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Boston, Massachusetts

In many ways, Boston, Massachusetts, represents a great science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) success story embodying the revival of the American city over the past few decades, said Rachel Lipson, director of the Project on Workforce at the Harvard Kennedy School, in her introduction to the second virtual workshop of the six-workshop series. Prior to the pandemic, the city’s economy was booming according to many measures, including historically low levels of unemployment, a thriving and diversified economy, and serving as headquarters to some of the nation’s most innovative employers. Boston is the third-largest destination for venture capital funding in the country, with a globally renowned healthcare and life sciences sector and a technology sector that has grown rapidly in recent years. Boston’s plethora of higher education institutions has created a steady stream of young people and STEMM talent, a significant share of which stay in the region after completing their degrees.

At the same time, the city’s growth has not benefited all its residents, with wages for Bostonians without a bachelor’s degree remaining stagnant for decades. In fact, said Lipson, Boston has one of the largest racial wealth gaps in the country, and inequity has been skyrocketing with a bifurcation between high-wage and low-wage job pathways. In addition, housing prices have made the city unaffordable for many, and gentrification remains a pressing issue. Moreover, the pandemic has exacerbated inequity across the Boston metro area, as many of the residents who were most affected by a loss of income were those who were already systemically disadvantaged.

Boston is a major tourist destination, with a normally thriving downtown corridor, but the pandemic has hit its hospitality industry hard. In addition, other sectors that have historically been countercyclical in times of recession, such as higher education and healthcare, have been affected given the unique dynamics of this pandemic. In addition, the lack of affordable childcare has exposed the challenges that working parents and especially mothers in the Boston metro area are facing during these challenging times. The varying level of reliable internet access in the region has also laid bare the stark digital divide that exists across the region.

Lee Wellington, founding executive director of the Urban Manufacturing Alliance, a national coalition of organizations and individuals that are building manufacturing economies fit for the 21st century, noted that addressing these inequities requires conversations that can be difficult at times, but the racial uprisings the nation is experiencing provide a pivotal moment to have those conversations and address inequities that are deeply embedded in STEMM workforce systems and their associated career pathways. “These are inequities that we must urgently correct in order to build resilient local and regional ecosystems and put ourselves on a concurrent path of scientific innovation and justice,” said Wellington. She expressed hope that the day’s discussions would serve to move the STEMM ecosystem along that path. In that respect, added Lipson, the Boston metro area can continue to attract young people and talent of all races, nationalities, and backgrounds, but ensuring that a STEMM-led recovery is shared broadly by all of Boston’s residents is the defining challenge faced by the region.

This workshop began with sessions that presented data on economics, the labor force, educational attainment, and demographics for the Boston metropolitan area and the importance of creating an economic recovery that is equitable for Bostonians. The workshop then discussed how workforce development organizations, educational institutions, and training providers shifted their operations and program delivery mechanisms during the COVID-19 pandemic; the ways in which the pandemic has exacerbated existing inequities in the region and the ongoing work to embed anti-racism in training activities; and the linkages between STEMM workforce development and entrepreneurship.

UNDERSTANDING THE ECONOMIC AND WORKFORCE IMPACTS OF COVID-19 ON BOSTON

To ground the day’s discussions, Lipson presented a wealth of data from the Atlanta Federal Reserve Center for Workforce and Economic Opportunity; the Bureau of Labor Statistics; and Opportunity Insights, a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization located at Harvard University that seeks to translate insights from rigorous, scientific research to develop scalable solutions that will empower people throughout the United States to rise out of poverty and achieve better life outcomes. While median wages were only slightly lower in the city of Boston than in the greater Boston metro area in 2019—$45,046 and $49,592, respectively—the poverty rate in the city was nearly double that of the metro area, at 17.1 percent versus 8.6 percent. Lipson noted that between 1980 and 2017, Boston lost middle-income households, while the numbers of high- and low-income households both increased, illustrating the high level of income inequality seen in Boston and many other U.S. cities and the fact that Boston’s economic boom has not translated equally across the city’s population. Boston, she explained, is a majority minority city, with larger shares of Black and Latinx residents than the metropolitan area (Figure 3-1).

Regarding educational backgrounds, the greater Boston area has one of the highest rates of college graduation in the nation (Figure 3-2), with almost half of the residents of the metro area having a college degree compared to 33 percent nationally. The region also has almost double the share of workers with graduate or professional degrees compared to the national

average. Educational attainment in the city proper is similar to that of the metro area except there are higher shares of residents in the city who do not have a high school diploma or who have less than a ninth-grade education.

Boston and its metropolitan area have seen a massive spike in unemployment that started in April 2020. While the unemployment rate has been declining since June 2020, it is nowhere near pre-COVID-19 levels. Unemployment since the start of the pandemic has disproportionately affected women, adults under age 35, and Black or African American

workers in Massachusetts. Women, for example, made up 55 percent of those who claimed unemployment as of September 2020 while making up just 45 percent of the workforce, and Black or African American workers accounted for 12.6 percent of the claimants while making up just 8.7 percent of the workforce (Figure 3-3). Lipson noted that as of August 21, 2020, low-wage jobs in greater Boston—those paying less than $27,000 a year—had declined by 25.3 percent, compared to 16.2 percent for middle-wage jobs and 5 percent for high-wage positions (those paying more than $60,000 per year). Similarly, for the week ending October 9, 2020, postings for jobs requiring “minimal” education had fallen by 52.9 percent from January’s level compared to a 30.2 percent decline for all job postings and a 10 percent decline for job postings requiring “extensive” education.

