Thanks to all of you for being here. We launched Paya in this room four years ago. When we launched the second phase in 2020, we did it in like our teeny tiny small boxes on Zoom, and it is a lot nicer to be delivering remarks to you and not my dog. Although, she's maybe an easier audience, I don't know. So many of you were in the room when we launched here four years ago, but there are even more new faces among us now both in this room and in the over 150 people who registered to join us virtually. So throughout the day, if you see us sort of remarking to the camera or doing things up here that seem odd, no, some of that's for the webcast. But having so many new faces in this room, having so many people online is a sign, as Mary Alice remarked last night, that this community has grown in size tremendously since it launched in 2018. For anyone who's joining for the first time, welcome. We are, we'll introduce ourselves again, because we always do it, just so folks know what they're getting themselves into. But we're a national initiative here at New America, multi-year initiative dedicated to advancing youth apprenticeship as a strategy for restoring the link between American education and economic mobility. Four years old this fall, PIA is a collaboration of national partner organizations and philanthropic supporters who work together to build this field and increasingly to empower you all to lead it. Many of our partners and funders are in the room today, and in case I run out of time at the end here, which I'm famous for doing, let me make sure that I say it to you all loud and clear, once and for all, we would not be here on stage today in a room full of people without your partnership, your leadership, and your friendship. Thank you. Oh yeah, and I have these, don't I? I forgot about this. All right, so over the past four years, we've had the privilege of working in communities and regions across the United States where dynamic public and private partnerships are working to build youth apprenticeship in a wide range of industries. These programs provide on-ramps into jobs and careers in IT and cybersecurity and healthcare, advanced manufacturing, financial services, the skilled trades, education, and more. And in a second, we're gonna tell you just how many of these occupational pathways we've seen seeded over the last four years. It's pretty incredible. Through the work of all of the people represented by dots on this screen, we see growing evidence that youth apprenticeship can provide positive outcomes for employers, for students, and communities. Ultimately, PIA's goal is to expand high-quality youth apprenticeship so it becomes an accessible, equitable, mainstream, post-secondary option for American high school students. As we work towards this vision, PIA advances three core objectives. We work to support place-based partnerships that increase the number of youth apprenticeship opportunities available across the country that are aligned to PIA's definition for high-quality youth apprenticeship and the principles that we developed collaboratively as part of our first phase of work. We work through our network and the relationships that Ann Marie referenced to facilitate learning and innovation in the field and to support the wide-scale adoption of best practices and enabling policies across the nation. And we work, with all of you, to tell stories, to collect data, to build evidence, to strengthen the case and the evidence base for youth apprenticeship to raise awareness of its potential and to mobilize policy, action, and investment to really change the narrative about the options that are and should be available to young people today. Our first launch phase, whoops, our first launch phase ran from fall of 2018 to fall of 2020 and focused on establishing norms and foundational resources to lay a foundation for what was back then a small and disconnected and nascent field. Honestly, we didn't really know what to expect when we launched. We knew that we had a core community of excited people, but we could never have predicted the initial interest we saw in the first round of grants that we made. We had an office pool going. I think the high guess was 42 applications. We were refreshing all morning on the day they were due and we ended up with over 230 applications from 49 states in Puerto Rico. Unfortunately, we couldn't work with everybody, but we had a tremendous group of nine partnerships that we funded in that first year of work. Many of them are with us today and the overwhelming demand from the field led us to establish the PIA network, which was not secret for you all here. That was not part of our original strategy, but it has proven itself to be a remarkably useful, durable and impactful part of the work. In the second phase of our work, we really, we launched in the middle of the pandemic and we designed that really to maintain the momentum and accelerate the program development and design and implementation efforts that we had seeded in phase one. Again, launching in the height of the pandemic, tumultuous time for young people, for businesses, for our economy, for our communities, we really didn't know what to expect. We weren't sure if youth apprenticeship would survive the tumult of the pandemic. Would the partnerships that we had seeded and supported persist? But I think it's testament to the dedication and commitment of many of the people in the room and their partner organizations listening from home that they answered to both of those questions was a resounding yes. And today, I'm gonna skip a slide here and go right to that one to share proof of these yeses to many of you. So on this prior slide, you saw there's a map with lots of tiny little dots. There's some bigger dots here. Prior slide was the paya network. Ann Marie mentioned this. We have 49 place-based sites that participate in this virtual learning community we've established. And I actually think if we were to truly survey who's attended a lot of those events, it would be almost double that. These dots represent the paya grantees and we've had the opportunity to work very closely with the sites indicated by these green. The light green, lighter green, lighter teal dots there are our first round of grantees. There are nine of them. The darker green are six that we supported most recently over the last year and a half with seed funding to develop strategies to launch new programs. And the purple represent our paya national learning hubs which are two outstanding well-established programs in career-wise Colorado and the Charleston Regional Youth Apprenticeships program that we have seed funded in the last several years to provide mentorship, resources, and really to drive a learning agenda with us for the field. We have collected data now twice from some of these folks, once from some of these folks. And in just a second, I wanna share some of what we're seeing. I will say we have not included data from our two purple folks on this and there are lots of reasons for that but they're just not in here and the numbers that you'll see in a second. We'll fold them in later this year when we pull data from them again. All right, so in fall 2020, the close of phase one, our green teas, we had seven that were in a position to provide programmatic data. A couple of them were really still developing and launching programs. We had 20 occupational pathways across that cohort. We had 112 employers who had put their hands up, were hiring or would soon hire a youth apprentices through the program. And we had 687 young people who had enrolled and were participating. Some of these programs were still in the process of really establishing the sort of programmatic elements that we would want to see in a youth apprenticeship but they had committed themselves to the principles and were moving fast in the direction of implementation. In just two years time, we have been able to collect data from six more of these sites which means they're enrolling partnership or enrolling young people. They have more employers on board and they've developed programs and occupational pathways expanding the range of options available to young people. We haven't calculated the rate of growth here but given that many of these programs launched and recruited employers and young people in the pandemic, we think this is worthy of celebration. Thank you, yeah, thank you. All right, so folks often say to us, well, and Marie referenced this, youth apprenticeship, what do you do in youth apprenticeship? We've been really excited to see growth and a number of different occupations in our cohort. Manufacturing and advanced manufacturing is the most popular in the cohort and across the cohorts overall but we also see a lot of growth in fields like information in technology, construction and the skilled trades where youth apprenticeship has not really made significant inroads for a host of reasons, healthcare and early in