philanthropy has often bet on a lot of the kind of early-stage ideas and collaborations that may go on to really ground our understanding of the economy and the workforce in the future. For example, the Rockefeller Foundation, which I’m a proud alum of, was one of the early backers of both Gross National Income—so how do we even measure and count all of the output of our economy? How do we talk about economic growth—and then later, Social Security—this idea that a lifetime of hard work should not add up to you living in poverty when your body is no longer able to work in the same way. I think we need to continue to lean into that role today. For me, that looks like really investing in new pathways to economic mobility. You should not be able to work full time and still live in poverty. That’s the set up that we have right now. I think philanthropy has a role in backing innovation, in backing efforts to build worker power and increase and expand this narrative that work should add up. Also, we need to partner with employers. There’s a lot of employers doing great work here and really investing in their people. We should lift up and help to scale some of those practices.

Kerr: You sit at the center of a network that’s got a lot of different public and private players. I want to walk through a few of them and talk about your relationships and how you are working with each other. Let’s begin with the U.S. Department of Labor. You recently collaborated with them on a Good Jobs Summit. Tell us a bit about the aim of that summit, what came out of it, and really just what’s the role of government in this area?

Korberg: The Good Jobs Summit was, as far as we know, the first time a modern presidential administration has hosted a major public summit specifically on good jobs. I thought a few hundred people would come. I thought I would know them all. Four thousand people RSVP’d. To me, it’s just such an indicator of what a huge priority this is right now for the country, for business, for government. We see it in the opinion polling now, too. Regardless of race, gender, age, political party, where you live in the country, a JUST Capital/Harris Poll found that how companies treat their workers, if they invest in their workers, is the No. 1 thing that people are judging business on. I’m going to go ahead and say likewise what they want to see government really deliver. A couple of exciting things that came out of that summit. One was the first-ever whole-of-government good jobs principles. What is a good job, even? Commerce and Labor Departments led this for the government, but really jointly defining from the lens of business, and from the lens of workers of what constitutes a good job. A number of other agencies—Energy, Transportation—committed to not only delivering on their goals of upgrading the nation’s crumbling infrastructure that’s desperately in need of upgrading and not only greeting it but ensuring that we actually deliver good jobs in that process. I think the historic Bipartisan Infrastructure Law really can be an engine for economic mobility and can be an engine for racial and gender equity in the economy, as well. We were thrilled to host them in making some really exciting billion-plus-dollar announcements about how they’re going to do that with taxpayer dollars at this summit. Lastly, for us in philanthropy, we were thrilled to give a preview of our Job Quality Measurement Initiative. But we have been partnering again with the Department of Labor, but also with about 70 different economists, researchers, nonprofit labor, and business leaders to say, “How can we actually measure job quality in this country?” We spend a lot of time, and we’re very well set up to measure job quantity. The unemployment numbers that we anticipate on a monthly basis, we’re recounting jobs. How many jobs did we grow? We do a lot of quantity measurement, but we know that that’s really obscuring quality measurement. Were these jobs that we grew, are they the kind of jobs that lead to healthy communities and strong families and strong local economies? Do the jobs provide a living wage and provide good benefits? Do they offer pathways to upward mobility? We have been working very deeply with this group of experts on a number of pretty technical and wonky answers to this, but of how we can make job quality measurement a key part of government data that gets put out and industry data, and ultimately, we hope, how people understand the economy and understand what our goals should be for economic growth.

Kerr: You described the number of different types of actors around the table as you were discussing this. Do you view the definition that comes out as a compromise across the sectors? Was it something where there was a lot more agreement than you were anticipating going into that? Tell us about the way those three or four different groups came about this collaboration.

Korberg: I was very pleasantly surprised by how much agreement there is. It wasn’t perfect. No coalition process is perfectly smooth. It shouldn’t be. I think some would say this has really got to focus on worker organizing, unions, power building. Others would say capital markets have a huge role to play here, and let’s reward companies that really invest in their people. I think there’s a strong evidence base to say that that’s right. Others would say this is about policy. We need to increase the minimum wage. We need to change our health insurance and other benefits policies. That’s where you really start to see a lot of the differences. I think, for me, what’s exciting is all of the above, all of these are important solutions to have at the table.

Kerr: Can low-wage work be a good job?

