A study that followed participants of Project Quest over 14 years found a total income boost of $54,000, on average, over that time span.
Founded in 1992 by a coalition of working class neighborhood and church leaders in San Antonio, the longtime workforce development program has served as a model for the City of San Antonio’s taxpayer-funded Ready to Work effort.
Slightly older participants — those who enrolled in the program between the ages 35 and 64 — saw a much bigger benefit, earning nearly $139,000 more than those in a control group over the 14 year study period.
Released Wednesday, the study found that participants’ earning gains “far exceeded” the costs of the program. With an average investment of $16,244 (in 2022 dollars) in each participant, the program has seen a 234% return on its investment.
“These are the longest sustained earnings impacts ever found in a U.S. workforce development program,” said study author Mark Elliott, president of the Economic Mobility Corporation, a nonprofit that evaluates workforce development programs and policies. “Only five or six organizations in the country have ever demonstrated significant earnings impacts in a rigorous evaluation of this kind.”
Project Quest, which was developed by COPS/Metro Alliance, is one of four contractors administering the city’s taxpayer-funded Ready to Work program.
Ready to Work has struggled to meet the ambitious goals city leaders touted during the campaign to secure its passage. On Wednesday Mayor Ron Nirenberg commended the results of the Project Quest study as “evidence of the transformative impact” of “sustained, evidence-based workforce development.”
“This study and its outcomes point to the success we can expect to see from … Ready to Work,” he said. Alluding to the criticism leveled at that program, Nirenberg repeated one of his common refrains. “We are not counting widgets. We are changing lives here in San Antonio.”
Replicating success
While the programs are not carbon copies, the architects of Ready to Work replicated several pillars of Project Quest’s program, including a focus on in-demand sectors of the economy, wraparound support services while participants are in school or training, and job placement that depends on relationships with local employers.
COPS/Metro Alliance, which has a long history in San Antonio advocating on behalf of working families and holding politicians accountable, launched Project Quest as residents struggled to find work during a recession and local employers complained that they couldn’t find skilled employees.
COPS/Metro leaders forged relationships with community colleges and local employers, focusing first on the health care sector, and became known for a support system that helped participants reach the finish line with high touch counseling and financial help with barriers like child care and transportation costs.
Project Quest has been considered a successful workforce development program before today’s study. In a 2019 New York Times article touting the program, Paul Osterman, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, called Project Quest “a striking exception” to most workforce programs, which often show limited results.
“It is scalable,” he went on, “and there is no reason every city and town in America can’t have something like it.”
San Antonio is the first city in the country to commit to what experts like Elliott say are the resources necessary to attempt that scale. In the early months of the pandemic, local voters approved collecting a 1/8-cent of city sales tax from December 2021 to December 2025 to be put toward “authorized programs related to job training and the awarding of scholarships.”
Thus far, $160 million has been collected. Ready to Work has spent less than a third of that so far, about $43.8 million, since City Council signed contracts with Project Quest and three other contractors in February 2022. The other three are the Alamo Colleges District, Workforce Solutions Alamo and ReStore Education.
The program will serve residents until the money runs out.
Enduring criticism
Ready to Work has been criticized from the beginning for not showing results faster, and some of the sharpest early criticism came from COPS/Metro Alliance leaders, who encouraged the creation of the program based on the Project Quest model, and then mobilized a major grassroots effort to get it passed — which it did by an overwhelming 77% of voters.
A year into the program, COPS/Metro leaders, pointing to Ready to Work’s struggle to move participants from training into jobs in the promised numbers, urged city leaders to do more to extract job commitments from local employers.
Ready to Work has yet to meet its goal of placing 80% of graduates into full-time jobs that pay at least $15 an hour within six months of completing their schooling or training. Today the six-month success rate is just 59%. Stretched to 12 months, the rate is 77%, roughly the same place it was in May, when City Council approved a $49.5 million budget for the program for fiscal year 2025.
“We’re still striving for it, because the premise behind the time frame is people need jobs now,” said Mike Ramsey, executive director of the city’s Workforce Development Office, which administers Ready to Work. “But is it a failure if it took somebody nine months, 10 months, 11 months to get a job? No, it’s absolutely not.”
Despite its decades of experience, even Project Quest got off to a rocky start as a Ready to Work contractor. The city-funded program dramatically expanded Quest’s longtime and tightly-focused program to encompass more job training programs, more economic sectors and more participants.
As of Oct. 2, Project Quest has a 60% job placement rate after six months, roughly the same as Workforce Solutions Alamo and the Alamo Colleges District, according to the presentation to the Ready to Work advisory board earlier this month. The smaller ReStore Education has a 47% placement rate.
Future generations
“This is a larger scale than we’ve ever done, and we are still putting a lot of people into jobs they weren’t qualified for before,” said Project Quest President and CEO Francisco Martinez.
He said Ready to Work participants who are placed in jobs through Project Quest are seeing the highest averages wages of all the contractors, which he attributed to Quest’s culture, “and the fact that we’ve been doing this for 32 years.”
Ben Peavey, managing director for Accenture Federal Services, said when Accenture’s leadership challenged the office to increase the number of women and people of color there, it turned to Project Quest.
In the decade since, the company has hired at least 100 Project Quest graduates, often into entry-level IT roles. Peavey said those employees have “better engagement and retention” that Accenture employees overall.
Peavey, who also chairs the Ready to Work advisory board, said the city program, like Project Quest, is serving a population that faces any number of barriers. Most are women of color with little education, many of whom have been un- or underemployed for years.
“We’ve set very high targets, and we need to do whatever we need to do to achieve them, but I’m very proud of the results we’ve gotten,” he said. “We’ve placed more than 1,500 people into jobs,” with a mean annual salary of almost $44,000. Another 9,000 or so are enrolled in job training and college degree programs.
San Antonio remains one of the poorest cities in the country, with almost 18% of the population unable to meet their basic needs. The median household income here is $59,593, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, compared to $74,580 for the U.S.
The impact of Project Quest can already be seen in subsequent generations, said Sonia Rodriguez, a COPS/Metro Alliance leader who chairs Quest’s board. At a press conference Wednesday to tout the study’s results, she noted that the father of Councilwoman Teri Castillo (D-5) is a Project Quest graduate.
Castillo’s father, Navy veteran Joe Castillo, “is three years away from retirement using the skill set he earned going through the Project Quest program,” Castillo said. “I’m a proud daughter of a Project Quest member.”