K-12 education which has gained a ton of steam and is consistently ranked as a top area of interest for the programs with which we work. We're also really proud to tell you that PIA grantees enroll a greater share of non-white apprentices than we see in the US registered apprenticeship system overall. Our partners at JFF recently did a really very useful, very timely study of data of young adults in the registered apprenticeship system and we see that PIA grantees are enrolling as a share of their enrollees, twice as many black students, more indigenous youth, more Asian youth and more folks who identify with multiple races. I will say we have fewer Hispanic or Latino youth in the cohort overall and that's something that we're curious to understand what's going on there. We also have a higher share of female apprentices enrolling at our PIA grantees than we see in the US registered apprenticeship system overall. For reference, our friends at JFF found that over the last 10 years the share of young female apprentices, so apprentices in the registered apprenticeship system who are between the ages of 16 and 24, it's only about 7.1% female. So while this may not seem like, it's the gender parity we would hope to see, there are signs that when well-designed programs are stood up, when intentional recruitment is designed and delivered, we can make these programs more equitable and we can attract people into these pathways to provide the sort of structured, supported learning opportunities that we know can make a difference in young people's lives. We also see some interesting patterns of, oh, this is a slide I thought. So we know in the registered apprenticeship system overall and in our labor market, there's significant gender segregation and by this we mean that women and men tend to be clustered in certain types of jobs and certain types of occupations and to some extent we see that persist. We certainly see it persist in the registered apprenticeship system overall and we do see some of that in the PIA data and it's something we're keeping our eye on. So female apprentices in the PIA sites are over-represented in fields like healthcare and education just as they are in the labor market overall. Male apprentices are over-represented in fields like manufacturing in the trades. Again, these mirror patterns that we see in the labor market but what we'd really love to see is signs that apprenticeship and youth apprenticeship can dismantle some of these patterns and shift the direction. At a bright spot, we do see near gender parity in the IT pathways and business and business operations pathways that our grantees are running. So that suggests an area where we wanna understand how is that working, how did they do it, what does it look like and what lessons can we extract from the success in those spots and bring to other areas. But despite some of the bright spots that we've seen through PIA over the past four years, we really can't ignore that the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic volatility will continue to have a long-term effect on the economic trajectories of young people. Youth employment has returned to pre-pandemic levels but significant gaps by race and gender persist. Enrollment in college remains 10% lower than it was before the pandemic and the greatest declines continue to affect younger students, particularly black and Latino men. Well, many of these young people are likely to return to some form of post-secondary education. A growing body of research indicates that delay in college enrollment may have significant long-term negative impacts on individuals' labor market outcomes over time. And frankly, with or without a college degree, a young adult today is less likely to earn as much as his or her parents have done in generations before. Basic necessities, housing, healthcare, education, childcare that were affordable to previous generations are far more expensive for young people today. And that was true even before the psych inflation crisis that we hear about all day, every day, every time you turn the radio on. But all of this makes the transition that young people face when moving from high school into adulthood even harder to navigate. And many of the proven paths to make that transition, to proven paths of the past are becoming less reliable for them even as they become more costly. So we here at PIA are not naive enough to suggest to you that youth apprenticeship is gonna solve all of those problems. We know that as promising a strategy is, it's not gonna solve them all. But I think as many of the folks in this room and online, I suspect, can attest, apprenticeship is uniquely suited to meet the needs, the immediate needs of students transitioning out of high school who are, as many recent surveys have demonstrated, increasingly demanding education opportunities with stronger, more direct connections to the labor market. As we think about launching our third phase, and we've said this, this is our fourth birthday party, so we've had kind of two phases of two year work and we're excited to be looking ahead and launching today, sort of soft launching today, the next phase of our work. But we do see that youth apprenticeship is experiencing growing interest in the field that's driven by a convergence of educational, economic and social forces and an uptick in both public and private investment in the model. This mounting momentum presents a rare opportunity for PIA to leverage and expand on the work that we've done these past few years to ensure that high standards, a commitment to equity and a vision for long-term sustainability remain hallmarks of the youth apprenticeship landscape as it enters this next phase of growth. To date, the infrastructure that we have built for this field has enabled local, state and national partnerships to develop, connect, collaborate, commiserate, and more effectively, under a shared vision for this field, one that is grounded in the PIA principles for high-quality youth apprenticeship, which are printed and all over the back. If you wanna take one with you later on, we've got lots of copies. But before anyone accuses me or PIA of making this all sound easy, let me also say it clearly, it's anything, but the innovators in this room can also attest to that fact. If we've learned anything in the last four years, it's that building high-quality youth apprenticeship programs and the relationships that undergird them can be slow, painstaking work. But it's happening and it's beginning to happen faster and faster and more efficiently around the country. And that means as a field, we're approaching a pretty critical transition point. So ultimately, PIA has always seen youth apprenticeship as a strategy to really rethink how our systems prepare young adults to succeed in adulthood. It's always been a core tenet of our vision. It's sometimes been hard to explain, but ultimately what we hope to see is youth apprenticeship driving the kind of systems change and systems alignment that can pay dividends not just for youth apprentices, but for young people across the country as systems become more efficient, more cooperative and better aligned. So earlier, I walked through our objectives as an initiative and you may not be surprised that they align with some of the categories that are up here on the slide. We work at the programmatic level to support place-based partnerships to increase the number of youth apprenticeship programs to define and tell you what quality looks like to help support the adoption of standards that make these programs deliver the outcomes we want to see. And we've also done a lot about how we change and where information flows, how resources and information and tools, what that looks like. We also work at the structural level to really rethink and redefine best practices to promote and test enabling policies across this growing field and to really understand what it's going to look like to drive the kind of innovation and long-term learning agenda that we will need to continue growing high quality programs and ensure they're delivering the equitable outcomes we know they can. And finally, a lot of our work is looking, is thinking at this cultural level. What does it mean to build a case, build the evidence base, tell the story of youth apprenticeship and the organizations and young people that are witnessing and experiencing the power of these models to really change how we think about the way young people should enter adulthood, what the right choices are, what the good choices are. And how do we shift that narrative thinking? Many of the folks in this room, I think would say youth apprenticeship sounds like a great idea and they might still think twice about their own kid. And we really need to change the narrative not only to make these more of these high quality programs available to people but also help people understand that there is more than one way forward in America