Budgets as Moral Documents: A Conversation Between Mayors

For #BuildItBackBetter, NationSwell held a conversation between two leaders blazing a trail for the country to follow: Mayor Michael Tubbs of Stockton, California and Mayor Melvin Carter of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Alongside other members of the greater NationSwell community, the two mayors discussed the innovative solutions needed to reform our institutions.
Here are some of the insights from their discussion.

  • In this time of compound crisis, the role of local, state and federal government are touching our lives more than ever before. Mayors are the focal point of government for your community, but not necessarily the focal point of authority, resources, or influence. In some cases, it’s the federal government, Congress, or state government who can unlock what citizens need.

  • Taking care of what people need here and now and making incremental change is how you build trust. Without trust, you can’t experiment with innovation — and you can’t make large-scale systemic change.

  • Too often we run governments with the goal of never falling, and then we wonder why we never see transformational progress. For many communities, the risk of maintaining the status quo is worse than the risk of trial and error.

  • A budget is not just a document full of numbers, it is a document full of values. Just like individuals and financial planners diversify our portfolios, so should cities diversify their public safety budgets. The police are one resource we can deploy as emergency response, but we should consider other investments in public safety to make sure we don’t need as much emergency response in the first place.

  • If we really want to solve violent crime in our communities, it has to be focused on social connectivity, economic empowerment, hopefulness, and the understanding that every child has the opportunity for a bright future.

  • It shouldn’t seem radical to extend what we want for ourselves to other people.

  • Charity does not equal justice. But philanthropy is a powerful tool to test ideas that can tell the story for policy change. (The universal basic income pilot in Stockton, CA under Mayor Tubbs has been paid for by philanthropy.)

  • Victims of violent crime and shootings are most likely to become perpetrators of violent crime and shooting, and a small group of individuals are responsible for a large portion of the shootings. In Stockton, CA, they have tried to reimagine public safety by intervening directly with those individuals through mentorship and employment, and have seen a 40% reduction in violent crime.

  • The private sector can support innovative government through “time, talent and treasure.” You already share your money, but consider sharing your expertise – let local leaders tap your minds to come up with innovative communities solutions.

  • The biggest challenge to progress are the limits to our imagination. If we really, truly believed that every child born in our neighborhood could be a doctor or an astronaut, then investing in their education would be a no-brainer.

Closing the Racial Wealth Gap: Reparations as a Solution

For #BuildItBackBetter, NationSwell invited Kirsten Mullen, folklorist and writer, and William A. Darity Jr., Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies and Economics at Duke University, to lead us in an exploration of reparations as a solution, focusing on its history, its applications and its challenges. Judge Elaine O’Neill, Chair of Durham, North Carolina’s Taskforce on Racial Equity, joined the panel to discuss her committee’s findings. Aaron Walker of Camelback Ventures moderated.
Here are some of the most compelling expert insights from the digital event.

  • The Homestead Acts are an excellent example of federal policy directly giving assets to white Americans as a way to acquire and sustain wealth.
  • Elaine O’Neal’s experience on the Durham racial reconciliation task force has taught her that “racial equity is an issue of the heart… and racial tensions can be fixed in a manner that allows all of us to flourish.”
  • People can be cynical of “task forces” but the reality is that these types of organized efforts result in exposure (conversations like the one today) and exposure can help change public perception + educate more people about the subject. This leads to more fertile ground for future policy.
  • Support for reparations amongst white Americans has gone from almost non-existent, to slight, to more substantial in a short period of time. There is positive momentum on the front, which is reason to be bold + optimistic.
  • Volunteerism is a powerful tool: Do not underestimate the importance of giving time outside of work. Related, when thinking of systems change, it is also important to get your own house in order both professionally and personally. This means looking at who you are hiring, supporting, working with, befriending, etc. don’t just look at your office, look at your ultimate frisbee team.
  • There are many misconceptions about reparations, and a big one is about guilt. Reparations are not about individual guilt, it is about the culpability of the US Federal Government. The Federal Government is the culpable party when it comes to slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, anti-black police violence, unfair credit + housing markets, etc. Also, no individual contribution or event single state level contribution could meaningfully solve for wealth inequality in the United States. A $10 trillion dollar issue needs to be solved at the federal level.

To watch the event, click here.