Statewide, all job postings had fallen by 11 percent, compared to a nationwide decline of 16.3 percent over the same period.

By industry, the largest share of unemployment claims was from individuals in the accommodation and food services sector of the statewide economy, followed by healthcare, retail trade, and administrative support and waste management, sectors that disproportionately employ women, minorities, and lower-income workers (Figure 3-4).¹ In addition, the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank estimates that Boston’s opportunity employment situation—defined as jobs that do not require a bachelor’s degree but pay above regional median wages—is less strong than for other parts of the country.

Lipson discussed how the mix of industries in a region has a direct bearing on the number of jobs that could be lost in that region as automation continues to take hold across different employers. He noted that the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s analysis of regional risk of job loss from automation suggests that Boston, like many urban centers, ranks at the lower end of the spectrum, suggesting that big, diversified economies are best prepared to deal with automation. This is consistent with estimates by the Congressional Budget Office that automation will affect 41.1 percent of

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¹ Unemployment claims by industry were only available by state, and not by city or metropolitan area.

greater Boston’s industry employment demand, compared to 42.7 percent for the entire state (Arnold et al., 2006), while the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank estimates that 30.9 percent of Boston’s workers will be able to work at home, compared to 39.9 percent of Massachusetts’s workers (Andreason et al., 2020).

Data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey revealed that 81.2 percent of households in the greater Boston metropolitan area have a high-speed internet subscription, 8.1 percent access the internet through cellular data plans alone, and 9.5 percent have no internet subscription. Nearly one-third of households earning less than $20,000 annually have no internet subscription. For computing devices, 83.2 percent of all households in the metro area have a desktop or laptop computer, 6.2 percent have a smartphone and no other device, and 5.7 percent have no computing device. Those figures are slightly lower in the city proper, with almost 10 percent of households accessing the internet solely through their smartphones, over 12 percent having no internet subscription at all, and 7.3 percent of all households having no computing device.

A RECOVERY WITH EQUITY

Trinh Nguyen, director of workforce development of the city of Boston, said that if racial equity and the integration of STEMM and workforce development was bad pre-COVID-19, it is worse now. She noted that her office is the largest regional funder of workforce development efforts in the region, funding between $14 and $20 million annually on programs run by its partners, including community colleges and nonprofit organization in the area. While she acknowledged that this is hardly enough money to have a big impact on workforce development, it enables her office to leverage other resources to provide opportunities such as tuition-free community college.

In terms of workforce development and STEMM, Nguyen’s office focuses on 18- to 24-year-old adults, including English language learners, who do not have a bachelor’s degree. Most of her office’s clients are people of color, single women heads of household, and families and individuals that have multiple economic barriers. She explained that for workforce development for these underserved groups to be considered successful, it cannot include only education and training, but should also include a job at the end of the process. Therefore, employer engagement is a critical piece of their efforts.

One example of those efforts is the pre-apprenticeship program developed by the city of Boston’s Office of Workforce Development in collabo-

ration with 13 building trades across the Boston region. At the time of the workshop, some 420 people of color, women, seasonal workers, and others were enrolled in the program as an entry point into a career in the building trades. Nguyen noted that the program has generated a great deal of interest among people of color who are taking the opportunity to train to become electricians and pipe fitters and enter other technical trades.

Her office also partners with the Boston Private Industry Council, which provides skill training and internships for young people from diverse groups to enable them to gain experience in and entry into the region’s tech industries. Another important source of STEMM employment is the city itself, which has various positions requiring engineering-type training, such as building and infrastructure maintenance. The City Academy Program provides training for and a pipeline directly into those positions. Another program provides emergency medical technician training, which includes the state’s first registered, paid apprenticeship program that guarantees that graduates will have jobs when they complete the program.

In closing, Nguyen said that when it comes to STEMM and equity, one major lesson she has learned is that if there is an opportunity for training and jobs, people of color will obtain those competitive credentials, get into those fields, and do well in them. At the same time, however, she and her colleagues have found that some employers hiring people of color who have completed these programs still start them in entry-level jobs, rather than the jobs they are now qualified for. Even more concerning, many graduates are kept in those entry-level jobs and not given the opportunity to move up in their fields. She believes that some hard conversations are needed to address this problem.

COVID RESPONSE AND WORKFORCE TRANSITIONS IN GREATER BOSTON

The first panel session highlighted how workforce development organizations, educational institutions, and training providers have shifted their operations and program delivery mechanisms in the pandemic environment. Topics discussed included emergency and contracting STEMM workforce development opportunities in greater Boston, partnerships to support operations in a resource-constrained environment, and continuity in training and wrap-around services as programs move online. The panel featured four speakers: Kaitlyn Bean, senior program officer at the Boston Foundation; Lane Glenn, president of Northern Essex Community College;

Joanne Pokaski, senior director of workforce development at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; and Jerry Rubin, president and chief executive officer of Jewish Vocational Service Boston. After the four presentations, Deeneaus Polk, Bosch Fellow at the Robert Bosch Foundation, moderated a question-and-answer session with the panelists.