for young people to achieve economic success, to find economic opportunity and also to find passions and people and networks that will support them as they transition from being teenagers into this weird sort of liminal space of their 20s and increasingly maybe also their 30s but that's a conversation for a totally other day. So I'm running short on time and I know that I've been told I can't, I really can't go over today but I'm going to just for a minute. So we have spent an enormous amount of time in the first phase of our work really putting pressure on this programmatic stuff. We've been pushing hard, we've established standards, principles, we've developed tools, we've developed data frameworks, we've really tried to give the field what we think is needed to develop these programmatic proof points and start showing the world how these programs work, what they can be and helping other people understand, oh hey, I want to do that and I think the growth in this room is at least some sign that that's working but as we look to the next two years of PIA we're really excited to have an opportunity to leverage that programmatic infrastructure that we've built to lead youth apprenticeship into its next chapter of growth and so for us as we think about what that means looking forward, PIA is going to continue supporting program implementation and innovation but we also want to start pushing even harder on some of these structural and cultural elements out here that you all have surfaced to us as the hardest things for you to tackle independently in your corners of the country and so as we look ahead to phase three I will own right now we're not about to lay out our 15 point plan for what comes next but we know that the PIA network has proven to be a powerful vehicle for accelerating learning and building communities across the field of youth apprenticeship. We know that it can continue to be a critical resource for promoting scale while maintaining those standards of quality and equity. We know that telling the stories, developing the evidence base, getting your data and continuing to ask hard questions about why things are challenging for you, what it means to improve programs over time, how you solve some of those tricky challenges around liability and addressing occupational segregation and putting together braided and blended business models so that you can really achieve the sustainability goals that folks are telling you you must set. These are the kind of questions we want to continue pushing on that we're really excited to have the opportunity to learn alongside people in this room to put some of those questions together. There is a lot more to come from PIA we are really looking forward to continuing to expand the partnerships with the national partners who we are going to name and think in one second. We're really looking forward to continuing to support the work of our place based grantees and we are really looking forward to continuing to figure out just how powerful the network can be as a vehicle for learning and helping this field continue to sustain itself over time. But today, I'm gonna get out of telling you about that whole work plan by reminding that this is actually more of a celebration of what we've done and so we wanna pause today to recognize a lot of the folks in this room who've been working really hard. They've taught us a ton of stuff. They've done a lot of work and for the last couple of years they've mostly done it in front of computer screens. So in just a second, we're gonna kick off our official program but I wanna say a couple of really important thank yous in case that you don't get to hear us celebrate the work that they've done. First, I wanna make sure that we say in no uncertain terms that none of this work would have been possible without the support and expertise and network of our incredible national partner organizations who do research, who provide technical assistance, who provide sanity checks frequently to make sure that we are on and remain on the path that we've set for ourselves together. So these are Advanced CTE. Kate's here in the room today. Make sure you say hi. She'll be up on a panel later. CareerWise Colorado is in the room. Ryan and Jill. Education Strategy couldn't be with us today but they are a wonderful partner as well. Kathleen and Ryan and Matt continue to support all the work that we do. JFF is represented here today by Andrea Messing Matthew. Matthew, thank you for being here. National Alliance for Partnerships and Equity. Brittany will be on stage with us momentarily but she's not getting mic'd. She's getting mic'd. In the National Governors Association, I have seen Jordan and I think I've seen Rachel right there. Thanks to you both for being here and our folks from Trident Technical College, Charleston Regional Youth Apprenticeships. I think Rob is in the back. Melissa couldn't be with us today but thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Finally, none of what we could do, absolutely none of what we could do would be possible without the continued support and thought partnership of our funding partners. They have been with us. Many of these folks have been with us since before our launch four years ago and we would really like to take a second just to recognize the folks from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Bill O. Millindigates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the JPMorgan Chase & Company, Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation, the Siemens Foundation, the Smith Foundation and Harbor Freight Tools for Schools Crew and finally the Walton Family Foundation for your continued ongoing support and the great, great questions that you are constantly asking us. Thank you. And really quickly, if you'll permit me to do this, I just want to say a very quick thank you to our staff here at New America, our talented and tireless and tired tech events and tech colleagues, Molly, Angela, Morrell, Riley, Jason and Shannon in the back, thank you so, so, so much. Ann Marie and Paul for being here and supporting the work that we do. My colleagues in EPP and Selna, especially Mary Alice, Elena, Kevin is around here somewhere. The PIA team, I can't say enough. Mike, Kelly, Sarah, Fabio who did these animations that I still can't quite figure out how to quick food but they're amazing and to all of these other folks across New America who make everything we do possible, Christine, Garrison, Shayna and the development team who help us pay the bills. You don't get named enough up here. I hope you're listening or someone tells you but thank you, thank you, thank you. None of this work, like I said, would be possible without you all. So there's one more person who may or may not be here that I wanna call out really quickly by name both as a way to recognize her but also to let me segue to the panel. One of many things I've learned here through PIA is that this is a community of doers and fixers and problem solvers. So earlier this week we had a little bit of a snafu with this panel. We had a couple of young people cancel and I was lamenting this reality to a colleague in the room. Is Latifah Durant here? All right, Miss Latifah Durant. So Kelly and I reached out to Latifah and she said, oh, give me one hour. And by the time I woke up in the morning, the panel was back in order. So thanks to the hard work and the network of Latifah from CityWorks DC and CareerWise, CityWorks and CareerWise DC, I am pleased to introduce our first panel which is an opportunity for us to hear directly from true to extraordinary young women who are current youth apprentices working in the region. And just a moment, you'll hear from Leah who is a youth apprentice based here in Washington DC. I'm gonna let them introduce themselves. And you'll also hear from Stephanie, a youth apprentice from PG County right over the border in Maryland. And by last, but no means least up here on the panel, I wanna introduce Brittany Brady. I mentioned Brittany a second ago. She is CEO of our national partner, National Alliance for Partnerships and Equity. Prior to joining NAPE in that role, Brittany has also served as an Executive Director of the Brewer Foundation Future Leaders Program. And she was most recently the Chief Development Officer at Lumen Education. She holds a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Maryland, Go Terps, and a master's degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education where we were classmates, which we didn't know until recently. And more wonderfully for this panel, Brittany is herself a graduate of STEM programs at PG County Public Schools. So please welcome me in joining this tremendous trio. And thank you for permitting my five minutes of overage. Brittany, over to you. Sounds good. Thank you, Taylor. And nice to see everyone today. Can we get another round of applause for our apprentices here, please? So as Taylor mentioned, I serve as CEO of the National Alliance for Partnerships and Equity. And we partner with PIA to really focus on youth voice. So it's appropriate that I'm here with our youth apprentices who are brilliant and amazing. And I think you guys are really gonna be wild. So I won't take up too much airtime. I'm gonna actually start off by asking both Leah and Stephanie, if you all could share with me where you are, what your role is, and a little bit more about yourself. So your name, your role, and what your apprenticeship is like thus far. My name is Leah Sloan. I attend Kibbe D.C. College Preparatory. I am a finance apprentice with Freddie Mac in D.C. My name is Stephanie Romero. I'm a carpentry apprentice with Prince George County Public Schools. So how did you all hear about the apprenticeship program? Did you do your research? Did you hear it from someone else?  