“Building Community Partnerships to Serve Immigrant Workers” (BCPIW), an initiative of the National Council for Workforce Education, was designed to replicate and expand effective community college/worker center/community-based organization partnerships to address the workforce development needs of immigrants and immigrant workers. Common barriers for immigrants include lack of literacy skills, limited knowledge of potential career pathways and limited perspective of the benefits afforded by comprehensive training and education. The activities and goals of BCPIW provided eight new community teams with the tools necessary to create and/or expand successful partnerships that improve access to education and training opportunities that help immigrants and immigrant workers achieve family-wage careers. The teams’ experiences and lessons learned are described in eight case studies.