Working with the Most Vulnerable Communities

Bean noted that three simultaneous crises—the COVID-19 pandemic, the resulting economic crash, and the racial reckoning triggered by George Floyd’s death—are having a profound impact on workers and families, particularly among low-income individuals and communities of color. Prior to the pandemic, her organization’s SkillWorks initiative² and its partners were exploring strategies to leverage greater Boston’s tight labor market to drastically change how workforce development is done. With the pandemic raging, this activity became what she called a moral imperative. Since March 2020, SkillWorks has been in close contact with all of Boston Foundation’s grantees and other partners to conduct listening sessions, share information, and determine how the foundation, as a funder, convener, and influencer, can best support the immediate needs of the community and greater Boston’s overall economic recovery in the months and years ahead. As an early response, SkillWorks converted all of its funding to general operating support and suspended all reporting requirements in order to reduce as much administrative burden on its grantees as possible.

Noting that her organization’s grantees were already working with the most vulnerable communities before the pandemic hit, Bean said it has been inspiring to see how they have sprung into action and transitioned to remote service delivery. On top of that transition, these organizations have had to help massive numbers of clients with an array of other needs and challenges brought on by the pandemic, including navigating the unemployment system, gaining access to computers or mobile devices and reliable internet, avoiding eviction, and accessing cash supports in emergency situations. She added that these services were not just for current or new clients, but alumni of the program who are also now struggling.

To help support frontline staff, SkillWorks continued its career coaches’ community of practice by offering virtual learning sessions on topics such as

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² Additional information is available at https://www.tbf.org/what-we-do/special-initiatives/skillworks.

digital literacy and transitioning to remote learning, doing career coaching remotely, supporting clients who are experiencing trauma, and supporting staff who may be experiencing trauma and toxic stress themselves. Bean’s hope is that federal and state money will eventually help support this work.

Community Colleges Respond

Glenn described how Massachusetts has 15 community colleges that serve some 150,000 students annually, accounting for 49 percent of the state’s undergraduate enrollment. In 2019, the community college system’s students earned more than 10,000 associate degrees and more than 3,300 certificates. At Northern Essex Community College, one-third of the graduates received their degrees and certificates in a STEMM field.

When the pandemic first hit, Glenn wrote an article asking how community college students differ from other students (Glenn, 2020). In general, community college students tend to be lower-income students, and it is not unusual for more than half of the students on a community college campus to be the first in their families to attend college, he explained. They also tend to be older, people of color, working—sometimes multiple jobs—while attending college, and often raising families. Every year, approximately one-third of Massachusetts’s community college students report being without housing or experiencing food insecurity, and they tend to be less connected in terms of having computers and broadband internet access at home.

His institution, and likely all of the other community colleges in the state, announced early during the pandemic that it planned to move its courses online for the fall 2020 semester. Making that decision early allowed the community college to spend the summer training faculty and redesigning some courses to be ready to provide online education for its students. Glenn noted that funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act provided to colleges and universities helped his institution pay faculty to convert their courses for online delivery and put the equipment in place, including providing wireless internet access in all of its parking lots. His institution also implemented a laptop requirement for its students and provided resources to make sure every student would have a laptop computer if they did not already have one. To support students who might have issues with online learning, he and his colleagues also spent the summer training student ambassadors to help with that type of issue.

Among the struggling occupations that community colleges tend to train people for, hospitality and food service took big hits, an unfortunate

development as the economy crashed the very month his college was opening the multi-million-dollar Hospitality and Culinary Arts Institute it had been planning for years in response to industry demand. Glenn said that his institution, as well as many of the state’s other community colleges, also offers an associate degree in early childhood education, another area that has been hit hard by the pandemic. Jobs in other fields where community colleges commonly provide training have also been heavily affected, including healthcare fields such as radiology technician and dental hygienist and some areas of manufacturing. There are bright spots, though, for jobs in cybersecurity and information technologies, as well as for laboratory technicians, licensed practical nurses, and medical assistants, for which demand has stayed relatively strong. On a final note, Glenn described how the community colleges are putting out an “innovation playbook” on promising practices for fostering innovation in post-pandemic health education.

Healthcare Training Programs Adapt

Pokaski said that the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has been heavily affected by the pandemic and has had to put trainees and practicums on hold as it dealt with the enormous medical emergency wrought by COVID-19. The process of bringing in new trainees, even for high-demand roles, had to stop given that a pandemic was not a good environment for bringing in new people. Her institution also paused its program that sponsored people with an associate degree in nursing to get their bachelor’s degree while working for the medical center. She explained that while this is a great program, managers were too overwhelmed dealing with the medical crisis to interview candidates for the program. She also noted that many employees who had jobs such as welcoming people or helping them navigate the medical center were redeployed to help with COVID needs.

At the time of the workshop, Pokaski said her institution had switched out of incident command mode and had established a plan to handle a possible second surge of the virus. While classes for employees will remain virtual through the year, the medical center was working to fill over 600 vacancies, particularly those for patient care technicians and medical assistants. Training programs had restarted, and the medical center is marketing them digitally and conducting Zoom job interviews. It has also resumed practicums.