How did you find this opportunity? So for me, it was mostly because of my teacher. He would always bring it up to sign up for this apprentice. It's a good opportunity. And well, most of my classmates didn't want to, so I'll do it. And from that moment, he was always supportive that you're gonna get it, that you have the skills, you're always passionate about everything, to learning new things. So I signed up and I was waiting for like a while to get the email. And then one day, like in the middle of the night, I just received congratulations. So that's how I got in. For me, I saw the CareerWise D.C. email it was sort of like a spam thing. So I didn't really pay much attention to it because I said, it's COVID, they just keep emailing, whatever. But something told me to read it. Something told me to read it. And I applied to like every opportunity they had. And I started sharing it with my peers. And I was really excited. And once I got the congratulations, I was the happiest thing ever. Wonderful, that's great. And speaking of your peers, what do your friends think about the fact that you're an apprentice? What does your family think? And how is it impacting like your local peer community? Are you sharing about your apprentice experiences? You said you shared it with your friends. You said your friends didn't wanna apply. So tell me more about that. Okay, so for me, my parents are really proud.  But no, they became really supportive. They're always wishing for me to keep going higher and higher. And I do share with my friends now like you should try it. Like even though it's not kind of late cause we started in high school, I'm like, you could look into other companies. And yes, they're starting to research. So hopefully they could get into one soon. Wonderful. How about you, Leah? For me, I have a friend and we do everything together as far as opportunities. So she, I made her apply with me. And she applied and she got into HR and she's also an apprentice as well, former apprentice now, but she was an apprentice with me. I shared it with everybody who I knew had the skills to become, you know, an apprentice with the company. And ever since then, I feel like my family is proud. My friends are proud. Everyone's proud of me. And they're my motivation to keep going and strive through it. Are you all proud of yourselves? Of course. Of course. Okay. We often describe youth apprenticeship as a triangle. There's a high school, the college and the employer. You're kind of bouncing all between those different areas. What is that like? How do you, first of all, maintain balance? You guys are busy ladies. Yesterday we had a call with Leah and she said, oh, I have an interview. I have a meeting with my supervisor. I'm going to have to leave. I'm going to have a hard stop at 2.30, right?  So how, how do you balance everything? And do you have to give up anything? Either one. Okay. For me, sometimes it's tough because I overwork myself a lot. So I feel like yesterday I'm always like 2.30. Okay. Now I have another one at three. And I feel like I did a lot of community involvement my junior year in high school, but now my senior I'm starting to dial it down a little bit and be more realistic with myself to not overwork myself. For as far as balance, I feel like I can take on any and everything. I don't know why, but I do and I am going to. So I feel like as long as I just keep myself going with the simple things that matter to me, like I do a lot of community involvement and I know that the more and more that I go about the specific things that I want to keep doing, it'll keep me balanced and it'll keep me going. I know. I needed to hear that too. How about you, Stephanie? For me, I don't know how I do it. I wake up really early to go to work. From work, I go to my carpentry classes. And then after that, I had to do my college classes to become an accounting. So like every day is, I don't know, I just go to sleep and then wake up the next day to the same thing. Yeah, but it's just a motivation to see like all my family and friends proud of me and making sure that they're gonna have a great future. Things to me is my motivation. No one can say anything after that, right? So you guys have kind of alluded to some of the things that you learn on the job, right? Like I wake up early, I do it again. You have to schedule yourself. That's kind of what on-the-job learning is like. Have there been any things that have surprised you from your apprenticeship experience? Have there been any things that you really think you need more support? How are you garnering that support? How are you really carving out that space for yourselves? Well, for me, I feel like during work, I do have most of the support from all my coworkers. So, but there are a few that don't wanna help me, but I take the support from anybody, like willing to teach me every day and that's what keeps me going, like learning more and more. So that's what's helping me develop my skills. Right, you found your people. Yeah. Yeah, how about you, Leah? I feel like at Freddie Mac and even CareerWise, I had that support. I know I can just shoot up Microsoft, ping, that's what they call it, I think, but I can just ping someone and I try my best to get out there and network with my coworkers and stuff like that because it helps me know who's who and who I can go to and who I can feel comfortable with with certain things because Freddie Mac is interesting. They have a lot of red words on their documents, so sometimes I can't ask questions about certain things, but it keeps me motivated and makes me feel better by myself that I'm really out here doing a lot of different things that a lot of people around me aren't and I wish that they will, so that's a little bit of balance with me. Yeah, that's actually really interesting and I wanna ask a little bit more about that because you all are having very unique on-the-job experiences, right? And so how does that vary or differ from your peers or even jobs that you've held previously? Have you worked with people to consider a typical teen job before and how does this experience differ from that? This experience is more unique for me because I'm not in person, I'm remote, so it's kinda different because I'm in my room at my desk on the meeting with a blurred background and so is everyone else and that kinda makes me feel a little isolated, but getting off is a whole new chapter and I'm not ready to open yet, but one day, I feel like specifically for me, it helps me feel better when I, Freddie Mac has this thing where you can check people what they're doing, what they're working on. I try to do that so I can get myself into more things, ask people if they need help with certain projects, just to give myself that little bit of different exposure with different projects and tasks so I can open up to pick a college major to see what I really like and narrow it down a little. So it's giving you more experiences to kinda try things out. Yes. Wonderful. How about you? Can you repeat the question? How does this differ from other job experiences either that you've held or that your peers have held? So like she mentioned being remote, right? Like typical teen jobs you might work at Chick-fil-A or when I was in Prince George's County, everybody worked at Six Flags. Like that was like the place to work and it was the best summer job. I did not work there, but how does this differ from other work experiences you've had? For me, I was always doing internships so I would work at my high school, at a townhouse. So it was becoming learning, like working on hands because I was usually on the computer. It was like a quick change, but it was something I did like because I like working hands on and compared to my peers, they were surprised because young women were going into a carpentry field where it was mostly dominated by men. So, but they were really supportive.  