The Lagniappe* Center is an employment skills and community development initiative whose mission is to mobilize children out of poverty by surrounding low-income parents with a transformative, vocational community. At Lagniappe, this means that a trainee is paid $18.50/hr while she or he learns several different skill sets from volunteers and professionals. In our paid-to-learn model 60% of participants’ paid full-time workweek is spent in direct manufacturing and acquiring hard skills and 40% is invested in individualized, supportive programming that will help make the participant more independent and stable in the long-term. This results in job offers for full-time, benefitted employment at which point trainees leave our program for their new career.