Unlocking Better Outcomes: Roger Low on Reshaping Workforce Training in Colorado 

Edited by Taruni Donti

Roger Low believes in the power of good, data-driven government. In 2021, he noticed a compelling need: workforce programs that truly lead to better jobs and higher wages – especially for marginalized people such as women, people of color, and people living in poverty – were not getting the public funding they needed. These programs fill “middle skill” jobs, which require more than a high school diploma but less than a four-year degree and include millions of jobs in IT, health, manufacturing, and many more sectors. Meanwhile, many workforce programs currently funded by public dollars lead to low-wage jobs with little upward mobility.  

In this conversation with Trailhead’s Senior Communications Coordinator Taruni Donti, Roger shares his journey, the challenges faced in workforce development, CEEMI’s successes, and how he continues to fight for real, equitable outcomes amidst a changing political landscape. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Roger: My first full-time job was as a field organizer on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in rural Elko, Nevada. It was a 10,000-person campaign with many hundreds of thousands of volunteers, and I was just one small piece of it. I helped recruit volunteers and precinct captains and put together a field program to mobilize voters in a deeply conservative area of the country.  

The experience taught me the value of collective action, of organizing, and of face-to-face conversations, how they can really move people. Even though I was a liberal progressive in a very red, rural part of the country, we had shared values and concerns – healthcare costs, a desire to leave one’s kids better off – that transcended the political divide. It gave me some optimism.  

Once President Obama took office, I briefly worked in his administration. Because I was born and raised in Colorado, I came back to Colorado to work for Senator Michael Bennet’s campaign in 2010. I then joined his office in various roles, including as a legislative assistant policy advisor, working on issues like workforce development, evidence-based policy, and Pay for Success. I earned a Master’s in Public Administration and Public Policy and returned to Colorado again to work for Governor Hickenlooper’s budget office, launching the state’s first Pay for Success, or Pay for Outcomes, projects. Later, I worked with America Forward, the policy arm of the venture philanthropy nonprofit New Profit, advocating for evidence-based policy and Pay for Outcomes.    

The throughline of my career has always been exploring what good government looks like. How do we make government more effective, more accountable, more outcomes-focused, and how do we build support for that? I’ve always had an interest in government as an imperfect vehicle for collective action and for solving problems, and I find it very satisfying to actually fund a project or pass policy that moves that vision of government forward. 

CEEMI and partners meet with Senators Michel Bennet and John Hickenlooper in May 2024. 

Roger: I mentioned at America Forward, I advocated for Pay for Outcomes approaches, or in other words, tying public dollars to outcomes rather than inputs. For instance, if you fund a workforce training program, how do you structure the program so that you’re paying based on whether people’s lives improve, rather than based on how many people show up? 

We had a growing list of workforce development programs that had strong evidence of impact based on some of the most rigorous evaluations out there. Learners were actually ending up in better-paying jobs. And yet, these programs struggled to scale with public funding from our workforce development system and were largely funded by philanthropy. For all the talk about how we must invest taxpayer dollars in more effective job training, there were few examples of that happening on the ground.    

In 2021, Congress passed the American Rescue Plan Act [ARPA], a significant one-time federal stimulus program. States were making decisions about how to allocate those one-time dollars, and I noticed a gap. This happened in every state, really, but Colorado is the state I know by far the best. Colorado needed advocates for evidence-based programs. We also needed to do a better job of unlocking outcomes data for more training programs so that we could grow the list of programs that we know actually work. And so, with an incredible team of partners and funders and supporters, we launched CEEMI. We were unfunded at the time. Over the last four years, we’ve been able to leverage modest seed funds and achieve outsized impacts to change the workforce development conversation in Colorado. 

CEEMI is unique in that we focus on the state and local levels – not the national level. There’s no other organization in Colorado that checks all the boxes that we do. We are, I think, politically realistic, we have a lobbyist, I have a strong background in government and politics. We have a lot of relationships at all levels of government, and we’ve worked to build those relationships over time. We also bring this highly evidence-based orientation to the workforce ecosystem. When people ask about our goals and vision, we are clear that we want to move towards publicly funding many more workforce programs that are backed by evidence – and we can show what that looks like. 

“The throughline of my career has always been exploring what good government looks like. How do we make government more effective, more accountable, more outcomes-focused, and how do we build support for that?”

Roger: One of our biggest early wins was influencing how Colorado spent its ARPA dollars back in 2021. Essentially, we participated in the Governor’s task force to recommend how to spend these one-time stimulus dollars. We also made broader recommendations to reform our workforce system. We then made recommendations to the legislature to pass several key bills. We played an active role in the 2022 session to shape how those bills were designed and, with the support of our lobbyist, included language that prioritized evidence-based programs.  