Korberg: Absolutely. You’re not going to be earning as much in some jobs as other jobs, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t earn enough to get by, why you shouldn’t be able to take care of your health and take care of your family, or potentially have a path to get ahead. Right now, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is actually below the poverty line for most families. We said, “Hey, here’s the line that, below this amount of money, you’re not going to be okay.” Then we set our minimum wage below that line. It really is right now poverty by policy design. It’s something that needs to change. I think in the future, that’s going to be one of many changes that can still make lower-wage work a good job. I’d love to hear what you think of that definition of a good job. Does it resonate with you?

Kerr: I think that you are hitting both a short-term, static perspective of well-being. You’re giving people the opportunity to advance to something beyond. We know that’s a very important attribute of jobs for workers, and you’re giving them a way to have a part, a voice in the conversation. But as a way of setting out some pieces to keep on track of it would be great. And that does bring me to a second in question about the business leaders here, which is as you engage with CHROs, the chief human resource officers, how should they be thinking about this? Is this kind of like a set of principles, and then we’re going to need to define for each sector or for our company-specific situation how we go after those? Or are there some places where you say, “This is the minimum standard that we think you need to have on voice.” We talked about it on wage a little bit earlier, but on some of these other dimensions—on upward mobility—this is what needs to be in place.

Korberg: When we are talking with Chief Human Resource Officers, I think there’s two things we want to say. One is that investing in your people really does pay dividends. The question is really how, and how you make choices between different approaches, different investments, that you can make. What I would say is, if you’re in a lower-wage industry, if you’re in retail, if you’re in hospitality, try not to just look at something like the average wage, but try to look at the living wage. You might really be able to differentiate yourself from a talent attraction and retention standpoint there. That’s definitely the playbook that Costco has been using with much success for many, many years. If I’m talking with an employer that may be in a legacy industry and may have challenges with diversity, equity, and inclusion—that can often be a really important place to start when it comes to good jobs. We really see very clearly in the evidence and in the stories we hear from companies and workers that, when you combine these three elements—when your workforce has a solid economic footing, has that economic security through their pay and benefits, when they know that they have a shot at advancing through paid training or through a wealth-building product, and when they’re truly being heard, when they can solve problems in the workplace, when they can improve the workplace—the benefits are pretty significant. We’ve talked about attraction and retention. That’s a huge one. There’s a lot of interesting new evidence around workplace health and safety that can really increase, and employee engagement and productivity and innovation.

Kerr: Is there a sector that you think is way out in front of this—not necessarily a specific company example, but a place that people can go to draw inspiration or see a little bit around the corner what their industry space might look like if they had more of these good jobs?

Korberg: A sector that I am pretty excited to watch is the clean energy and green infrastructure space. It’s rapidly growing. There’s a lot of new momentum. There’s a lot of young people that are newly interested in these jobs. People are often drawn by a blend of interest in the technical skills required and the sense of purpose and contribution to their community. So I see a lot of exciting work, especially around building pathways in, building pipelines into the sector for diverse talent, who may have been overlooked or underestimated in the past.

Kerr: So, Rachel, in your work with the Biden administration, you’re probably dealing directly with the talent pipeline challenges that are being faced. Tell us about how the partnerships can be applied in that setting.

Korberg: We’ve been really thrilled to partner with the White House on what it calls its talent pipeline challenge. And this is the reality that, just by passing a historic law and appropriating trillions of dollars doesn’t mean that we can get the job done on infrastructure if we don’t have a workforce that’s really ready and trained and able to build these roads and bridges and build the solar energy and wind energy and broadband. So we’ve been so excited to see the way that the White House has created this challenge to partner with philanthropy, and we’ve been leading a cohort of funders to work on this. But also with companies and nonprofits to say, we’ve all got to take major action here. It’s going to take all of us to really build up the workforce and ensure that all infrastructure jobs can become good jobs, and that there are really pathways for diverse talent into this industry. Because it is not a diverse industry, generally, and it is not an industry that’s been very accessible to many people.

Kerr: The other important actor in this conversation’s been labor representatives. And you’re often working in spaces where not everyone is part of an organized labor group. What role do you see for labor organizations in terms of the good jobs?

Korberg: So whether we’re talking to frontline workers or some of the most highly compensated professions, we know that it’s really important to have a say in your workplace. Some workers are going to pursue that through joining unions or creating a union drive. Others might pursue that through other channels, like an employee resource group or some sort of structured way of working with management, like participatory management or seats for employees on a board. Others will get involved with worker groups that are not officially unions, and that might be worker centers, for example. Whatever the pathway is that an individual employee chooses, we know that having a say in the workplace is absolutely critical for people. We just see that across the board. And I think the benefits to companies that really take that seriously and think about how they act on that, how they really partner with their workforce, are huge.