What Bad Party Guests Can Teach Us About Bridging Divides

Who is the perfect dinner guest? It is the person who tells the best story? Has the funniest joke? Interjects with a good anecdote?
Studies suggest that it’s none of those people. The best dinner guests are Active Listeners, not dominant talkers. They ask questions, don’t interrupt, and express interest and empathy in what they hear, making people feel supported and understood.


This was produced in partnership with the Greater Good Science Center and Einhorn Family Charitable Trust. Learn more about how you can bridge differences in your life here.
 

The Gap Year Fantasy and the Reality of Today’s College Student

The uncertainty and anxiety that COVID-19 has wrought on college students and higher education institutions has generated a flurry of articles and conversations about students taking “gap years” as a way to bridge the learning challenge that the virus presents.
But the reality is that this option is a fantasy for the vast majority of students, a distraction from the enormous challenges ahead for those students and their schools.
A widely shared piece in New York magazine featuring an interview with innovator and NYU professor Scott Galloway seems to have fanned the flames of this idea. Recent articles and polls also suggest that that gap years are growing in popularity as a possible option among four-year college students and their parents.
Galloway says that when parents ask, “I tell them it’s a great year to take a gap year.”
Gap years are a longstanding option for an elite tier of students who want to take time between high school and college, or even during their college years, to travel, volunteer, or participate in activities that ultimately supplement the learning that takes place in classrooms.
A gap year is fine if you have the financial resources, flexibility, and family support required. But they are a very narrowly framed tool, mostly targeted at students who attend full time at residential institutions and are in the 18-22 age range.
That’s not at all what today’s college student looks like.
Higher Learning Advocates, a D.C.-based advocacy group, says that today’s students are older, more racially diverse, and have far fewer life options than the mainstream narrative would lead us to believe. Only 13% of college students live on campus, and two-thirds of all students work in order to make tuition payments or other expenses. Two in five students are over the age of 25, and a quarter of all college students are parents themselves.
The “gap” that should be getting more attention right now is the growing gap between white students and students of color when it comes to the pandemic’s impact.
Forty-one percent of minority high school seniors say it’s likely they won’t go to college at all in the fall or that “it’s too soon to say.” That compares to 24% of white high school seniors.
And the pandemic’s impact on people of color has been widely reported. Black Americans account for 34% of confirmed cases and 21% of deaths.
Students who make the choice to delay college entry immediately after high school are at considerable risk of not completing a post-high school degree or credential, according to a National Center for Education Statistics study.
And most students who do so tend to come from high-income backgrounds — more than 70% of “gappers” have parents with incomes over $200,000 a year, according to a 2015 report.
American higher education faces an enormous set of challenges in the coming months. Decisions about whether to return students to campus are complicated — and constantly changing as new information emerges about the virus’ spread. To date, a number of schools have proclaimed that they fully intend to open come fall if at all possible, while others — most notably the California State University System, the largest in the nation — have announced that they plan to do most or all learning online.
Higher education also is uncertain about how much to charge students in this unknown new world, and whether to offer tiered or conditional tuition options depending on what kind of learning they can offer. And colleges and universities face an incredible set of ethical and moral challenges associated with the uncertainty — literal life-and-death decisions.
There are many thorny issues ahead for American higher education. As a key driver of the nation’s economic and social progress and an important generator of both talent and new knowledge, higher education must confront the increasingly complex future of human work. Today’s students need every opportunity to gain access to the learning that these schools offer — whether online, in person, or in some hybrid way. But gap years are not a viable solution for the vast majority of today’s students. They need to be moved to the fringes of the debate about college student options for this fall.

