Speaker 1: The important thing about sector strategies has been the fact that they allow people who come from different perspectives to bring their expertise to bear on a common goal. And I think if I would have understood how sector strategies really provide a neutral platform for people to organize around, we would have taken this work on much earlier than we did. A lot of times you get into the turf battles, you know, the implementation of the one-stop system, the alignment of partners, you know, does that mean we have to give you our money to control how it's being spent? Sector strategies takes that conversation off the table. It becomes about designing good community vision and allowing partners within a community, whether it's at the state level, regional level, or local level, to begin to articulate their role within a comprehensive workforce system. So it's no longer about, are you going to try to get my money? Are you going to try to direct my resources in a way that is not in alignment with the goals and missions in my organization? It's about willing alignment. It's about, we've often referred to the coalition of the willing. It sets that kind of platform. It sets a platform for diverse organizations, diverse agencies, diverse funding streams to come around, identify where they have an appropriate role, and then willingly align resources, policy, investments to further a shared community vision.

Speaker 2: I think the biggest part of the sector initiative is making sure that the systems meet the needs. That it's not just, you know, whether workforce has the problem solved, it's whether all of us together can solve the problem. And it's looking at the partners that are strongest and letting them, you know, take

Speaker 3: the lead if they need to. Before we started this more focused approach to sector strategies, that there was a lot of duplication of effort, and maybe we were all doing things in our own way and doing the right things, but we weren't doing them in a coordinated, constructive fashion. We have been able to align our resources because we meet regularly, we talk with one another consistently. There are things now that are going on that we're all aware of and we're all pushing on, rather than just having things happen in our individual silos as it happened in the past. We know that money doesn't drive change, but sometimes the lack of money drives change. And we have been dealing with declining resources like every other state, and we don't have the luxury of operating in our silos anymore because to get something accomplished, you have to merge your resources and be very efficient with what resources you have.

Speaker 4: Having a committee, and having a coordinated effort, and having a collaborative effort, there are different degrees of commitment in each one of those. What we found is people don't do until they understand why they're at the table. You can't mandate it. What you can do is show potential outcomes, invite people to the table. You can do some things with policy, you can do some things with incentives, but that collaborations, buy-in occurs because people have a reason to be a member.

Speaker 5: They need to align their policies, and they need to integrate in all the initiatives that they put out so that it is on that framework, the platform of sectors, so it doesn't look like it's a project because projects end.