Is anyone reading this ever gone to Fresno? That’s where I’m from, where I was born, and where I currently reside. For those who are unfamiliar, Fresno and the whole Central Valley of California are founded on agriculture: miles and miles of farmland for as far as the eye can see, with a couple of huge, impoverished communities dotting the landscape. My family, like many of the local community, is made up of immigrant agricultural laborers: people toiling hard in the fields in the hopes of earning an extra $25 per hour. I didn’t view myself as destined for the glitz and glam of Silicon Valley, but I made it to college, and something magical happened. I obtained a job in technology.
I recall the first time I didn’t have to count the change to figure out how much to tip the pizza delivery guy, and I understood that this business, the technology sector, was going to transform my life forever. And I remember thinking, if it can happen to me, a poor, queer Brown lady from nowhere, why can’t it happen to large cities of people like me? So that’s what I’ve been working on in Fresno for the last eight years: developing a business that can show what it takes to make an entire city prosper, rather than just a few people in it. It turns out that we just need three basic materials. Related article – How To Make A Roadmap For Young Changemakers.
Training, evidence, and community. So job training is the foundation of all we do. The communities we deal with are frequently from low-income populations, such as those learning English as a second language, those who are homeless, the formerly incarcerated, veterans, and those who work in retail or manufacturing. These people’s problem isn’t a lack of technical knowledge. Their issues are centered on issues that are far less evident. Childcare, transportation, hunger, and money are just a few examples.
How and How can
So those are the areas in which we concentrate our efforts. It may be extremely difficult for families. How can you rationalize studying something like coding when you have debts to pay? Isn’t it better for the family if you just took a job at McDonald’s and worked as many hours as you possibly can? Because that’s a check, and who’s going to keep an eye on your younger brother? That’s what we do as a family: we all chip in. But how can you defend yourself to those around you when it appears to them that you’re just messing about on the computer? We didn’t come up with a novel technique to teach JavaScript. We basically concentrate a lot more on the elements that impede people from learning it.
Money is such a Source of Energy
In addition to linking our students to resources such as bus tokens and free regional transportation choices, we also deploy a fleet of cars whose only purpose is to pick these people up before their study groups and leave them off after class. We get them food if they are hungry. We collaborate with food cabinets and pantries to ensure that cartons of food sufficient for a household of three to five people are delivered to these students’ homes. We link them with daycare choices that fit their schedules and finances. Most significantly, because money is such a source of energy and decision-making for these families, we essentially pay them to learn through our apprenticeship program. Read – How To Stop Negative Thoughts Cycling – Exercises for Mind.
Not only do students get paid and experience real-world employment, but they also have that first line on their résumé. The one that is so difficult to obtain and instills trust in the rest of the world that you might know what you’re talking about. As a result, you may be thinking, Irma, this sounds fantastic, but it seems incredibly pricey.” So, how are you going to pay for it? We’ve flipped a long-held belief on its head. We must stop placing the weight – the financial load – on students and families who are already suffering and begin putting it on the individuals and entities who will gain the most from their untapped potential.
Government, companies, and philanthropy are examples of entities. Because these are the entities who gain from the development of that ability, they are the ones that get to pay for it. Let me pull back the veil and explain what I’m trying to express here. Let’s start with the government. The United States invests a trillion dollars to build a workforce for this country. Many of those programs have mixed results, and while some people who come out of them do in fact earn higher wages at the end, many of these people can’t also work, which means they’re not bringing home a check, which means they’re still in survival mode, which means that the people who would benefit the most can’t participate to begin with. That’s when a system like ours comes in handy. We apply for the same type of funding and use it to pay individuals to study. Read – How To Community Creates A Healthy Life.
We also work with businesses. QA testing, for example, is a position that can be taught and is critically needed by businesses. Training a group of QA engineers is low-hanging fruit that yields near-instant results for businesses. Companies that invest in the development of such talent breed a local and enthusiastic technological workforce from which to pick. Companies in growth mode or through a digital transformation understand that the capacity to discover, employ, and retain people is critical to their future success.