Exposing the Long Term Consequences of Today’s Workplace Inequity

Making the case for rebuilding our communities in ways that expand opportunities for all Americans.
This nation has always suffered from entrenched racial disparity — and today, the wealth gap between white and Black workers is still substantial — and growing. As technology changes in the workplace, artificial intelligence and automation pose a significant risk to levels of the economic trajectory, life expectancy, and social mobility of Black communities, especially for workers approaching mid-life and mid-career statuses.
In a 2019 report, McKinsey found that the racial disparity is quantifiable. “African Americans start from a deprived position in the workforce, with an unemployment rate twice that of white workers, a pattern that persists even when controlling for education, duration of unemployment, and the cause of unemployment,” the report said.
But systemic racism extends beyond hiring biases, according to Washington Monthly: “It’s not merely that black Americans have more trouble getting jobs than their white counterparts,” an article on the widening racial gap said. “It’s that, when they do get jobs, they often don’t pay well or fairly.”
Often, these are the jobs most vulnerable to technological disruptions. AARP and The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that “a large portion of African Americans currently work in jobs that will produce the most displacement from automation by 2030.”  
Ready to Adapt
Black employees are more than ready to adapt to these changes, given the opportunity. AARP and The Joint Center surveyed Black workers of all ages and found that respondents value stable work over all other priorities. But respondents also said they were ready to learn new skills, especially in midlife. “Over half of aging African Americans surveyed indicated that they would be interested in some form of employer provided training program, and 68 percent indicating they would be somewhat or very interested in being paid for the time they spend in training,” the survey found. 
For low-income workers, who often can’t afford to lose wages for training, this is vital. AARP found that, among African Americans of all ages, financial constraints (49%) were cited as the leading major barrier to obtaining additional training. “This holds true for aging African Americans as well, with 45 percent indicating that financial constraints are a significant barrier. Among African Americans of all ages, being able to get time off of work was the second major barrier (22%), while this was less of a concern for African Americans 55+,” the report said.
Building a New Workforce
The COVID-19 crisis has hobbled businesses and unemployment everywhere has surged to heights not seen since the Great Depression. But even before the pandemic, experts said an automation-driven unemployment crisis was looming. If we want to successfully transition workers into new roles in the coming decades, AARP recommended that private and public sector organizations need to institute policies and practices that make re-skilling readily available to all workers.
The report’s findings suggest that private-sector employers need to step up. “…Over half of aging African Americans surveyed indicated that they would be interested in some form of employer provided training program, and 68 percent indicating they would be somewhat or very interested in being paid for the time they spend in training,” AARP and The Joint Center found.
But the government, they added, also has to play a crucial role. AARP and The Joint Center report that most Black workers felt the government bore responsibility to help re-skill its citizens, and “a large majority of African Americans 55+ said that they would support tuition-free community college or vocational training.” This would be to the government’s advantage, too, as a more adaptable workforce makes for a stabler economy and lower unemployment.
The AARP and The Joint Center report made several specific recommendations: 

  • Increase funding for community college and vocational training. Access to top-notch education lets workers pivot at any age.
  • Expand tuition-free community college programs to better allow aging workers to learn alongside their younger colleagues.
  • Expand access to sectoral training so that investments are effective and efficient, and employees can access the learning they need.
  • Increase incentives for employers to provide on-the-job training, especially for employees who are low income earners. 
  • Provide portable training benefits for workers who are in non-traditional work arrangements and can’t travel.
  • Modernize and expand tax incentives for employer-provided training. 
  • Increase job security and stability for low income workers through full employment policy and robust safety net supports.

In the past months, Americans have had to rediscover their own resilience. But they should not have to go it alone. According to Jean Accius, “We are at a turning point. On one hand, we can continue to operate with a patchwork approach whereby inequities continue to fester and harm the most vulnerable among us. Or we reimagine and not just rebuild but rebuild our communities better in ways that expand opportunities for all.” If the government and the private sector work together to co-create the systems that will ensure that the future of work doesn’t exacerbate disparities, we can create infrastructure that sets all Americans up for success as we adapt to the evolving world economy. Investing in workers throughout their lives can only bolster our security and help us emerge from these crises a stronger, more just, and economically sturdy nation.

How to Create a Culture of Belonging — And Why It Matters

In a recent NationSwell event on antiracism, Dr Ibram X. Kendi — Founding Director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research — urged us all to consider “not what’s wrong with people, but what’s wrong with the power and the policy?”
Over the past few weeks, we have been hosting a series of events on racial equity and justice. Our aim is to foster spaces in which the leaders in our community feel empowered to share insights and practices that help to advance the movement for Black lives and address the systemic inequities within the sectors and institutions in which they have power. 
Throughout all of our convenings, one message has come through loud and clear: In striving to foster diversity and equity within an organization, it is not enough to simply hire more diverse talent and innovators — you must also create a culture of belonging where everyone can thrive without compromising their identity or values.

