Welding pre-apprenticeship is not a new idea. Starting it inside a jail and having it resume at the same competency milestone on the outside is.
Philadelphia Works has been awarded $851,000 through the U.S. Department of Labor’s RESTART initiative, passed through the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, to run career training for justice-involved young people. A further $300,000 in Commonwealth funds brings the total to $1,151,000, disclosed as a 74 percent federal and 26 percent state split. The grant period runs to December 2029.
How the welding pathway is structured
The program serves 115 people aged 15 to 24 across four pathways, one of which is welding and industrial fabrication. Instruction begins at the Philadelphia Department of Prisons Skills Center. The design detail that matters is what happens at the gate: instructional hours and credential progress travel with the participant, so training picks up at the milestone they reached rather than restarting from zero.
Case management starts at least 90 days before release and continues for 12 months after program exit. Delivery is split by age. The Philadelphia Technician Training Institute handles 18 to 24 year olds; Career Connected Learning Philadelphia takes 15 to 17 year olds with stipended work-based learning, and under Pennsylvania’s Act 158 Pathway 5 those hours can count toward high school graduation.
What RESTART is funding nationally
RESTART was announced in February 2026 as an $81 million national investment. Pennsylvania secured roughly $3 million of it across four workforce boards: Philadelphia Works and Partner4Work at $851,000 and 115 participants each, Lancaster County at $518,000 and 70, and Montgomery County at $444,000 and 60.
Patrick Clancy, president and CEO of Philadelphia Works, is the named executive on the award.
The honest caveat
There are no results here. The dollar figures and headcounts are grant terms and independently checkable, but the program starts now and runs to 2029, so the argument that continuity beats restarting is a design premise, not a finding. Only one of the four pathways is squarely construction. And 115 people is a pilot, not a pipeline.
Still, welding and fabrication remain among the hardest craft positions in the country to fill, and reentry is one of the few labor pools nobody has worked hard. The transferable idea for contractors and chapters building their own programs is narrow and cheap: make the credential survive the transition. Contrast it with the union apprenticeship route on a project like Empire Wind 1, where two separate project labor agreements carry more than 3,000 trades workers. Both approaches move people into the trades. Only one of them is trying to catch people the other never sees.
Source: Philadelphia Works.