Workforce group receives $320,000

An initiative to help raise the pay of workers has received $320,000 in government funding.

The Manatee Sarasota Workforce Funders Collaborative, designed to move low-wage employees into higher-paying jobs, has received $200,000 from Sarasota County and $120,000 from the Newtown Community Redevelopment Agency.

The county’s funding is over a four-year period to provide job training while the Newtown CRA’s is over a three-year period to provide job training to Newtown residents and employers.

“We are very excited Sarasota has joined this bi-county initiative,” said Mireya Eavey, director of the collaborative, said in a press release.

The City of Bradenton Central Community Redevelopment Agency and the City of Bradenton Downtown Development Authority previously authorized funding of $200,000 each over four years.

The collaborative was formed in 2009 with a $1 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation along with the Bradenton Central CRA, the Bradenton DDA, the Gulf Coast Community Foundation of Venice Inc., Bank of America and the Manatee County Action Agency.

The group previously was awarded five grants totaling $35,457 for worker training at local health care facilities. Tidewell Hospice and Palliative Care was the largest grant recipient. The Manatee County health care provider received a $19,350 grant it will match to train and certify 60 registered nurses.

Manatee Memorial Hospital received three grants from the collaborative: a $2,500 grant to train health information managers to become cancer registrars, $5,000 to train new nurses in surgery care and a $3,107 grant it will share with Blake Medical Center and Sarasota Memorial Hospital to train nurses as sexual assault nurse examiners.

The remainder of the $35,000 in grants went to Village on the Isle, a continuing-care retirement community in Venice, to train workers in electronic medical records.