FUNDING PROGRAMS
There never is enough money to do all that labor educators would like to; budgets for labor education always have been inadequate. No federally funded labor extension service exists that is comparable to the Agricultural Extension Service, established in 1862 for the farm population, which at the time constituted the majority of this country’s workforce. Today only 2 percent of our population farms, while more than 102 million women and men are in the industrial, service, and white-collar work force.
Two routes to augmenting the financing of labor education are covered in Part IV. Chapter 20 is a guide to developing and writing proposals to obtain money for experimental, pilot education projects for women workers. The ability of educators to design and test innovative ideas in this area depends on their access to funding. The chapter details the soundness of proposal design and clarity of presentation that foundations look for. Because it is practically a blueprint for proposal writers, it should prove invaluable.
The second chapter in this part discusses a quite different source of funds: the use of tuition assistance programs, often available to workers and equally often underutilized. It reports on a study of why these monies have not been used, and suggests some programmatic remedies to encourage women, the major non-users, to take greater advantage of tuition refund where it is available.
While neither chapter suggests that obtaining funds is easy, each offers considered suggestions in a forthright, pragmatic form that readers should find both useful and refreshing.