And yeah, it was just a great switch for me to have. That's wonderful. And I want to highlight for the audience, both of them sought out these opportunities. Both of them were looking for ways while on these work experiences to really continue to develop their learning and their knowledge. So as people that are in positions to open up these doors, make sure that people have pathways to those other experiences. I love that Freddie Mac, you can kind of pop in and say, hey, what are you doing? How can I learn from you? That's really how you learn on the job and how you really advance. So I love that. Okay, what would you say are the biggest benefits of your apprenticeship? What would you say you've learned through your apprenticeship so far? So we've heard a couple of things, but what's the highlight for you? So you said college major, you said working with your hands, but big picture, what's one of your biggest takeaways from this experience? That I'm getting paid to learn. I agree, actually. But I will also say the big takeaway for me is the different projects that I am doing and working on sometimes, they're a little more harder than others. And with me wanting to be an accountant and majoring in accounting, I feel like the task that I'm doing is similar to accounting work and it honestly stares me away from it, but at times I think it's a great experience for me and it's great exposure and it's a great opportunity for me to take away, even in school, I can help in the finance academy. So it helps me in that class as well because I know the exact work that they do behind the scenes. So that's how helpful it is for me. Oh, that's fantastic. Are you seeing any synergy between your college, well, you're in a carpentry apprenticeship and you're taking carpentry classes, so there's clear alignment there, but how about for your accounting classes? Any alignment between those two? Oh, no. Yeah, I don't think so. But it's a great, it's opened up different. For me, well, I wanted to take accounting too, so one day I could run my shop and even go higher than that, so that's why I wanted to take accounting. That's great. Okay, so we think, especially at NAPE, that youth should be involved in the design and delivery of youth apprenticeship programs. This can help ensure that young people have positive experiences and make sure that they meet your needs. So what advice would you give to the people in this room? Do not hold back. What advice would you give to the people in this room who are building youth apprenticeship programs and how can we all do a better job of listening to your voices in this process? Well, I would say always keep motivating young people because, like they say, it goes one ear, it comes out the other, just keep pressuring them to, they tell them the benefits, the money, like that's what they're looking for. So it's always just keep talking to them, keep talking to them, and that would hopefully help a lot of young people. For me, I would say build relationships. I feel like that's a very important part to me because the more comfortable I feel with someone, the more change that I can try to help influence or help someone else work with. So I feel like with the supervisors, the people that are there to help, I feel like once you build a relationship with them and get to know them, not just about your job title, but who are you outside of your job? I feel like that's what makes me feel more comfortable and makes me feel welcome when I'm working with those professionals. Yeah, would you say that gives you a sense of belonging? Yeah. Okay. And how about you? I know you mentioned that you have some folks on the job that help you and some folks that don't. Those people that are on the job that help you, what are they doing to cultivate that feeling for you? Well, they're always saying that oh, you're doing a good job or you should try this way to make it easier for you. They're never putting me down or trying to belittle the few skills that I have and building up. So they're always trying to help me grow and grow everyday my skills and be more confident in the field. Are there any challenges that you've experienced that you're feeling comfortable to share? You don't have to deep dive, don't feel nervous, but it's helpful for people to know when they're thinking about supporting people and building relationships, some of the challenges that you might encounter, whether on the work or from navigating all of these different spaces. So are there any that you're willing to share? I would say that my age is something that a lot of people, like grown people try to, like kind of push me away, like oh, you don't really know that much, you're too young or, but it's just something like, make them feel welcome even though they're really young or really old, like it doesn't matter, just always make them feel welcome. Right, that's wonderful. For me, I've had four supervisors within my year span of being at Freddie Mac. Now that has been different and unique for me, but I feel like the challenge I face is I have to switch from being a student in a classroom next to my friends and a teacher with directions on my paper to being an apprentice with this big long title that, and I have to live up to it and I have to do the work. And sometimes I'm scared to ask questions because I don't wanna feel like, oh, I'm too young. And I feel like sometimes in the meetings, everyone around me is so advanced in the field, like they have degrees, they've been doing this for years and I don't know that much. So I feel like that's been the most challenging for me because I have to switch, not my personality, but I have to switch my focus. And I feel like sometimes I can't ask for help because the work is confidential. Or I feel like I don't ever wanna feel like I can't do something. So I try to push through it even if it's little off. But that's how I try to get through it. That's the biggest challenge for me. Is there anything that people can do to make sure that they see you? Because that's a bias, right? I'm just gonna go ahead and say the word. It's a bias against people that are younger. Even though both of these young ladies are clearly brilliant, if people are assuming, oh, you're just 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 25. It goes all the way up to there. How can people, or what would be helpful in that? Would it be helpful if you just had a peer that was in that setting? Would it be helpful if your supervisor was speaking truth about it? What would make you feel more comfortable about that very innate bias that so many people hold? Well, for me, since we work with different people every day, I would say the supervisor telling them, or make sure she learned something today because sometimes I'm doing the same thing over and over and I'm trying to learn more and more new things. So it would just be talking to everybody saying, okay, everybody has to learn something new, not just doing the same thing over and over again. That's wonderful. How about you, Lia? For me, I would say my supervisor was also working in high school, so she understands almost everything. And that's really helpful for me because I feel like I love working with people that understand because I feel like people can say it all day, but you've never done it or you've never been through it, you don't really get it. So I feel like the pair that I have now is perfect for me because she understands I have a thousand assignments, I'm doing college applications every day as well as long as doing accounts payable, whatever. So sometimes that's much more helpful for me when I can just say, hey, things are rough at school, and she always asks questions. She's always interested in learning what's going on, what's going on around me, how can she help, how can she make it better for me? So I feel like that's the most helpful part for me is working with someone that understands where I'm coming from and has been in my shoes before. Indeed, so someone that's been in your shoes and also people in positions of power making sure that that space is ready for you. I love that. Okay, when thinking about both of you all mentioned the fact that getting paid is a big benefit, how is that providing a benefit outside? Like how, what does that mean to you to be able to get paid to learn? Well, I could buy like whatever I want now. And it helps me like for my future, like paying classes that since right now I'm in a primary scholarship. So I get my classes paid, but on further that like trying to get my bachelor, so master's like having the money aside that will help me further my education. Beautiful. For me, I feel like again, what she said, I completely agree, having your own money is nothing better than that. And soon I've learned how to save and how to like sometimes I get what people were saying were like, you saved for a rainy day and it rains that night. I get that because that happens a lot.  