Kerr: Rachel, we’ve talked now about both the convening aspects of your work and also creating definitions on good jobs and some of the tracking that goes on. Tell us also some about the examples of grants that you have provided to advance The Good Jobs Initiative.

Korberg: There is so much amazing work happening on the ground. The one I’d love to share is an initiative called “Better Builder.” So this is a social enterprise, and it’s a partnership between a nonprofit, called the “Workers Defense Project” in Texas, working with city governments across the state, like Austin, and working with construction developers. What Better Builder has done is, they worked with construction workers to say, “What really constitutes a good job for you?” They documented that, and then they were able to find ways to help the city provide incentives to encourage companies to adopt that. For example, picture expedited zoning or permitting, and time is absolutely money when you’re a developer. So companies are adopting these standards that are helping workers to gain more of a foothold in the economy and have upward mobility, have safer jobs. What’s so exciting now is, after deploying this social enterprise model for the past few years and impacting about $2 billion in construction deals, this approach just got picked up on this major expansion of the Austin region’s rapid transit system, supported by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. I mean, easily tens of thousands of families are going to be lifted out of poverty from this. I think this is exactly the kind of role philanthropy should play, of backing these innovations and partnerships on the ground and knowing that they can then scale through markets and public financing.

Kerr: This story’s very inspiring, but let me continue on that a little bit and ask, when you’re reporting back to those who have contributed to the fund, how do you measure success on something, especially if you’re trying to take some risk, you’re trying to show new models that work or won’t work?

Korberg: We’re always balancing taking a risk on a big idea that may or may not pay off with knowing that we need to deliver results. And we do have a five-year timeline for our fund. One of our most important goals is delivering 1 million good jobs—or career pathways into them—by 2026. It’s around backing models and innovations like Better Builder. And it’s also about shifting the narrative here and really showing the importance of good jobs and making it a business and public imperative. So we’re tracking those results at the level of all of our individual projects, and then we’re also aggregating them across.

Kerr: I love that 1 million objective. It would almost seem like you need to further approach it from the strategy of how are some of our grants and activities going to add up to that million, and are we aiming ourselves high enough, in addition to the specific grants, and the impact that they have from there.

Korberg: Yeah, absolutely. We’re always thinking about how we get to that 1 million. I think we commonly face choices, like this potential grant would have really deep impact in people’s lives. It might be working with people who have been out of the workforce for years. Maybe they’re in recovery or have been court-involved, versus this model that might not go as deep but is going to impact a few hundred thousand. So those are the types of tradeoffs we’re often thinking about. The other big metric we hold ourselves to is leveraging $1 billion in external funding—so ensuring that the grants we make ultimately help to unlock and tap into at least $1 billion of money from outside of philanthropy.

Kerr: Can you talk a bit about the fund’s progressive approach, centering a lot more on grantees’ kind of preferences? And you emphasize trust over stringent financial oversight. Tell us a little bit about that model.

Korberg: Yeah. So we really believe in trust-based philanthropy. That means when we can, we’re going to make grants that are multiyear, that are core support—meaning we’re not dictating how you spend $1,000 over there, $300 over here. We think that’s really important. Just in the way that in VC, you’ve got to provide funding so that founders really have room to experiment and try new things. The same is true for social innovation and for social entrepreneurship. It’s given a lot of organizations, like Better Builder, a solid foundation to—in some cases for the first time—know that they can really try new things and innovate, and they’re not constantly going to be in this nonprofit starvation cycle, just a couple months from running out of cash.

Kerr: Rachel, the listeners of this podcast would include a number of business leaders and executives, also policymakers and some labor representatives and so forth. I’m going to kind of try to ask some meta question here of, if there’s some way they could collectively help you overcome obstacles that you’re facing right now, or something you could ask of them to support this work, what might that be?

Korberg: Everyone has a role to play in advancing good-quality jobs. So if you are a business leader, consider assessing job quality in your company. Are people really earning enough to get by? Do you really know what the lived experiences are of your workforce and how folks are feeling when they’re sitting around the dinner table with their family? Is it possible you might need to raise pay or change benefits or just create more space for people to improve the workplace and share their voice? If you’re a government leader, this is a historic opportunity for you. You have billions of dollars, thanks to recent legislation, coming your way to invest into your local economy and the workforce. Make sure you do it in a way that really advances good-quality jobs, that’s not just business as usual. That means looking at things like your procurement and your contracting practices and ensuring that it all leads toward good jobs.

Kerr: Rachel, that’s an inspiring call to action. Thanks for coming on the podcast today.

Korberg: Thanks so much for having me.

Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.