Achieve Aims
We can teach whole cohorts or a generation of junior-level and apprentice-level technicians who will be ready to work on day one. We’ve worked with a variety of businesses to persuade them to pay for things like tuition and money for students in order to achieve this aim. Philanthropy’s interests may be easy to define in this context. Foundations and non-profits want to know that their funds are being used wisely. Take, for example, the Quality Jobs Fund. It is a collaboration venture between the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco and the New World Foundation, with the specific purpose of addressing inequality via the expansion of quality jobs and skill development.
We seek for allocations or grants from philanthropies like those, work with the government monies indicated above, and corporations in the manner described above, and bring it all together to pay people to study. So that’s how it’s paid for. Now, what should these people be learning? Real-world software initiatives, in our opinion, are the proof. You see, all of the software that the world need must be created. As a result, we can use talent from underrepresented groups to meet that demand while simultaneously creating a training environment for green talent and a really vibrant firm.
We’ll use Onwardus as an example. We collaborated with the Kapor Center on a rapid-reaction program in response to COVID. The state of California was the first to adopt it, followed by ten other states. The plan was to connect displaced employees – people affected by COVID – to money, services, and new jobs. We took a senior software engineer who could architect the entire platform and then apprentices who could execute on that plan, and we produced a working prototype in 11 days.
You see, the local mom-and-pop shop, the school system, and the regional factory all have software needs and will pay someone to fulfill them. With this approach, they may not only have their answers brought to them, but they can also contribute to the establishment of high-growth, high-wage employment in their community. The final component of our formula is community. We want lively environments that suit the goals of technologists and entrepreneurs, therefore we construct castles for the underdogs. We acquire dilapidated downtown buildings for pennies on the dollar, renovate them, and then lease them back to ourselves and others in the IT business.
This fosters community around the concept of leveling up entry-level humans, as well as a shared understanding and value for what it means to have access to infinite talent. We started with a building that had been vacant for 40 years before we took it over. We arrived with our tenant list and our abilities to operate. Our partner arrived with an empty and rotting structure. We painted the walls, erected a lot of desks, and hung a lot of TVs, and when the coffee shop opened at the front of that building, it was like someone flicked a switch on that corner of downtown. Read – Amazing Beautiful Science Of Love – Understanding Real Relationship.
Every day, a thousand students, renters, and community members flocked to the edifice. When these elements are combined, they generate real effect driven by real change that affects real individuals with names, faces, families, and dogs. This is only one example. Our friend Miguel, who was formerly jailed, had no possibilities for his future, his work life, or his family. He received a government-funded scholarship through our pre-apprenticeship program. Miguel took a detour to the left of computer programming and found himself neck-deep in analytics and website funnels.
He worked as an apprentice in our digital marketing program. After eighteen months, Miguel has a full-time job with a good income, benefits, and a 401(k) match (k). We’ve worked with over 5,000 students, and more than 80% of those who attend our professional programs find technical employment. In Fresno, this means that the emerging technology workforce is more than half female or gender nonconforming, more than half minority or Latinx, and 20% first-generation. And those demographics are similar to those of our county.
These are people who were working in restaurants, retail, factories, and field labor and earning less than 20,000 dollars a year before entering the programs and making 60-80,000 dollars a year. That translates to petrol in the tank and rent paid on time. And when you do that enough times, you see more sandwiches being purchased at the local panini shop; newer, more reliable cars transporting these people to work; the tax base improving, which invests in schools and rebuilds roads; homes in those communities being built or purchased by the people who will actually live in them; dilapidated buildings that were once empty now full of energized underdogs sipping coffee and writing code and, most importantly, bringing jobs back to the community.
This is something we can accomplish. It’s not a mystery at all, especially now that we’ve spent 10 minutes discussing it. But there are three very precise and purposeful things we must accomplish. Invite the underdog in, pay them to study as if it were their profession, and then build them palaces in their hometowns. It has worked in Fresno, Bakersfield, and Toledo, Ohio, and it can work in underserved communities all around the world.
This article based on a speech of Miss. Irma L. Olguin
HowNHowTo.Com Team
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Keywords
city change, community development, community tools, Irma L. Olguin Jr. TED, Irma L. Olguin Jr. TED talk, new city, tech jobs, technology, TED, underdog cities, urban cities, urban development