Like I need to save my money to teach me money management and everything with like the money part about it is so important to me because I feel like my specific choice of apprenticeship with finance, I felt like I would do it for free. I mean, I would take that back if I was doing it for free, but I feel like me getting paid is like very important to me because it's something I'm passionate about. So I feel like if I'm doing it and I'm getting paid, that's like the most important thing to me because it's like now I can teach other people, I can try to help other people get on my level, not my level, I'm not gonna sound like that, humble myself, but help people get to where I've been and like teach them and help them along the way. So I feel like that's the most important part to me. Yeah, lifting as you climb. And both of you all being invested in at this age, you don't wanna sound, I will not be humble for you, okay? They wanna get on your level because everybody wants that freedom and flexibility of having their own income and being able to invest in what they need to invest in, college applications.  Everything costs to make that next step. And so you having the money, you don't have to ask someone else for, means that you can do whatever you need to do for yourself, which is really powerful. Okay, before we open it up to the audience for questions, because I'm sure we have a lot of questions in this audience. We need people's heads nodding and smiles and everything. So they're probably ready to go. But before we do that, what are your plans for the future? What do you want to do when you finish your apprenticeship? And what's next for you in terms of work and learning? So give me the grand vision for where you see yourself. And it doesn't have to be perfect because the paths change. But what do you see for yourself now? For me, it's running my shop. And at one point running the accounting positions and all of that. So being higher and higher every year, trying to get a raise. For me, staying here has been a little rocky. So I've always wanted to get a degree and I've decided that I want to get my degree in finance. I mean, not finance, accounting. But working at Freddie Mac has told me maybe not. And sometimes I feel like, yes, I'm gonna do it. But I feel like I also want to become a full-time apprentice to get that experience because school does cut into it a lot because I can't give my all sometimes. So I'm trying to balance that, but I know I want to get my degree. Just like her, entrepreneurship is a part of my pathways. Well, I wish to, I'm gonna get my real estate license in December. I also want to fund my own business with helping people experience opportunities. And I feel like me getting my accounting degree will help me be able to find ways to fund that. Better is saying like the CEOs and also an accountant. So I feel like that's where my pathway will take me and it better not change because I'm tired of trying to figure out what I want to do. Transferable skills. You never know the path can be circuitous. Something that I love to ask you. So we talked about very concrete things that you want to do. When you're looking 10 years into the future, who do you hope to be? A millionaire. Hello. I want to be that someone that I wish I had. Whether regarding my community, regarding a supervisor, regarding, no, I'm not gonna say a parent, but regarding, you know, I just want to be someone better than I am today and rich. Of course. Of course. And I want to give back. Yes, and I want to give back to my community as well. So that's my goals, my long-term goals. Absolutely beautiful. Okay, now I think we're ready for questions. Believe I see a microphone back there in the back. Please speak into the microphone. We have people joining us online. They would love to hear your questions. If you do not speak into the microphone, I'll just repeat it in this one. So please be sure to say it in the microphone and there's no question too big or too small and... Okay. We also have the program leaders from both of these programs here. So if you have more concrete questions about the nuts and bolts of how the program is delivered, we have a couple of folks in the room that can also speak to that. So any questions that anyone has, please feel free. Please come to the back to ask your question so that the webcast audience can also hear them. Hi, your story is incredibly inspiring. A question I have is, do you find yourself explaining youth apprenticeship to the other adults in the school, like counselors, teachers? Is this something that is kind of something known in your school or is this something you find you have to explain to the other adults as well? For me, it's something that is known in the schools because throughout the years, they had other apprentice for either, for other traits too, like electrical, cosmetology, nursing, pharmacy. So for me, it was already known in my school. I just had to ask about it. For me, not really, but really, because sometimes I try not to make it seem like, because I have friends and I have peers that say, where you going? When I'm dressed like this, like today, I don't wanna say, oh, I'm giving a speech. For my apprentice, I don't wanna sound like I'm better than anybody. So I try not to talk about it too much, but I do wanna talk about it because it is something that exists and it is something that more people should become a part of and they should definitely use the experience as something that they can learn from. So I'm just wondering, when you first applied, did you rank what areas you wanted to be an apprentice in? In other words, did you have to put like carpentry first and medical or second? How much choice did you have in applying to where you were gonna be an apprentice? I already had one choice, which was carpentry because I was already in the class, so I was, but I could always branch out to other fields. I could go to the sheet metal shop or painting, so it's not just, I must stick to carpentry, I could always branch out, but I only had one choice. For me, it was a little different because they did have multiple options. In my application, I definitely kept mentioning that I was a NAF Academy of Finance student. So my career-wise DC advisors say, we're gonna get you in finance and I gotta find it, so yay to that. Great, good morning. So good to hear your story, so thank you for being with us today. Finances came up a number of times, rightly so, right? And I'm wondering about opportunities for you to learn personal finance. Has that been a part of any of the conversations that you've had formally or informally in the midst of all this, and if not, is that something that would be helpful to you and your peers? Yes, I feel like it would be extremely helpful. So for me, I'm in the NAF Academy of Finance, which is a three-year course of applied finance. The first year, it was COVID, so hey. It's COVID. The second year, I was an apprentice, so that's substituted for it, but I always had a relationship with the two finance people at my school, so I am still learning my personal finance experience, but I always hear from my mom, like, you're a NAF, why are you spending all this money? You should know better. So I feel like the personal finance part, it definitely works, and it's very helpful, especially when you're in the finance field, because you know what not to do and what to do, especially when you're working with a company and you have to budget their finance, which I've done before, and it's been very interesting when you see all of that money have to be budgeted in certain different categories. So I feel like that's definitely something helpful for people who don't have those kinds of courses at their school or offer it. Good, thank you. So hi, my apology for being late this morning. Myself and my coworkers are from Potomac Job Corps Center. And my question to you, I mean, I do apologize for being late, and I didn't get late getting the front end of the story. You guys are in high school still, right? I am. I graduated Class of 2022. Okay, so my question is what impact has been part of a pre-apprenticeship? Has it treated your life? I mean, has it given you a better vision as to where you're going? Because in, so what we do at Potomac Job Corps Center, often we try to encourage our students to not only get a trade if they have to get their high school diploma, but we also try to encourage them to participate in an internship program. We just had a young man that finished and he went to Colorado. He's getting about 20 something dollars an hour. They're paying for his residential for two years. He has to pay nothing. So how has this internship impact you and where do you see yourself going forward? For me, I think it paved the pathway for me. It gave me a lot of exposure and different opportunity to see as a teenager working from a different position than, you know, not up here. It gave me a different vision on how life can be and how it will be like in a professional setting. I feel like I've gained a lot of skills early. So like, for example, my supervisor switching four times on me, that was a little