I’m not always the best at pushing myself to the forefront, but in service of advancing CEEMI’s goals, I pushed to have a seat on the steering committee for the Opportunity Now workforce grant program, which CEEMI continues to have a key role in implementing. The program has since made significant scale grants to some of the most evidence-based programs in Colorado and has supported more programs throughout the state to evaluate and collect outcomes data.     

Another win came in 2023, when Denver City Council was debating the Prosperity Denver Fund. This program – funded by modest sales taxes – was approved by Denver voters in 2018 to provide college scholarships for low-income students. Along with several partners, CEEMI really pushed to expand the program as the money wasn’t being fully spent –in part because many low-income students who qualified for the fund weren’t going to college. We successfully pushed to expand the program to include short-term apprenticeships and evidence-based workforce training programs. For both of these wins, we meaningfully tied public dollars to outcomes without locking out community-based organizations.  

CEEMI and CEEMI partners testify in the Colorado General Assembly in February 2024. This group photo was taken under the stained–glass window of Emily Griffith. 

Roger: Honestly, we wish the list was longer. It’s very challenging to collect outcomes data at scale. CEEMI’s not an evaluator – I always try to clarify that. But we work closely with evaluators, and so we’ve helped these evaluators access wage data. There are some great examples of some of these programs. 

Activate Work is a nonprofit here in the Denver area that delivers an IT training program. Their program is based on an IT training program called Per Scholas that’s supported by two randomized evaluations, showing very statistically significant increases in earnings. We also do a lot of work with Cross Purpose, which is a cohort-based training model in Denver. In Texas, Project Quest has been shown to help learners attain post-secondary credentials and to increase wages for low-income learners – especially women of color – over a 13-year timeline. We’ve supported an effort that is currently underway to pilot that program both in Denver and in the San Luis Valley. Each of the examples received an Opportunity Now scale grant. All three are also in the process of getting local Denver funding through Prosperity Denver Fund, too.  

CEEMI also launched the Wage Outcomes Results Coalition, or Colorado WORC to help a cohort of training programs access their wage data. It’s a paradox – the state does collect wage data. There’s just not a good system in place – especially outside of traditional two and four-year colleges – for training providers to access that wage data. And they all want it! At least the programs that we’ve talked to want to know what’s happening to their learners once they leave their doors. We have a list on our website of the five training programs that are in the first cohort of Colorado WORC. You can actually see their wage outcomes from these reports that we issued with the Colorado Evaluation & Action Lab at the University of Denver. 

“When people ask about our goals and vision, we are clear that we want to move towards publicly funding many more workforce programs that are backed by evidence – and we can show what that looks like.”

Roger: We see many challenges. One major challenge I would highlight is the lack of scalable outcomes data. Training programs don’t have a way to clearly visualize and see their wage outcomes over time, manage performance, and do so for different audiences – funders, policymakers, employers, and, most importantly, learners. These audiences should all be able to look at a specific training program, see their wage outcomes, and have some sense of their return on investment and program quality.   

Of course, earnings are not the only indicator of program quality. There’s a place for great arts programs, even if they don’t result in wage outcomes that are as high as, say, an IT program or a finance program. But polling shows that if you ask American college freshmen what the most important function of college is, they say it’s the return on investment – making a livable wage. So, we must collect that data point, as well as other indicators of job quality. And we must have more programs that learners can actually trust to increase their wages and quality of life.  

Another big challenge is the very siloed, splintered public funding ecosystem. We have this chart that we call the spaghetti chart, because it kind of looks like spaghetti. It shows the many different programs we have in Colorado’s post-secondary workforce ecosystem, none of them particularly well-coordinated. With a couple notable exceptions, most dollars are not tied to outcomes. And one final challenge I’ll mention is that a lot of policymakers and funders do not have a solid grounding in evidence-based policy. Everyone talks about outcomes and evidence, but they don’t fully grasp what that actually means.  

One part of the Spaghetti chart shows a snapshot of Colorado’s workforce preparedness and training ecosystem.  

Roger: Trailhead was a huge catalyst in getting CEEMI off the ground in 2021. We needed 501(c)(3) status quickly, along with infrastructure to manage funds, legal protection, a nonprofit board, financial oversight – we didn’t have any of that. No one was going to fund us without an established platform. It was clear that to get CEEMI off the ground in 2021 to help shape the ARPA conversation heating up in Colorado, we needed a fiscal sponsor. Trailhead was a great fit, and they’ve been so important to our growth.  

Trailhead provides the essential infrastructure and credibility – incredibly important for a new nonprofit – without needless barriers and bureaucracy. They help us ensure that important fiscal controls are in place. They’ve done so much from sharing 501(c)(3) status and audited financials to managing grants, providing legal counsel, and handling hiring and payroll. They also have the ability to direct dollars through subcontracts. In so many ways, I feel it’s been much easier to take this risk and start CEEMI under the umbrella of a more established fiscal sponsor. 

