3. Big Idea - Career Planning in Relation to Baby Boomer Retirements

"Roughly 44 million baby boomers hit retirement age over the next decade". New York Times 5/28/11

For young professionals with 8-10 years of work experience, there is an opportunity over the next five years to position oneself to quickly assume positions of leadership as top level executives/leaders look to retire or significantly reduce their work hours. Our generation has the potential and responsibility to prepare for this transition of power in the public and private sector.

Ideas to potentially monetize:

• Mapping organizations with positions set to be vacant in 3-5 years
• Incentive programs to retain leadership knowledge - maybe in positions of mentoring
• Documenting intellectual capital
• Job-shares for individuals with new families and retirees
• As a business, maintaining relationships with business partners who have turn over
• Transitioning book of business
• Explore how various sectors will change
• Ways to attract talent and make adjustments taking into consideration generational differences

2. Big Idea - Fingerprinting and Background Checks

The goal of this proposal is to have higher compliance in individuals receiving multiple background checks via DOJ when working with vulnerable populations (significant “recurring access” with children 17 years or younger, persons 60 years or older, or individuals with disabilities).

Barriers

One of the barriers, perceived and real, from the perspective of agencies and individuals is the current protocol for individuals to be fingerprinted multiple times. Individuals that fall under this category include; substitute teachers, service learning students, volunteers with multiple non-profits, non-profit staff, students involved in professional practicum.

The current process involves the individual attending an orientation at the placement site. The volunteer then travels to either a school district office or a LiveScan facility. This requires a trained technician and in many cases a “rolling fee” which is not set, but usually is about $20. Individuals many times must adjust their schedules in work and school to be fingerprinted, pushing back their start date and adding to the time from initial orientation to being cleared to volunteer.

Proposed solution

For those individuals who are fingerprinted multiple times, a site-based authentication could be completed in the main office or HR department. The equipment needed includes: an existing DOJ account, a computer connected to the internet and a DOJ specification approved USB Fingerprint Scanner. This would be exclusively for individuals who have already had a full set of fingerprints rolled via LiveScan. All that would be required for future fingerprints is the authorization to do a background check with a government issued ID and one corresponding fingerprint as verification. This could be checked directly with the fingerprint on file and verified. The permission would be the same as it currently is, so that schools would receive certain background information, employers and non-profits, access to information they are currently authorized to receive from DOJ.

On the part of DOJ, this would require a portal and secure transfer of information to the site as well as identifying the specifications or specific models of approved scanners. As a project, it is rather limited in scale and could be piloted before full roll out. Parameters could be put forth to limit eligibility in program, but the basic concept would drastically streamline the process for fingerprinting and the perceived and actual barriers to fingerprinting.

2. Big Idea - Fingerprinting and Background Checks Using Livescan

Having worked now for eight years in the fields of non-profit and higher education, I've worked with individuals and organizations who work with volunteers. Limiting liability and creating processes for large numbers of volunteers to be cleared through fingerprinting and background checks, I have been struck by the inefficiencies, time commitment and prohibitively high cost burden on schools and organizations.

1. Big Idea - Neighborhood Tax Party

I figure that the current structures of taxes are inaccessible and intimidating for most people. There is a whole segment of the population who work and pay taxes but do not file taxes. This group misses out on tax refunds and special anti-poverty tax credit programs. In an in depth NewAmerican Foundation report called "Left on the Table", they highlight; "in 2009, an estimated 800,000 Californians, about one in five who are eligible, will fail to claim $1.2 billion in EITC refunds".

Here is an idea. Throw a tax party in your city. Rather than trying to market the opaquely acronymed program EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit), market the program as a tax party. I believe this works in small communities as well as large metro areas.

Neighborhood Tax Party

1 Week

1000 People

1 Million Dollars

This works only if you re-imagine VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) to be scalable and sustainable without a large surge in specialized volunteers. Empower individuals to do their own taxes, with limited guidance and general financial literacy programming. 

1. Big Idea - VITA and Earned Income Tax Credit

I've been thinking quite a bit about the economy and how families are coping with lower incomes. I briefly looked at demographic information that the Brookings Institute makes available http://www.brookings.edu/metro/EITC/EITC-Data.aspx and used some basic comparison to the numbers here http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_national/stress_index/

To me it seems like there are some ways of acutely addressing the crisis with existing federal programs such as EITC. I have been doing some brainstorming and want to inform myself further about current efforts, strategies and outcomes to see if I could identify some of the barriers, if any, and pathways for participation in the program. 

Ideas

This blog will be a platform for brainstorming ideas and general musing. I hope to consider various outcomes of these ideas and the viability of making them into a reality.