Pokaski ended her presentation with some policy recommendations. One was to consider healthcare roles with high demand and low barriers

to entry for those needing quick job transitions. The second, directed at healthcare educators, was the need to convey a better understanding of the role of the healthcare worker in an emergency so that prospective students will be more informed before entering a healthcare field. A third recommendation was for the state to find creative ways to bring back testing and certification capacity so that people who are finishing programs are not held back waiting for a test and unable to move into jobs immediately. Finally, she would like to see more support for jobs seekers with limited technology and technical skills. She wondered whether Boston could use this moment to lean into training more people for information technology roles.

New Roles for an Experienced Organization

In his remarks, Rubin noted that Jewish Vocational Services was founded in 1938 and has therefore gone through one depression and one great recession, and it has operated in great job markets and horrible ones. In a typical year, it partners with dozens of employers and provides both pre-employment services and incumbent-worker career ladder services to 15,000 to 20,000 people per year. In 2020, however, the overnight collapse of the job market required the organization to shift to focus on its clients’ immediate needs, including helping them with unemployment, re-employment, and emergency cash assistance for the first time ever. He explained that while the state did a good job helping the suddenly unemployed, the system was overwhelmed. In addition, many of their clients, particularly non-native English speakers, had a hard time navigating the unemployment system.

Like the other speakers’ organizations, Rubin’s shifted immediately to providing its services remotely, offering online classes using Google classroom, Zoom, and WhatsApp, which many immigrants were comfortable using; setting up a laptop and wireless hotspot lending library; and implementing volunteer “digital navigators” to help those clients who had limited digital literacy. It also developed and launched a remote talent match portal for online employment services so that employers could post jobs in a curated manner and job seekers could upload resumes and work with career counselors.

At the time of the workshop, Rubin said that Boston was experiencing a strong and robust healthcare and life science employment market, and though his organization has not slowed its training in the healthcare area, there is the current problem of limited capacity for testing and certification

mentioned also by Pokaski. Manufacturing, retail financial services, and administrative positions were recovering, and remote distribution service jobs were in high demand. The hospitality industry, however, remained in crisis mode.

Rubin’s policy and strategy recommendations included expanding resources for proven employment and skills services and expanding investments in remote learning and remote employment services. He also suggested improving the availability of real-time job growth and hiring data and continuing a focus on job quality within the context of a softer job market. Finally, he called for expanding proven programs for delivering workforce development services and quality jobs in Black and brown communities.

Discussion

Speaking about the nature and availability of jobs in greater Boston since the onset of the pandemic, Pokaski said that while the hospitality sector has struggled, there are hospitality jobs available in the healthcare sector. She believes there is an opportunity to help people transition from hospitality to healthcare. Rubin echoed Pokaski’s comment, noting that the chief executive officer of one of metro Boston’s many hospitals told him that healthcare organizations in the region serve more dinners and have more beds than Boston’s entire hospitality industry. Rubin also said that the local job market in the interconnected fields of healthcare, life sciences, and medical technology is stronger than ever, with opportunities to move from one field to another and for people to reposition themselves as the demand for jobs ebbs and flows among the three fields.

Glenn called that situation an adjacency, an opportunity to take skills from one sector to another or, in the case of his institution, renting out space in its new Hospitality and Culinary Arts Institute building to home-based business and entrepreneurs who might not otherwise have access to a commercial production space. These types of connections create the opportunity to create new businesses or make new connections between different sectors of the economy. “We are taking a closer look at on ramps and how people discover new fields in the first place,” said Glenn. He added that as fields expand, the goal should be to expand the pipeline into those fields.

Bean, whose organization works with the hospitality, healthcare, and information technology sectors, said that the organization’s information

technology training partners were able to get back up and running quickly, have maintained their relationships with their employer partners, and are placing people in jobs. However, its partners in the hospitality training program reported that over 90 percent of the local hospitality sector’s employees were laid off within the first month of the pandemic. In response, one hospitality training program pivoted quickly to start training laid-off housekeepers for environmental services positions at hospitals. One barrier she noted was that people with a criminal background find it easier to get a job in the hospitality industry and move up in that industry than at a hospital. Another barrier, said Bean, is implicit bias and racism.

When asked about opportunities to reset how the workforce development system engages or trains people, Rubin said that his organization’s one-stop career center now operates remotely, and he sees no reason why it will not continue to operate remotely once the pandemic is over. In fact, he sees no good reason why much of the service delivery that the workforce development system does now should not be done remotely, given that it makes accessing these programs easier and take less time. “We are delivering exactly the same content for individuals that need to maintain their unemployment insurance and meet certain criteria to maintain that insurance, and we are having a higher level of participation,” Rubin explained. “Why should we not continue to make things easier for consumers?” His organization has moved all of its recruiting and assessment activities online, and the result is an increase in enrollments. He acknowledged, though, that remote learning may not be the preferable option for everyone, particularly for individuals with lower-level English language skills.

Glenn agreed that there is no good reason not to keep delivering much of his institution’s classes and services online while also acknowledging that some course offerings, such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation training for paramedics, will still have to be delivered in person. That said, his institution is looking at how to make its offerings available to a broader population of students and how to use technology to shorten the time needed to earn a credential. In the same vein, Bean pointed out that the pandemic has created the opportunity to recognize that whatever was normal in the past was not working for a large portion of the population, particularly people of color. She did note the challenge of preparing people for jobs and careers while also anticipating that a chosen career path might end at some point in the future.