Roger: We’re continuing to try to build on our success. We’ve set an ambitious goal of redirecting over $100 million in public funding toward evidence-based workforce programs and programs that are meaningfully evaluating outcomes. We’re very involved in conversations that the state is having right now about standing up – for the first time – a truly functional state longitudinal data system. We’re pushing state agencies to make wage outcome data available for training providers at scale, something that is long overdue. We’ve finally secured a commitment that the state is going to make this data more available, and we expect continued conversations on what that exactly looks like.   

We’re also excited to launch a program called Evidence Builders, a two-day program where we will have 20 key policymakers and funders deep dive on what evidence-based policy looks like in practice. Governor Jared Polis also recently announced an ambitious initiative to scale evidence-based economic mobility programs with a dollar-for-dollar match of up to $10 million from Arnold Ventures, one of our anchor funders. We’re having conversations now about how we use that funding to incentivize and scale more evidence-based programs. 

Roundtable with Congresswoman Yadira Caraveo in January 2024. 

Roger: I’m proud of how CEEMI’s work is genuinely bipartisan. Not many topics are genuinely bipartisan these days, but making the workforce system accountable is one of them. The left wants to explore how we can more robustly fund programs that will better serve people facing systemic inequity. Some on the center right want more accountability for government programs and are skeptical about the current federal structures undergirding the workforce development system. Frankly, they’re right to be skeptical. As we’ve argued repeatedly, too many people coming out of our current system end up in low wage jobs. Those outcomes are even worse for women and people of color. There’s overlap in our goals, and we’ve had funders from both sides.  

I, unfortunately, don’t believe the current administration in Washington is interested in data-driven, evidence-based government. In December 2024, Congress got very close to reauthorizing the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). I wrote an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review two years ago that made our case for why the WIOA needs to be reformed. We thought the reauthorization last year didn’t go far enough, but we did support it. It had some good ideas that would meaningfully improve the system.  

But then, Elon Musk tweeted about how the government funding bill was a thousand pages too long. Elected Republicans in Congress blindly followed his lead. They shredded a thousand pages of the bill in order to keep the government funded. I wish I was exaggerating, but that’s what happened. The workforce reauthorization that we expected to pass was randomly included in those several thousand pages, and so the reauthorization didn’t happen. The big question at the national level is what will happen in terms of the workforce reauthorization moving forward. 

“I’m hopeful that there will be more interest in prioritizing effective government, in part because people see what happens at the other end of the extreme, when government fails.”

Frankly, I’m also very concerned about what will happen in Colorado in the coming months. We have a major concentration of federal workforce in our state. We could be disproportionally affected as thousands of federal workers in Colorado could indiscriminately get laid off by the new administration. With local workforce centers also anticipating funding cuts under this administration, I don’t think our workforce system is ready to deal with the coming manufactured crisis.  

Roger: I don’t know [laughs]. I mean, what else can we do? I tend to be a fairly optimistic person. Honestly, the last couple months have tested that for me. I’m hopeful that with the terrible chaos we’re seeing in the national policy level right now, it may help many realize the critical need for good government. We cannot take good government for granted. I think perhaps Americans have done just that. Many Americans believe that competent government and the rule of law are like oxygen – always there. They’re not.  

Our work at CEEMI is often very technocratic and data oriented, but we ultimately work to make government more responsive, more effective. Government is never going to be perfect, but I think that’s the direction that we need to keep moving towards. For those of us who really believe in democratic government, it’s imperative.   

If you zoom out a little bit, one of the challenges for folks who believe in government is perhaps we spend too much time on policy, big pictures, ideology, and not enough time on delivery. There’s a great book that the founder of Code for America wrote called Recoding Government that’s all about this. If you’re someone who believes in the collective action behind government, you should also be motivated to make government more effective. I see CEEMI’s work as fitting into that space. 

I’m hopeful that there will be more interest in prioritizing effective government, in part because people see what happens at the other end of the extreme, when government fails. That’s where I’m getting a little of my optimism, at the moment anyway. 

Photo Credit: Thomas Morse

Roger: I genuinely love Colorado. I love the people. I think Coloradans – on average – are more collaborative and optimistic than in other parts of the country. Obviously a sweeping generalization, but as someone who’s lived here most of my life, I believe it’s true. There are many exciting advances in workforce development that are happening in the state right now – and a lot of room for progress. More generally, I love living somewhere where there’s over 300 days of sun, beautiful mountains, lots of open space, and where more people take their freedom seriously. My husband and I live in Lakewood, and we’re both quite happy here. 

Learn more about how CEEMI is changing Colorado’s workforce ecosystem.  

Learn more about Trailhead’s Administrative Partnership Program and how to apply to become an administrative partner. 

Since our founding in 1993, Trailhead has helped advance innovation and collaboration in public and environmental health. We serve as a strategic partner for building coordinated, community-informed solutions to public health needs through our knowledge and relationships across the public health system. As a public health institute, we support organizations who work in direct service to communities.