So how do you cultivate a ‘culture of belonging?’ Here are the top ten insights and practices from our community:

  1. Transparency is not the same as inclusivity. Find ways to go beyond sharing information and decisions, to helping others be involved in the process. This could mean a rotating staff board — in any level or department — participate in executive team meetings, to bring new voices into the decision making process for the business.
  2. It’s easy to forget to focus on your internal culture when you are designed to serve outside partners & clients — so be proactive and set a standardized cadence to pause and reflect on your culture and practices with the team.
  3. The goal is not homogeneous acceptance — in fact, it’s often the opposite: encourage questioning of decisions and policies to allow people to move from “fitting in” to feeling a sense of “belonging.”
  4. One way to ensure cognitive diversity is to solicit feedback from the youngest/newest/most junior people at your organization to see how they are experiencing the environment and culture.
  5. Revisit your employee handbook. It should not be a static document, but a living, breathing reflection of your values.
  6. Employees should not have to earn your trust — put the onus of building trust on leaders who hold positional power.
  7. Empower affinity groups /+employee networks with allyship and resource them. They alone cannot change the workplace, so support their work with the education, training, events and manager engagement the organization needs.
  8. Remote working exposes us to the challenges and distractions traditionally kept “outside the office,” so approach every interaction with empathy and sensitivity.
  9. Get comfortable with surrendering power. If you are asking yourself “Where do we draw the line?” in ceding power, recognize those feelings may be rooted in fear of your perceived loss instead of you and someone else gaining from a more inclusive space.
  10. Interrogate whether the jargon you use at your organization makes sense to everyone across your team. If needed, co-develop or expand a shared terminology so it accurately reflects your organization’s values and goals and allow your team to align around language.

If you’d like to learn more about cultivating a culture of belonging, take a look at these resources recommended by our community.

To Build It Back Better, We Must Make Equity Core to Everything We Do

For #BuildItBackBetter, NationSwell asked some of our nation’s most celebrated purpose-driven leaders how they’d build a society that is more equitable and resilient than the one we had before COVID-19. We have compiled and lightly edited their answers.
The challenges of 2020 are our chance to address the longstanding inequities that, for far too long, have cutoff opportunities that prevent everyone from living longer and healthier lives. This is our chance to innovate. It’s our chance to be bold and courageous as architects and innovative pioneers of our individual and collective future. It’s time that we fully embrace our humanness and interconnectivity — and build something new and better.
To build it back better, we must ensure equitable access to resources to address the pandemic, and we must rebuild a health and social system that is more equitable than it was before. Every conversation we have about public health and economic recovery in the wake of COVID-19 must include a discussion of equity, because inequity reaches every system in our society. 
Solutions must be as expansive as the problem. They must involve all sectors — public, private and non-profit. 
On the private sector side, it is important to make the business case for creating healthier communities. Employers, for example, should be motivated to improve the social determinants of health in their own region, thus fostering a healthier pool of workers and keeping health care costs down. At the community level, solutions must come out of collaboration between community members, decision makers and experts; a community doesn’t need to be told what their problems are, nor should it have a solution thrust upon them without their input.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed longstanding economic and racial inequities. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black and Native American people are five times as likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 as White people, and the hospitalization rate for Latinx people is four times the rate for their White counterparts. This may be in part because those deemed “essential workers” are disproportionately people of color — putting them at greater risk of contracting the virus.
The structural inequities that cause many of these health disparities did not happen by accident, so we must make racial equity a central part of our plans to confront COVID-19 and recover from its economic aftereffects. We must be deliberate in our efforts to ensure the solutions to this health crisis do not uphold existing patterns of racial disparities. Communities of color shouldn’t be contracting and dying from COVID-19 — and other diseases and disorders — at rates higher than anyone else. Communities of color shouldn’t be living shorter lives than their counterparts just a few blocks away. And no one should be dying of hunger, experiencing homelessness, poor health and a speedier death as a result of loneliness as an older American.
Residents of Harlem deserve to live to celebrate their 90th birthday as much as residents of the Upper East Side do. Everyone in Baltimore should live well into their eighties or longer. That should be our expectation, and those are the expectations we must build systems and supports to deliver upon.
We all have a role and responsibility to advance equity and ensure that everyone has the opportunity to live a longer, healthier and productive life.  It is important to make equity part of the conversations you’re having with your family, friends, co-workers and holding your leaders whether that is in private industry or the public sector accountable to address the COVID-19 crisis. These are critical and foundational measures of success.
The danger is that we will think these problems are too big to solve. But no matter how tired we are of hearing bad news, we must continue to believe that a better future is possible. We must act with purpose, unite against hate and lead others to do the same. I believe in fighting against all attempts to divide us, and I will continue to fight against any form of racism in thought, word, action, practice, or policy.  
We are at a turning point. On one hand, we can continue to operate with a patchwork approach whereby inequities continue to fester and harm the most vulnerable among us. Or we reimagine and not just rebuild but rebuild our communities better in ways that expand opportunities for all. 
I’m ready to take the second path. You with me?  
Dr. Jean C. Accius is Senior Vice President for AARP Global Thought Leadership. He is a nationally recognized thought-leader on aging, longevity, health and long-term care policy. Find out more about his work with AARP here.