When asked if there were any complications around higher education partnerships for building STEMM-based skills, Glenn said that technology

has lowered barriers to successful partnerships among higher education, training programs, and employers. As an example, he cited a program that Bean’s organization is funding among the state’s community colleges to implement a product called Handshake that will help employers connect directly with students either upon graduation or as they search for internships. Pokaski added that finding the right partner in a higher education partnership and working out the kinks can be a little challenging, but it is smooth sailing after that, and Rubin pointed to the importance of all parties recognizing the value that they bring to the table as a key to developing robust partnerships. Bean noted that money always helps develop stronger partnerships, particularly when it comes to helping students pay for books, transportation, childcare, rent, and other expenses they incur while training or for providing laptops and wireless connections.

COVID-19 AND BOSTON’S ECONOMIC DIVIDE: THE INTERSECTION OF THE PANDEMIC, RACIAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC INEQUALITY, AND ACCESS TO GOOD JOBS IN STEMM

The second panel focused on ways that the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing inequities in Boston and how multi-stakeholder approaches to STEMM workforce development can directly address those inequities. The panel’s four speakers were Tyra Anderson-Montina, Boston site director of Year Up, a program that connects young adults and companies to launch careers, power business, and build community; David Delmar Sentíes, founder and executive director of Resilient Coders, which trains people of color for high-growth careers as software engineers and connects them with jobs; Valerie Roberson, president of Roxbury Community College; and Neal Sullivan, executive director of the Boston Private Industry Council, which works at the intersection of business and community interests to connect Boston residents to promising career pathways while creating a diverse talent pipeline for local employers. The four speakers explored how different institutional actors are working to embed anti-racism in their training and pipeline development activities. They also commented on how their institutions adapted their programming in response to the death of George Floyd and the subsequent racial uprisings that occurred across the nation. Following the four presentations, Peter Blair, assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, moderated a discussion with the panelists.

Connecting Inner City Community College Students to City Services

Robertson explained that Roxbury Community College is located in the center of Boston and serves some 3,000 students a year, of whom 90 percent are students of color and 80 percent are Pell grant–eligible. These students, whose average age is 30, are at the center of the pandemic’s impacts, said Roberson. In general, her institution’s students are the city’s essential workers, and when the pandemic hit, many experienced an interruption in their studies because of the loss of income. Even before the pandemic, these students’ studies were often complicated by issues concerning their health (pre-existing conditions that would make them more vulnerable to COVID-19), and regarding insurance coverage, access to healthcare, access to grocery stores, food insecurity, and housing insecurity.

To address as many of those obstacles as possible, Roberson and her colleagues have made a conscious effort to be more proactive about staying in closer contact with their students, making sure they were well and helping them access services throughout the city through a program called Project Access that makes connections between her institution and city services. Roberson noted that her school is a reflection of issues its students have, including being chronically underfunded. Fortunately, the business community has been a good partner and has helped develop and fund new programs, has provided opportunities for internships, and is providing employment opportunities for students. Going forward, Roberson is hopeful that the pandemic will bring about new ways to partner and to be more effective in creating schedules that help students be successful.

Investing in Public Schools

Sullivan noted that one of the things that makes Boston strong is that there are several interlocking boards and initiatives that work together regularly, which has allowed the city’s workforce development efforts to be as nimble as possible in these unprecedented times. The Boston Private Industry Council serves as the city’s workforce development board, one of 16 in the state. In that role, it oversees the city’s two career centers, one managed by Rubin’s organization, the other by Morgan Memorial Goodwill Industries.

Starting in 1982, he explained, his organization decided that the Boston public school system would be its baseline investment. There are now career specialists in Boston’s high schools, each of whom works with

some 150 students to identify, prepare students for, and match students with jobs and internships, and an employer engagement team that works with greater Boston’s major employers, including its largest, the region’s hospitals. In addition, there are re-engagement specialists who “chase down” students who have dropped out of school. A big issue for his organization when the pandemic struck was what to do about the thousands of jobs and internships that it had arranged for students. It took a heroic effort to move everything online, an effort that was helped as employers also pivoted to online working and virtual learning programs and internships.

Providing Hands-on Training Opportunities

Anderson-Montina explained that Year Up, which serves students aged 18 to 24, has been operating in greater Boston for some 20 years. Its mission is to close the opportunity divide by providing a hands-on skills curriculum, training, and brokering opportunities with employers for internship placements that serve as on-the-job training opportunities. This approach, she said, empowers students to find themselves on a journey toward a stable career and higher education attainment. The challenge that the pandemic triggered for Year Up is that it is a “high-touch” organization in how it works with its students and provides them with wrap-around services; therefore, figuring out how to do that virtually was not an easy feat, particularly given that the digital divide is real for most of its students. In addition, as Roberson noted, the pandemic has increased food and housing insecurity among the students, in addition to taking a toll on their mental health, particularly considering the racial trauma that so many of the communities it serves have experienced over the past year.

Coding Bootcamps to Address Equity

Delmar Sentíes explained that Resilient Coders is a highly competitive, free coding bootcamp for young adults of color who come from low-income backgrounds. Some 85 percent of its 2019 graduates found full-time jobs—with an average salary of $98,300—within a month of completing the bootcamp, and there are more commitments to hire than there are students in the program. His organization’s mission is to recalibrate power in America, and Boston specifically, by creating pathways to college that do not necessarily depend on going to college, which is just not an option for many of its students. As he put it, “We must convene a league of equity-led

organizations and employers, and thrust into the mainstream our ‘radical’ ideas about social justice in technology.”

