Private foundations are no stranger to government. Most of them exist to help address public issues –poverty, crime, blight, you name it.
Bloomberg Philanthropies, for instance, which was started by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars making cities’ solutions to big problems more innovative and data-driven.
But at least one foundation is going deeper than that. It’s getting at a root of the public sector’s problems: workforce shortages.
Without the ability to match the wages and salaries for most private-sector jobs, the public sector has long struggled to attract talent. And there’s reason to believe that won’t change anytime soon: Degrees in public service are on the decline, and as we previously reported, public service students appear to be increasingly choosing to work in corporations or nonprofits over government agencies.