Hmong American Partnership: Strengthening a Shared Vision for a regional New American Long-term Health Care Workforce

We are deeply grateful to Ivanhoe Development for helping transform a shared vision into a true regional partnership. Their guidance strengthened not only our proposal, but the foundation of a workforce system that will create lasting opportunities for New American communities while addressing critical healthcare workforce needs across Minnesota."
— May yer Thao, President and CEO

Organization Size: Large: ($10 million – $50 million)

Summary
Ivanhoe Development advised two regional cultural anchor institutions to unify pieces of a partnership framework into a cohesive, coordinated workforce development pipeline. Through program design, clarifying partner roles, and building consensus around shared outcomes, Ivanhoe helped create a first-of-its-kind workforce development system that will increase the supply of culturally competent healthcare professionals in the region and create sustainable career pathways for community members. 

The Hurdle

Hmong American Partnership (HAP) is the largest Hmong-serving organization in the United States, serving roughly 30,000 individuals per year. HAP came to Ivanhoe Development in 2024 seeking development support to strengthen its portfolio of interconnected culturally responsive programs spanning workforce development, youth leadership, mental health supportive services, and small business development. 

In 2025, the City of Minneapolis released the New American Long-Term Care Workforce funding opportunity in response to severe staffing shortages across Minnesota’s healthcare system. Minnesota aging services organizations reported approximately 17,000 workforce vacancies, with staffing shortages becoming a leading cause of reductions in long-term care services and facility closures. As HAP sought to expand the capacity of its Allied Health workforce pathway for Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) and Patient Care Assistant (PCA) training, the opportunity aligned with HAP’s vision of supporting New Americans into stable healthcare careers while addressing a critical workforce gap. 

While HAP had a strong program vision and a longstanding community trust developed over nearly four decades, the initiative required the development of an entirely new workforce partnership model alongside their partner, Karen Organization of Minnesota (KOM).  As two cultural anchor organizations, HAP and KOM brought distinct expertise and roles to the table. HAP brought a successful workforce training infrastructure for CNA and PNA roles in a culturally responsive environment, and KOM brought an established relationship with the region’s Office of Refugee Resettlement and deep expertise in serving newly arrived Americans. The challenge was to create a unified program design framework for the City’s proposal that clearly articulates each partner's role in strengthening the larger system.

The partnership needed a shared understanding of participant pathways, clearly defined responsibilities, measurable outcomes, and agreement around how participants would move through recruitment, supportive services, training, and employment placement. At the same time, the program model had to align with the City's specific priorities and funding framework. The work required balancing organizational strengths and perspectives while ensuring the proposal represented a realistic, coordinated, and sustainable approach to addressing workforce shortages in long-term care. 

The Answer

Ivanhoe Development worked alongside HAP and its partners to move the project beyond a collection of individual program components into a coordinated workforce strategy with shared goals and a clearly defined participant journey that aligned with the City’s program goals. 

Ivanhoe facilitated conversations and interactions among partners to align on program structure, participant flow, and responsibilities. The organizations entered the process articulating their distinct strengths and how they imagined the partnership functioning together to achieve outcomes. While they were clear on their distinct processes and contributions, these strengths needed to operate as an integrated system. Ivanhoe guided the partnership through discussions designed to clarify how participants would enter and move through the program, where responsibilities began and ended for each organization, and how partners would collectively define success. Through this process, the partnership established a shared framework that aligned recruitment, supportive services, workforce readiness activities, training, and employment placement into a cohesive pathway.

This work also involved testing the soundness and feasibility of the program model itself. Proposed activities, participant outcomes, timelines, and assumptions were examined to ensure the program structure was realistic for implementation and responsive to the needs of both participants and employers. Questions around participant barriers, referral mechanisms, partner capacity, and long-term sustainability were considered alongside the funding opportunity requirements.

As the framework took shape, Ivanhoe synthesized these conversations and organizational strengths into a unified narrative aligned with the City’s priorities for expanding and diversifying the long-term care workforce.  The proposal’s strength lay in its coordinated strategy to address both workforce shortages and the barriers faced by New American communities entering healthcare careers. The resulting application reflected a shared vision across organizations with clearly defined roles, measurable outcomes, and a stronger foundation for implementation.

This work illustrates Ivanhoe Development’s role in helping clients and partners work together to strengthen program logic, facilitate collaboration, and build realistic implementation frameworks for a collaborative program design. The result was the City funding this project at nearly its full amount (approximately $900,000 of the $1 million ask), establishing the Twin Cities’ region's first regional long-term care workforce pipeline for New Americans with two longstanding cultural organizations.