Achieving that goal, he said, requires five actions:

• Develop a body of principles and agitate for their adoption. Toward that end, Delmar Sentíes believes that Black and Latinx technologists must codify what it means to employ and advance equitably, and allies in these efforts must hold their leadership accountable to their publicly stated values.
• Move past diversity and toward equity and justice as a means of recalibrating power. Hiring a person of color into a dead-end job is an example of diversity without power.
• Rethink education and come up with a way to make top-tier education not just affordable, but free as a civil right and as a means of countering the stratification of wealth in America. Requiring people to pay for their education helps to maintain the stratification of wealth in this country.
• Create a league of equity-led organizations and employers and develop a body of principles crafted by Black and Latinx technologists. One piece of such a body of principles should be that employers do not require a bachelor’s degree for jobs that do not require a bachelor’s degree to perform, such as coding.
• Overhaul the way workforce development is funded. Currently, most funding for nonprofit workforce efforts comes from philanthropy and leading capitalists who want to ameliorate the harmful effects of capitalism on communities of color. In Delmar Sentíes’s opinion, there is a need to find a more democratic way to fund workforce development, perhaps by a corporate equity tax on those companies that do not abide by the body of principles.

Discussion

Regarding wrap-around services and their importance for education, Roberson noted that Roxbury Community College has a partnership with Year Up in which the college provides the education and Year Up handles all the wrap-around services, including a monetary stipend and training in soft skills. Providing wrap-around services is particularly important for community college students who have a much lower completion rate than those who attend four-year institutions. “This is not a situation where our

students are less intelligent,” said Roberson. Rather, it is a variety of barriers. For example, community college students progress at half the speed of four-year college students, so providing assistance helps them persist and complete their education.

Anderson-Montina seconded how important it is to provide these wrap-around services that can support students through completion of their education. During the pandemic, it has become clear, she said, that more mental health services are needed, and perhaps telehealth options can help there. Year Up is trying to broker a partnership with an app-based organization for people of color.

Delmar Sentíes pointed out that he does not have to convince Black and Latinx young adults to get into coding, for they already know that coding ability translates into well-paying jobs. What he does have to do is spend time educating employers about how the result of the systemic racism pervading their recruitment practices—specifically, a non-inclusive company culture—can cause some of their Black and brown employees to leave their companies after only a short time.

When asked about the linkages that need to develop between community colleges and four-year institutions to deal with racial justice in Boston, Roberson said that it is important that any time a college creates a degree program, it should consider both what the student will do afterward and what the student needs to get there, which taken together will dictate the partnerships that need to be arranged. For example, Roxbury Community College has partnerships with area high schools to help students who want to go into STEMM fields determine the courses they need to be successful in college and then have the high schools offer dual high school/college credit for certain courses. On the other end, her institution works with employers so that when these students complete their studies, they will have jobs to enter.

In terms of takeaways from the session, Sullivan’s lesson learned was that people do not have to be physically together to learn together. “[The online] environment allows us to connect with people far beyond our personal associations or even our own community and see different worlds quickly,” said Sullivan. Delmar Sentíes said the pandemic has provided an opportunity to organize, unite, and push for change in the way that the industry recruits, hires employees, and advances. Anderson-Montina said that it is imperative not to overlook talent any longer and to make opportunities inclusive for everyone. Roberson said the pandemic has highlighted the interdependence that may have gone unrecognized before the

pandemic. A recognition of interdependence argues for no longer ignoring groups of people who are the essential workers keeping society running. “The pandemic has highlighted that in order for anybody to succeed, we all have to succeed, and there is hope in recognizing that fact and working together to solve it,” she said.

CATALYZING STEMM ENTREPRENEURSHIP FOR ECONOMIC MOBILITY

The final panel of the day explored the linkages between entrepreneurship and STEMM workforce development and articulated how entrepreneurship can provide new routes to economic mobility for Bostonians once the pandemic-triggered crisis ends. As noted by Lee Wellington of the Urban Manufacturing Alliance, entrepreneurship can itself be a workforce development system, given that that many careers can emerge through entrepreneurship, often creating wealth, without the same credentials and requirements that traditional workforce pipelines might require. Specific topics in this session included how entrepreneurship can create job transition pathways, provide insights into emerging STEMM careers, catalyze ownership and employment opportunities, and provide a foundation for workforce education. This discussion also highlighted how entrepreneurial support organizations—including incubators, accelerators, and makerspaces—have worked closely with community-based partners to build ecosystems with strong connections to STEMM workforce development programming.

The three speakers for this panel were Jen Faigel, executive director and co-founder of CommonWealth Kitchen, Boston’s food business incubator; Sonia Moin, senior director of urban business initiatives at the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, a Boston-based national nonprofit organization that drives inclusive economic prosperity in under-resourced communities through innovative research and programs to create jobs, income, and wealth for local residents; and Michelle Weise, senior advisor and entrepreneur-in-residence at Imaginable Futures, a global philanthropic investment firm focusing on driving innovations that holistically support learners, from academics to life skills, and enable lifelong learning and lasting wellbeing for them, their families, and their communities. Moderating the discussion was Cecelia Wessinger, principal and founder of Mass Collaboration, an organization focusing on entrepreneurship as a means of economic development.