crazy. And I feel like for someone when I speak to that about like adults that are already in the workforce, they can relate to that because that's happened to them before. But to me, it's a little different because I'm younger, but I am gaining those skills to learn how to navigate through those challenging moments like that. So I feel like it's paved the pathway for me definitely. For me, well, just like your student, I'm getting my classes paid and I'm gonna get my journeyman's license. So it's always given me a vision. Like I could do more than what some teachers told me or more than what people expected me as a woman. So it has helped me a lot. Thank you. Hi, thanks for being here. Really appreciate hearing your stories. I wanna combine a couple of questions folks have asked about both options, like what options were available to you and also youth voice. So I'm wondering if you have any advice to folks in the room about how to get ideas about what young people might be interested in building pathways for and how we can navigate doing that when maybe there's like, if you haven't seen it, you don't know that you can be it type of situation. So like what advice might you have about creating more options so that more of your friends might be like, yes, that's for me, I see myself in that. How can we kind of get those things that might be inspiring to your peers and also share things that they might not have considered at the same time? Do you have any advice for that? Well, for me, I would say always have like speakers, like from different areas, young speakers, older speakers, like so they could relate to them and that will help them see all, like I could take this path or I could take this path based on their likings. For me, I feel like being a part of CareerWise DC, I kind of, I'm gonna be outside, stalk their website for a long time until I got hired and they had videos about like different fields and pathways. So that really helped me because I got to see, but now that I'm in the field and actually I get to see it, I feel like the most helpful thing would be like maybe making a video about here's HR work, here's finance work, here's technology work, here's what you'll be doing, here's some things that I've done because that can run someone away or that can bring them into it. So I feel like that's most helpful for me and definitely research, like having those resources and opportunities and people to speak about their unique experience will definitely bring the youth towards it for sure. And how should we get like the thoughts of your peers their thoughts about what we should be building? Cause I feel like that's, there is a lot of like let's put out there so that you all know what we think maybe you should be considering, but how do we make sure to flip that on its head so that we're building pathways that young people are like, hey, I feel like you had me in mind when you built that because that's something I'd be into. So how do we do the reverse of that? How do we get, how do we sit at lunch with your peers and be like, okay, what should we build? What fires you up? I feel like when you create a safe place, we're honest. So I feel like as long as we're comfortable and we're open to speak and we know a little bit more about it and know the goal, I feel like that's exactly where it helps and where it can definitely push the youth to understand where you're coming from and how they can build more onto what's already done or make their own pathway or something like that. I feel like once you build a relationship and you get, they get to understand both points of view from both the partnership and the youth. I feel like that's what really matters. I agree. Thanks. I also want to underscore, making sure that youth are part of the building of the pathways. So a lot of times people think if you build it, they will come, but if they weren't part of the building, then how do they know to come? Right? Yeah. Hey, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us. I have a very simple question. You talked earlier about balancing everything. What do y'all do for fun? Yeah. Well, I play sports. I play basketball. I play soccer. I'm trying to learn how to do like acrylic nails. So like I could have that as a side business. You can do that. How about me? And yeah. So I just like doing different little hobbies. For me, my dad, he just started real estate. So I want to become a realtor too when I want to intern under him and some of his peers. So for me, I feel like me and my real estate life will be a little fun for me because it'll pave a new pathway. I'm saying incredible. You're getting fun by picking up a new trade and learning how to be a realtor.  But also for fun, I get involved in my community. I try to give back and do better things to help my peers become like me or like other references around. And I like to go out. And it's very, very fun to go out with your own money because not much your parents can say. You have your own. You have one final question from the online webcast. What are you most proud of accomplishing in your youth apprenticeship? For me, it's being a young woman, entering a male dominant career field. That's just something I'm proud of. Girl power. It makes me most proud when I get to read what I've done in my experiences and what I've done. Like, for example, my LinkedIn account, like my job title and what I've done in the post, the little post I can make. That makes me so proud because it's like, this is really me. Like I wish I can show my younger self. So that's what makes me proud. Along with hearing my family members talk about me when I'm not supposed to be listening and stuff like that, that really makes me proud. And I get to, most importantly for me, I have a big family and I'm like, I don't even know the middle child, I guess now, but I have four younger siblings, five, and I have plenty of younger people in my family. I know that when they're my age, they'll be held to a standard. Sorry, but not sorry. So that's what pushes me. Just want to make sure that everybody thanks Leah and Stephanie for your insight again today. Can we give them another warm round of applause? Before we get started on our next panel, I wanted to introduce our president and chief transformation officer, Paul Butler, to welcome you all again. Paul. Morning, everybody, a good afternoon. I haven't smiled this much since I've been at New America and it's been about 18 months. And I can see from the back heads nodding and heads nodding, which is fantastic. First, I just want to thank Mary Alice for allowing me to participate and to join you this morning. So as Mike said, I'm the president and chief transformation officer and that word transformation and overall, the work of Paya is so important to me personally in addition to being important to the work of New America. Taylor shared the evidence of what Paya has done over the last four years. The work of Paya and the work that all of you are doing means so much to me personally. I've had maybe seven, eight jobs over my career. I've been on the board of the one nonprofit for about 25 years. It is a development program in West Harlem for black and Latino youth. So when I came to New America and when I met Ann Marie and when I saw the work that Paya is doing, I said, of course, this is a place that I want to be. Ann Marie used this word earlier and she said the work of Paya is awesome. And I want to go back to that word but I want to make sure that we're reminded of a part of that word that we have to take with us as we do this work. You saw the evidence of what's happened over four years. Imagine what's gonna happen in 14 years. In imagine what's gonna happen in 24 years with Leah and with Stephanie. There is a wonder to the work. There is something that we do not know that we are going to do to help young people see their possibilities. And I just want us to carry that through the day and through the remainder of the work in the next 14 and the next 24 years. It is so important to remember that while the evidence must be there and when we can see it, there's something that we may not see. And we talked about that last night. I know Tracy, we talked about that last night and the work that you're doing in Kalamazoo. So important. And I just wanted to just take a minute and just wanted to thank Mary Alice for allowing me to share that. There is something that we will not see in this work and it is still so important that we do it. So thank you all for your partnership and thank you all for doing it every day. Mary Alice, thank you for your leadership. This is incredible and happy anniversary and happy birthday to Pye. Paul, thank you very much for those remarks. Good morning again, everyone. My name is Mike Prebble. I'm a senior policy analyst at New America Center on Education and Labor. A thank you again for joining us today and a special thanks to those panelists who just left the