Dan River Region Collaborative

Danville

, Virginia

The Dan River Region Collaborative serves approximately 150,000 people in Pittsylvania, Halifax, and Henry counties and the cities of Danville and Martinsville. The region is located along the center of the state line dividing North Carolina and Virginia. It is anticipated that as the DRR Collaborative grows and achieves success, additional counties and cities will be added.

The goal is to promote career advancement by raising the skill levels of the existing workforce and to address employment barriers for those who remain unemployed, particularly those citizens from low-income backgrounds.

To meet the needs of the 21st century economy, the region would have to transition from its focus on low-skill jobs to one that emphasized high-tech advanced manufacturing. Nevertheless, the Dan River Region has the lowest educational attainment level in Virginia: 64 percent of Pittsylvania County residents and 58 percent of Danville residents have only a high school diploma or less.

Funding Collaborative

The Dan River Region Collaborative has a dual leadership structure. Its funding partner, the Community Foundation of the Dan River Region, serves as fiscal agent. The Danville Pittsylvania County Chamber of Commerce is the project lead.

Partners include key stakeholders, which are primarily local employers. These employers are involved in various workforce training efforts that will be expanded or affected by this collaborative. As part of their current involvement, they have committed to providing resources that are essential to project success. These resources include in-kind matches in the form of company time for employees and managers (to help develop plans, provide active service on boards, etc.), and, as feasible, use of company facilities, training equipment, publications, marketing resources, etc.

Key Strategies and Interventions

The Dan River Region Collaborative’s workforce partnership strategy is based on:

Research on industry sectors and occupational trends that offer accessible career advancement opportunities for lower-skilled individuals;
Identification of the current and future demand of occupations accessible to lower-skilled adults for each of the initiative’s target sectors, skills requirements, and career advancement opportunities;
Application of a sector approach that aggregates and confirms demand across employers; and
Identification of systemic gaps, duplication, and opportunities for workforce partnership investments that leverage the existing infrastructure.

In addition, the DRR Collaborative supports a system change agenda: it helps to create a network of regional workforce planning and implementation representatives to work with businesses to plan for and respond to regional workforce needs and support the restructure of One Stop centers to include more of the services that are currently located elsewhere in One Stops.

Labor Market Analysis

The following powerpoint provides an analysis of the Dan River regional labor market. The analysis is intended to provide a picture into overall employment conditions and structural changes in this local economy, focusing on the period from 2001-2007. Though this data does not capture changes associated with the recent 2008 recession, it should still provide useful insights into medium-term demographic and employment changes.

The data analyzed here comes from two major sources: The American Community Survey 2007 (and 1990 & 2000 Decennial Census for some charts) from the U.S. Census Bureau (http://www.census.gov/acs/www/) ; and the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://www.bls.gov/cew/).

For a full guide to the data content, structure, and how it might be used, please listen to the June 16, 2009, recorded webinar available here: http://www.nfwsolutions.org/elearning.html

downloads/tools/Southern_Virginia_Counties.ppt

downloads/tools/Southern_Virginia_Notes.xls

downloads/tools/South_VA_Data.zip