Matching Local Demand for Specific Skills

Weise said that each region of the country has what she calls a skill shape that describes the demand for specific types of skills in that region.³ For example, in southern California, with its concentration of defense contractors, there is a demand for more traditional manufacturing skills such as welding and machine skills, whereas in northern California, with its concentration of technology companies, the manufacturing jobs there demand more STEMM skills (Figure 3-5). Similarly, said Weise, digital marketing roles in Denver, Colorado, are oriented toward analytics and cloud computing, while in Boise, Idaho, they are oriented toward design and web development and in Atlanta, Georgia, they are geared to marketing automation (Figure 3-6). These regional differences in job skill demands are important to understand for job seekers who want to work in a certain region and need to know what skill gaps to fill to make themselves competitive for jobs.

What is important to understand, said Weise, is that individuals also have skill shapes that represent the different assets and unique skills they bring to the table. Comparing a collection of individual skill shapes to the type of skills an industry requires can help identify skills where the supply is not meeting the demand and skills where the supply outstrips the demand. “As we think about advancing and mobility, especially as we face this tough economic recovery, we have to think about how we start to fill some of those gaps and the ways in which we can connect to educational programs,” said Weise. This information about gaps can also point to ways in which regions can help people transfer their skills and pivot from one industry to another.

Weise explained that another way to use data to help people move from one industry to another is to map out where people go from retail and customer service jobs, for example, into many other fields, and then identify the skills they acquire that enable them to move to better-paying jobs. These newly acquired skills can then inform the types of micro-credentials and certificates that educational institutions might want to offer to students in their region. Weise said, “As we think about recovery and mobility for the future, especially for the bottom quartile of our population, we have to

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³ Typically, skill shape encompasses two dimensions: one axis represents the depth of related skills and expertise in a single field or multiple fields, and the second represents the ability to collaborate across disciplines with experts in other areas and to apply knowledge in areas of expertise other than one’s own.

think about how we help people move from survival mode into something that can lead to better economic opportunity with just a handful of skills they can build quickly.”

Becoming an Entrepreneur

Faigel addressed what it is like to be an entrepreneur who had been in a low-wage job with no potential for advancement. Her experience at CommonWealth Kitchen has shown that a person’s confidence level soars even as they are just starting their business and start making connections and forming their own networks. They start to understand that they have

useful skills that with some extra training they can use in new ways to build a better life. She noted that she spends a great deal of time with her entrepreneurs helping them understand what success is in the food industry. What Faigel would like to understand better is how this newfound confidence and resilience puts people on a different course in life, even if their first attempt at starting a business fails.

When asked what advice she would give organizations that support entrepreneurs, Moin replied that when wrap-around service providers think of creating a program or support service, they should consider locating the program so that it is easy for the targeted business owners to access. If the program will be virtual, it is important to know whether people in the targeted demographic will have access to a computer and reliable internet connection. “I know we would love to believe that if we build a program, they will come and we will help everybody, but that is not the case,” said Moin. “If you are going to build it, you as the provider have to go where they live, where these entrepreneurs are going to be. You have to go to those underserved areas to implement your program.”

Enhancing Sustainable Entrepreneurial Opportunities

When asked what they would do if they could wave a magic wand to enhance sustainability and create robust and thriving opportunities for people, Weise replied that what is missing from the entrepreneurial market are growth accelerators that will support people who get through the early stages and now want to scale up their businesses and get them to a sustainable size. Currently, she said, most of the funding emphasis is on early-stage entrepreneurs. Both Faigel and Moin supported this idea, with Moin noting that one of the programs she works on, the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business program, was created specifically to support those businesses that want go from having four full-time employees to 10 full-time employees, for example.

Faigel implored cities and investors to stop using their money to entice big companies such as Amazon, which Wessinger noted do not create that many new net jobs, to participate. Instead, she would like to see them invest both financial and non-financial resources in the small businesses that want to expand in their communities and that truly create new net jobs. As a concrete example, she cited how much of the food feeding Boston children who are learning remotely during the pandemic is prepared in New Jersey by the food services division of a California-based company. Instead of taking the $20 to $30 million dollars that the federal government is sending to Boston, which then spends it in New Jersey where the money eventually flows to a multinational corporation based in California, that money could be invested in local businesses that would employ local workers and support local farms and fisheries.

Faigel noted that CommonWealth Kitchen is part of a coalition, the Massachusetts Equitable Paycheck Protection Program Coalition that went to local banks and told them they need to work with Black-, brown-, and immigrant-owned businesses and spoke to the business owners to convince them that they needed to apply for Paycheck Protection Program funds. The coalition then advocated with the Small Business Administration to forgive these loans for small businesses, which she said appears to be on track to happen. Unfortunately, added Faigel, many small business owners would not apply for Paycheck Protection Program money because they were afraid of taking on debt or were suspicious of the Small Business Administration.