The Programs Helping Immigrant Health Care Workers Use Their Skills in America

America is experiencing critical shortages in health care fields, despite a deep reservoir of skilled, immigrant health care workers. These certificate programs can bridge that gap.
Hamida Ebadi didn’t want to come to the U.S. She wanted to use her skills and training to help her own people in Afghanistan. She’d already served as the director of Maternal and Child Health, managing all the country’s maternal hospitals, and worked as an advisor to the deputy minister of public health. 
But the fact that she’d studied public health at Johns Hopkins in the U.S., and worked on an Afghanistan-based team coordinating with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, had drawn unwanted attention. “We heard some threats from our neighbors,” Ebadi says. Those threats on her life, plus a suicide bomb attack near her children’s school, finally pushed Ebadi and her husband, an orthopedic surgeon, to apply for visas and move to America in 2014 with their four children, then ages nine to 20. Ebadi herself was 49 at the time.
Highly-skilled immigrants like Ebadi face unique challenges when they get to the U.S. For many, the first and biggest challenge is that their medical degrees and other credentials earned in their home countries aren’t recognized here. “We know that there are many immigrants that were doctors or nurses in their country of origin that are working here as dietary service workers or otherwise,” says Daniel Bustillo, the director of the Healthcare Career Advancement Program (H-CAP), a national labor-management partnership devoted to innovation in health care career education. “We don’t have a good mechanism for translating their credentials into our system,” Bustillo says. That means that even as headlines lament worker shortages in crucial health care fields, there’s a deep reservoir of qualified workers who can’t access those jobs.
Finding a job was, of course, among the host of challenges Ebadi faced when she arrived in America. “It’s very hard for health professionals especially, who had good jobs in their country, but when they come to the U.S., they start from scratch,” she says. 
Through the International Rescue Committee, Ebadi was introduced to a program run by the Baltimore Alliance for Careers in Healthcare (BACH) which provides trainees with certificates that can help them get good jobs. This program combines classroom and on-the-job training, allowing participants to advance as quickly as they can demonstrate competency in certain required skills. It’s one of many such programs that are designed to help immigrant workers like Ebadi advance quickly into jobs that better match their skills. 
According to a 2019 report by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), supported by Lumina Foundation, adults of immigrant origin make up 30% of all working-age adults who lack postsecondary credentials, making this a crucial population to target with efforts to increase postsecondary attainment. MPI’s research has also found that non-degree credentials, including certificates like the ones Hamida received, significantly increase labor-force participation, particularly for first- and second-generation immigrant women. Amid the COVID-19 crisis’ historic levels of unemployment — the highest since the depression era — these efforts to empower and increase labor-force participation are more urgently needed than they’ve been in generations, with Pew Research noting that the unemployment rate for immigrant workers is significantly higher than it is for their U.S. born counterparts. 
