Late this week, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass issued Executive Directive 20, a plan to expand job opportunities for Angelenos with justice system experience by leveraging the City’s hiring, procurement, and contracting resources.

With this Directive, Mayor Bass is sending a clear signal: fair chance hiring is an economic imperative. At a time when a growing number of Angelenos face barriers to employment due to involvement with the justice system and homelessness, the City is stepping up to expand access to work and opportunity.

But in this moment of opportunity, Los Angeles is at risk of overlooking the very system that has already proven it can deliver on this vision at scale.

For more than a decade, LA:RISE has quietly done what this Directive is calling for. It has connected thousands of Angelenos — many returning from incarceration or experiencing homelessness — to paid work, skills training, and permanent employment. It has built a functioning bridge between public systems and private opportunity.

At the center of that bridge are employment social enterprises (ESEs), businesses that generate revenue while intentionally hiring people who are shut out of the traditional labor market.

ESEs are not a pilot. And they’re not a theoretical solution. They work.

There are dozens of ESEs across Los Angeles that hire, train, and transition people into the workforce every day — across industries like construction, maintenance, food services, and logistics. They deliver measurable outcomes: higher job retention, reduced recidivism, and increased economic mobility.  If the Mayor’s Executive Directive is about expanding second chance hiring, then ESEs are not just part of the solution, they are the existing infrastructure that can deliver it.

Unfortunately, just as the City is elevating second chance hiring, LA:RISE — the backbone of this work — is facing major funding cuts. Measure A funding has been fully eliminated by Los Angeles County Homeless Initiative, and H.R.1 introduces new work requirements that could put individuals’ access to public benefits and safety net programs at risk.

The result is a widening gap between ambition and capacity, at exactly the wrong moment, when demand is accelerating. Los Angeles is heading into a once-in-a-generation period of economic activity. The FIFA World Cup, Super Bowl, and LA28 Olympics will drive billions in investment and thousands of jobs across sectors like hospitality, logistics, infrastructure, and city services.

The question is simple: who will those contracts and jobs go to?

Without intentional systems in place, these opportunities will bypass the very communities this Directive is meant to support. But with the right infrastructure, these events could become one of the largest second chance hiring opportunities in the City’s history.

That ecosystem and infrastructure already exists. It just needs to be scaled.

LA:RISE and the LA ESE ecosystem are uniquely positioned to meet this moment — able to quickly place individuals into transitional work, prepare them for permanent roles, and connect them to employers tied to these major demand drivers.

And that only happens if the City aligns policy with investment.

If Los Angeles is committed to the Mayor’s Second Chance Employment Directive, the path forward is clear:

• Protect and increase LA:RISE funding in the FY 2026–27 budget to $6,000,000.
• Embed LA:RISE and ESE hiring goals into City contracts, particularly in infrastructure, sanitation, and recovery efforts
• Expand access to contracting opportunities for ESEs as workforce providers and vendors for ongoing contracting opportunities, along with major event response like for the World Cup, Super Bowl, and LA28.
• Position LA:RISE and ESEs as the foundation of a coordinated citywide hiring pipeline for high barrier populations.

Los Angeles doesn’t need to start from scratch.

This region has already built one of the most effective second chance employment systems in the country. The risk now is not that we don’t know what works, it’s that we fail to invest in it when it’s needed most.

The Mayor’s Directive outlines a powerful vision to “champion human dignity, create new possibilities, and provide the stability from which our residents build purposeful lives.” LA:RISE and employment social enterprises make it real.