Opportunity Junction was honored to be selected as a Citi Foundation 2024 Community Progress Makers in May.
The initiative, which began in 2015, supports fifty community organizations across the country working to connect low-income communities to social and economic opportunities. Citi Foundation is part of a growing number of foundations practicing trust-based philanthropy, in which power imbalances between grantor and grantee are intentionally addressed. Citi Foundation’s vision for the initiative is to empower organizations to grow their transformative impact through unrestricted funding.
The Community Progress Makers grant is transformative to Opportunity Junction because it will help the organization institutionalize the Medical Assistant (MA) program over three years while also providing an invaluable network, via the cohort of grantees, for the organization's growing leadership team. President and CEO of Opportunity Junction says the grant comes at a perfect time, “both from the standpoint of the needs in the community [for additional high-quality healthcare training programs] and the needs of the organization’s growing leadership team.” Opportunity Junction will receive access to technical assistance from national experts and leading researchers along with a one million dollar unrestricted grant split over three years. Opportunity Junction is so grateful for this recognition and the support it provides to train and place additional Contra Costa residents in careers that lead to financial security.
In early June, Opportunity Junction expanded its Healthcare Career Pathway (HCP) by launching an MA training program. While a Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) training program began in 2019 in partnership with Mount Diablo Adult Education (MDAE) and Empowered Aging at the MDAE campus, OJ has been expanding the HCP step-by-step in East Contra Costa County since then. In 2021, OJ reconfigured the existing Antioch classroom space to create a healthcare skills lab and launched a parallel CNA training track in Antioch, doubling our training capacity. That same year, OJ began piloting the Career Advancement Project (CAP) for CNA alumni, encouraging them to participate in structured remote coaching to help them advance in their education and careers.
The HCP helps meet the critical need for more entry-level healthcare workers in the East Bay while serving as a springboard for those students interested in pursuing a career in nursing. The HCP outcomes have demonstrated that vocational training in the healthcare field is in high demand by East Contra Costa job seekers and that our graduates are in high demand by East Bay healthcare employers. In June 2024, OJ launched an ambitious new expansion of the HCP: leasing space next door to the main office in Antioch for an HCP Training Center.