The BACH program was designed in partnership with local hospitals, including Johns Hopkins, and with the Community College of Baltimore County, explains Kiera McCarthy, BACH’s Apprenticeship Manager. Participants start by taking an unpaid course in career readiness that helps prepare them for work in the U.S. BACH covers the cost of this course, so it’s unpaid, but free to participants, who receive a Community College of Baltimore County Continuing Education certificate upon completion. Then, they apply for an apprenticeship that provides on-the-job training while they work towards another certificate. 
“When they first start, they’ll start at maybe 50% of the final wage,” McCarthy explains. On-the-job training gives them the opportunity to demonstrate mastery of key skills, and as they progress, their pay increases. Participants can work through this program at their own speed, McCarthy says. “Hopefully, for immigrants, if they worked in the health care field in the past, they might be able to demonstrate mastery of those skills sooner,” she says. On the other hand, if English or another aspect of the program proves challenging, they’re not penalized for taking the time to improve. 
Ebadi went through the Environmental Care Supervisor track at Johns Hopkins Hospital, training to run a housekeeping team. Upon completing the program, she received a Journeyworker certificate from the Maryland Department of Labor. Ebadi says she’d prefer to be treating patients, “but because my credentials have not been accepted by the U.S. government, at least this position gave me some training to improve my managerial skills.” 
Once in the program, Ebadi appreciated the fact that she could get paid while getting up to speed on work culture in the U.S. “I had the opportunity to learn about the culture, to learn about some other processes like payroll processing and annual evaluations, training of the staff, grievance processes—a lot of new things,” she says. She’d managed people in Afghanistan, but found the work culture in the U.S. to be very different. “People here are very open, and they discuss everything openly with their managers and supervisors,” Ebadi says.” And there are some policies that get implemented here, like writing up people, disciplining, those kinds of things—it’s very strict here, and in our country, it’s not as strict.”
Certificates, apprenticeships, and other post-secondary credentials can be enormously valuable in creating pipelines into professions, Bustillo says. But there’s also a great need for programs that help people advance within a profession. “Especially in health care, we have tremendous occupational segregation,” he says. Bustillo says that as many as 70% of the home care workers H-CAP works with, for example, are immigrant workers, and there’s a real risk of segregating black, and brown and immigrant workers into these kinds of lower-paid fields within health care. 
The BACH program is designed to help both immigrant workers new to the U.S. health care system and internal workers who want to advance at a place like Johns Hopkins, McCarthy says. The initial idea was to focus specifically on immigrant and refugee workers, but hospitals also wanted to create ladders for internal workers, she adds. “From the employer’s perspective, they have found that nationally, the apprenticeship retention rate is significantly higher.” 
For her part, Ebadi appreciated the opportunity to move directly into a supervisory role. “If I compared this job with my previous job and my background, it would be frustrating,” she says. But she says that after three years at Hopkins, she’s now working as a Patient Referral Coordinator with the Baltimore Medical System. “My plan is to go back to Hopkins with the same position I have now or a better one,” Ebadi says. “I’d prefer to work either with patients directly or at least in a public health position. It’s not going to be easy at this age. But I will try.”
— 
This piece was produced in partnership with Lumina Foundation. Lumina Foundation is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. You can learn more about their mission to prepare people for informed citizenship and success in a global economy here.

