Helping Legal-System-Impacted New Yorkers to Benefit from the Clean Slate Act
In November 2023, Governor Kathy Hochul signed the Clean Slate Act, which will seal certain criminal records, unlocking opportunities for employment, housing, and education previously denied to people impacted by the legal system. The act will go into effect later this year, offering relief to an estimated 542,000 New York City residents, over 400,000 of whom are working-age adults. With automatic sealing of old criminal convictions, the New York City Comptroller’s Office estimates that legal-system involved New York City residents could see an increase of an estimated $2.4 billion in annual wages.
With the Clean Slate Act set to improve employment prospects for legal system-impacted New Yorkers, it is more important than ever to increase our workforce development system’s capacity to serve these individuals. That’s why we are offering Unlocking Employment: How to Partner with Job Seekers Impacted by the Legal System, a free online course to help workforce development providers better serve people with legal system involvement. Launched in December 2022 by the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity (NYC Opportunity), CUNY School of Professional Studies, and the John Jay College Institute for Justice and Opportunity, the course was designed with input from job seekers and workforce practitioners.
Unlocking Employment is 90 minutes, self-paced, and features four modules with interactive exercises and case studies. It also includes a curated resource library available to learners at any time during or after the course. The course offers:
- Proven strategies to support the job search
- A strengths-based approach to doing this work
- Ways to reduce stigma
- Key insights about legal protections for those with criminal convictions
Registration is free and available to everyone — career center staff, employment advisors, case managers, trainers, and leaders of organizations that provide employment support services — regardless of whether your programs are focused specifically on justice-impacted clients.
Since Unlocking Employment’s launch, 700 professionals from nearly 100 New York City organizations have signed up to take advantage of this free professional development resource. The course has drawn rave reviews from people who have already taken it:
- “I wasn’t aware of all the hurdles there are for a person with a conviction and did not realize how difficult it is for them to be integrated back into the workforce. This course has given me a lot of information that can be passed along to friends and family that may be having a difficult time finding employment due to a past criminal history. It was very informative.”
- “This course expanded my knowledge on the rights people have that aid in making a transition from their involvement in the legal system to the workforce”.
- “[Unlocking Employment] makes you more aware of what the person on the other side of the desk is going through. . . . [It] let’s them know you’re an advocate for them. [It’s] better than just telling them the laws.”
And there is a video that has more to say about the course.
Sign up today here. And tell your colleagues and people in your networks about it.