CLOSING REMARKS

To conclude the Boston workshop, Maria Flynn, president and chief executive officer of Jobs for the Future, and Robert Schwartz, professor emeritus of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-director of the National Pathways to Prosperity Network, reflected on some of the high points from the day’s discussion, with an eye toward highlighting important policy implications for the labor market recovery in Boston and the nation. Then, Christine Abrams, president and chief executive officer of the Commonwealth Corporation, summarized the key priorities for greater Boston’s workforce ecosystem and policy, business, education, and training institutions.

Both Flynn and Schwartz said they were optimistic, given what they had heard, that the recovery from the COVID-19 economic downturn would catalyze actions to overcome persistent economic development challenges that have been hard for the city to tackle during previous economic recoveries. In one sense, the national reckoning around racial equity and justice has brought more attention to this issue and enabled more direct discussions about addressing those inequities. In addition, the crisis is forcing more collaboration among organizations and learning from one another about how to do things differently. Schwartz added that his optimism stems from seeing people who have been involved in this type of work for decades, such as Rubin, Sullivan, and Pokaski, pivot so rapidly and adapt to the new challenges the pandemic created. For him, that signals that this may be the time to tackle these deeper problems in collaboration with new allies in a coalition of the willing that will bring its energy and passion around equity and social justice

An important lesson for Flynn was seeing that a coalition of the willing is the right way to go because it has more likelihood of having traction than if one of the stakeholders is taking the lead. In particular, she has been encouraged by the discussions that are bringing in all of the local institutions of higher education and the area’s social service–led organizations to work on the problem of how to help individuals get on the first step of the career ladder and advance into a family-sustaining career and middle-class life. She does see a potential role for the federal government in incentivizing regional collaborations that go beyond local communities.

Community and Technical Colleges as Key Players

Schwartz commented on the importance of the nation’s community and technical colleges. “If we are going to ever move toward having a real national workforce strategy, these 1,200 publicly funded community and technical colleges in my mind need to be at the center of it,” said Schwartz. These institutions do not have anywhere near the funding to play the role they should be playing, particularly when it comes to retraining displaced workers. He noted that the Center for American Progress released a report in October 2020 documenting a $78 billion gap nationally between the revenues available to community colleges and the revenues available to four-year public institutions of higher education (Yuen, 2020), which in Massachusetts translates into a gap of approximately $8,000 in revenues per full-time student.

Flynn agreed with Schwartz about the importance of prioritizing funding community colleges to help them not only reach more students, but also be nimble and adjust to keep their offerings aligned with regional labor market demand. She also would like to see programs funded during the Obama administration, such as the Social Innovation Fund and the Workforce Innovation Fund, be restarted and to see more resources devoted to help students navigate the job market and career changes. Schwartz shared that he would also like to see resources directed to helping displaced workers find on ramps to new careers, whether by providing them with online learning opportunities or helping them with digital literacy, to take advantage of programs that can move them from disappearing or declining sectors into sectors with real opportunities to move into middle-skill jobs that provide a middle-skill wage.

In terms of drawing lessons from Boston’s success and struggles that could be applied elsewhere, Flynn considered one of Boston’s strengths to be the mix of legacy programs that have been in the community for years and the new programs that fit into the entrepreneurial system. Schwartz noted that one of Boston’s continuing struggles has been its inability to develop a robust structure of introducing its public school students in a coherent manner to the world of work and careers. This work, he said, needs to start in the schools themselves. One lesson he has learned from examining strong vocational school systems around the world is that they successfully socialize young people into the world of work. The combination of work and learning should be better integrated in Boston.

Regarding the themes that Abrams said she heard throughout the day, the first was about rapid change being the new normal, which will require continual training for employees, the underemployed, and the unemployed. While moving fast will come with mistakes, the lessons learned from those mistakes will matter most, and using those lessons to adapt quickly in innovative ways will be a key to success moving forward.

Abrams’ second takeaway was about how the pandemic has disproportionately affected people of color, low-income workers, women, and small businesses, and how it is further hollowing out the middle class. These most-affected populations have complex issues that go beyond a simple fix of finding a job. When it comes to increasing the number of people from those affected populations who can benefit from higher education, starting with community colleges, Abrams pointed to the importance of moving from diversity to social equity and challenging the status quo. Abrams also pointed out that the childcare model in the United States does not need to be revisited—rather, it needs to be re-engineered. The current system is broken, said Abrams, and “there needs to be a different way if we are to get women back into the workforce.”

Abrams noted the importance of partnerships and alliances that the day’s discussions highlighted. Partnerships that provide support and wraparound services and apprenticeships are about reinvesting into the economic infrastructure of a community. Toward that end, she thought the idea of using technology to provide wraparound services has merit.

Another theme of the day was re-engineering education with a focus on pathways and on ramps, particularly regarding skills and competencies rather than degrees. To advance that shift, employers need to be advocates for this type of training, which offer a more rapid way—than four-year degree programs—for people to get into high-paying STEMM jobs. Abrams reaffirmed that this is where community colleges can play a key role in a new workforce development strategy for the new normal. She noted that achieving true equity in the STEMM workforce requires rethinking and eliminating the bachelor’s degree as a job requirement. Her organization, for example, is part of a collaborative partnership to redefine healthcare pathways that focus on competency-based learning and certificates and even using artificial intelligence to provide virtual hands-on training for some positions. Stackable credentialing and earn-while-you-learn will allow people to start working at better jobs sooner, as well as emphasize to workers the need to engage in lifelong learning to succeed.

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