It Takes a Village: How Coalition Work is Transforming Lives in Detroit

Deep collaboration between higher education, business, and local government is creating new pathways to success for Detroit workers.
“Life happened.” That’s the short version of why Shawnte Cain left Wayne State University with only one class left to take before completing her degree. The longer version: she was working multiple jobs and taking care of her grandmother, who was ill. “I just didn’t end up going back,” Cain says now.
Even with only one class remaining, a lot had to happen for Cain to complete her degree. When she inquired about going back, in 2017, she learned another class had been added to the requirements for her program. She also owed Wayne State money. “I didn’t even know what my outstanding balance was, I just knew that I had one,” she says. That debt would have to be settled before she could re-enroll. 
Cain was determined to finish her education. It was part of her life plan with her fiancé, Brandon Hall. But one Monday night in 2017, just a few days after the couple had moved in together, Hall complained of chest pains. He’d been born with a heart defect, but didn’t want to go to the hospital because he’d just gotten a promotion at work. Hall asked Cain to go out and pick up some medication for him. By the time she got back, he was dead.
With all these obstacles, both financial and emotional, it took a lot to get Cain re-enrolled at Wayne State. It also took a lot of behind-the-scenes work to create the programs that would eventually help her complete her degree. In 2018, the Lumina Foundation designated Detroit as a Talent Hub, in recognition of ongoing coalition work led by the Detroit Regional Chamber, Wayne State University, and Macomb Community College. Together, they had set a goal of re-engaging the region’s 690,000 adults who had completed some college but hadn’t gotten a degree. 
The Talent Hub designation recognizes communities that are doing innovative work to increase post-high school learning and training, with a focus on eliminating educational disparities for communities of color. Talent Hubs receive grants to support their work. “The Talent Hub [designation] brought us to this point,” says Dawn S. Medley, the Associate Vice President for Enrollment Management at Wayne State University. Medley says the city had applied to the program and been rejected, which made the coalition realize, “We had to bring our A-game.” 
Medley created one of the programs that enabled Cain to re-enroll and complete her degree: Wayne State’s Warrior Way Back program. She realized that outstanding educational debt often created compounding problems for students: “We just locked people out of higher education and locked them out of the opportunity to ever pay off that debt.”
“I’m an English major,” Medley says, but she found the math simple: forgiving some former students’ outstanding debt would allow them to re-enroll and start paying tuition again. That insight became the Warrior Way Back program, in which students with less than $1,500 in outstanding debt can re-enroll and “learn” off their debt at a rate of $500 for each semester completed. Medley says the program has generated roughly $750,000 for the university. “The opportunity to do what is right for the student has become an opportunity to do what is right for the institution,” she says. 
Working with this population of adults who’ve taken classes but haven’t received a degree is an obvious move for universities. But it’s also a top priority for the local business community, says Melanie D’Evelyn, the Detroit Regional Chamber’s Director of Detroit Drives Degrees: “Whenever we talk with businesses, the No. 1 issue that CEOs and our members say they are confronting is the issue of talent.” 
Coalition work comes with a host of challenges, but Detroit has been successful in bringing both business and higher education to the table. “One of the keys to our success has been starting out with the higher eds and actually proving that they are willing to implement big changes at scale,” D’Evelyn says. Building on that foundation, the Chamber and other partners, including local government and nonprofits, are also committing to make big changes. “That’s not a typical town-gown relationship, especially in a town this large,” notes Wayne State’s Medley.
Now, the Chamber and other partners are looking for more creative ways to work together, including taking the state of Michigan’s “Hot 50” in-demand jobs for the future and mapping them to local credential and degree programs. One big area of focus now is encouraging employers to offer tuition reimbursement for employees. “There’s a proven benefit to employers to do that,” D’Evelyn says. “It does help their bottom line.” The Chamber is surveying its members to see how many offer such programs and how many are interested. 
When Cain did re-enroll at Wayne State in 2018, she took advantage of both Warrior Way Back and a tuition reimbursement program provided by her employer, the MGM Grand Detroit. Warrior Way Back representatives “were kind of like my concierge team to make sure I had the best experience going back to school,” she says. With all this support at her back, Cain actually went on to take another two classes after completing her degree in public relations, allowing her to update her social media skills—and keep her son in WSU’s preschool, which is free for students. 
Returning to school as an adult was different, Cain says. “I approached it more with a business sense,” she says. Education and work “are not two separate entities when you’re an adult,” she says. “This is like another way of training on the job.” 
Now her new boyfriend is also enrolled in the Warrior Way Back program, and Cain herself is thinking of pursuing a master’s degree. “My dreams were torn apart,” she says, but “sometimes you have to step out of your dreams to create a better reality.”

This piece was produced in partnership with Lumina Foundation, an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. You can learn more about their mission to prepare people for informed citizenship and success in a global economy here.

Adults Can Thrive Amid the Pandemic by Earning Short-Term Credentials

A global health crisis hurts even those who don’t fall ill, especially people with no formal education beyond high school who are caught in the economic riptide of soaring unemployment.
As tens of millions of adults find themselves among the temporarily or longer-term unemployed, certifications represent a promising path back to work. These industry-recognized credentials, usually awarded based on an assessment of skills and knowledge, represent significant learning and have great value in employment markets. Better yet, they can be acquired quickly and usually represent skills in demand by businesses and other employers.
For the first time, Lumina Foundation can include industry certifications in Stronger Nation, the foundation’s signature online report measuring progress toward the national goal of ensuring that, by 2025, 60 percent of working-age Americans have earned college degrees, certificates, and other credentials of value beyond the high school diploma.

See the Stronger Nation Data Tool here.