stage, Brittany, Leah, Stephanie. It's so great to have you in our joining us today. Across four years of Pye, I don't think we've met many people who would disagree that the most exciting, the most rewarding part of building youth apprenticeship programs and partnerships is getting to meet and to hear from the young people who've heard about these opportunities and who've decided to use them to launch their careers to continue their intellectual and their civic journeys into adulthood. A close second, I think, is seeing the types of partnerships that start to emerge between businesses and other key youth apprenticeship stakeholders in support of those young people. We've seen many of these emerge over our four years with Pye. The next panel that we have for you today will give you a sense of how those employer partnerships start, how they grow, through the perspectives of two initiatives that I've had the good fortune to work with closely over four years of Pye, a career-wise greater Buffalo and career launch Chicago. Got our panelists joining us just now? No, not at all. Thanks, everybody. From the great city of Buffalo, New York, second from audience left, we have Daphne Ross, who is Senior Director of College Success and Communications for CES Buffalo, CES is a scholarship for Buffalo Public School students established in 2011, and the lead organization for career-wise greater Buffalo, a Pye grantee and an affiliate of career-wise USA. Also from Buffalo, to Daphne's left, we have Michelle Marie Gantt. Michelle Marie is Director of Diversity and Inclusion at M&T Bank, where she works across the organization to design and implement its diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy. She works with CES Buffalo to support M&T Bank's youth apprentices in their business services and information technology verticals. Moving westward, or I guess rightward to the Windy City, we have Stephanie Gomez, Director of Career Launch Chicago at the City Colleges of Chicago and other Pye grantee. She leads a crack team of educators and coalition builders working on youth apprenticeships and automotive technology, manufacturing, healthcare, IT, and other occupations. Also joining us from Chicago, I'd like to welcome Darius Caffee, who is the IT youth pathways program manager at the Rush Education and Career Hub of Rush University Medical Center. He partners with Career Launch Chicago to support Rush's IT youth apprentices. Welcome, Darius. Moderating our panel today, we have Kate Kramer, a long-time friend of the Center on Education and Labor and a key leader of the partnership to Advanced Youth Apprenticeship. Kate is Deputy Executive Director of Advanced CTE, a national nonprofit representing state career and technical education directors and a Pye partner since the very beginning. Kate, thank you so much for being with us today. I'll turn it over to you. All right, well, hello, everybody. Oh, yes, please, please. And we're all lamenting the unfortunate position of following that panel, but bear with us as we talk about really building, I'm an opportunity to talk about the nuts and bolts. How do you build this? How do you put this together? How do we create those amazing experiences that our learners are having and frankly create a lot more of them, which is why we're all here. So I'm really excited and honored to be moderating this panel with two of the grantees from Pye to really, and really importantly, not just the intermediaries, but their employer partners. And why they're here, why they're in this work, what it looks like and what the work looks like ahead. So why don't we jump in? The first question is, why? Why did you do this? And I'd love to start with Stephanie and Daphne. You know, you obviously already working in this space, but what made you apply for a Pye grant? What made you want to actually launch and pilot youth apprenticeship in your communities? So let me start with Daphne and then we'll start with Stephanie. Good morning, everyone. So for us, Say Yes Buffalo is a nonprofit 10 years old, we were founded as a promise to Buffalo Public School students that they would have a tuition-free college education. So we are intermediary and we've had relationships and kind of sat in the center of K-12, of higher ed, of business, of philanthropy in our community. So as we started to explore this pathway, it made sense for us as an organization to be the lead intermediary because we were already in the middle of that space. So what we know over the past 10 years is that a tuition-free college education is still too expensive for some of our students who are dealing with economic circumstances and challenges in a racially segregated city. The cost of actually attaining a college, a tuition-free college education is something that not all students can take advantage of. So we decided to create this pathway as an opportunity for our students to have a different entry into economic mobility through earning why they learn. So the conversation started several years ago. We had six inaugural employer partners, one that is here today with us. And the goal is really just to provide a pathway to students who aren't taking advantage of our scholarship. So we're excited that we just launched our pilot and for us, it just made sense for our, in our community for us to take the lead. Thank you. A couple of things that we're sort of setting the stage for Career Launch Chicago to get into this work. The one, the first one on one side was this unprecedented partnership between our Chicago Public Schools and our city colleges of Chicago known as the Chicago Roadmap. So this is the first time that, this is, we're really talking about taking a relationship that in the past may have had moments of successful collaboration, right? So think of it like almost like this where sometimes CPS and CCC made it happen to a place of like full convergence where now our strategies are uniform and we're taking these two huge institutions to come together to create that seamless path for high school students to and through college and into the career of their choice, right? And we're able to do that work through five different domains, one of them being career exploration and career preparedness, which is where Career Launch Chicago lives. So on the one side, you have this backing of these huge two institutions to do this work. On the other side, we have our sectors, our employer partners, so we had sectors that were dealing with the urgency, the reality of their workforce retiring, right? So when we talk about the advanced manufacturing partners, they're like, we have five to 10 years before a large percentage of our folks step out and we need to have a talent pipeline to funnel into these positions. When you look at health in IT, there's a projection for growth and we're seeing the same need, right? We need to have talent. How are we gonna meet this? And our answer was like, well, the talent is in our backyards, right? They're in our Chicago public schools. They're in our CTE programs. They're in our programs that maybe are not CTE, but are still connected to those sectors. And so it's sort of like this simultaneous, you have the industry, you have this unprecedented partnership and these things are coming together. And now here's Career Launch Chicago ready to lift up this work. It's wonderful. I wanna shift over to Darius and Michelle Murray. Before we ask you the why you took this plunge, curious what you were already doing in this space, right? How are you already working with your youth? How were you maybe working with your partner, Sayus Buffalo in city colleges? How did this fit into the portfolio that was already there? And then we'll shift to why you decided to go all in on Youth Apprentice. So why don't we start with Michelle Murray and start with Buffalo and then move to Darius? Sure. So we've had a relationship with Sayus Buffalo, and at a minimum I know I learned about our relationship from the perspective of sourcing for existing programs, whether it be for internships and perhaps some other opportunities there as well. And similarly, what we're talking about, a lot of us have that talent pipeline concern. We wanna be thinking ahead and thinking about where we need to get ahead of the challenge of people retiring as well as looking to bring on new, bright, innovative individuals, right? And we need to challenge the system, right? To shake things up. So we've had some other successful programs thinking about, thinking outside the box, right? Of the standard or what the historical situation has been.  You know, we've had programs where one more, most recent one is looking at, we did a data analytics bootcamp for example, reaching out to the community to, and look at the various community members and say, there's an opportunity to train people who may not have had the degree in say that area. And we have the tools and resource, we have Tech Academy, we stood up, that we can actually, you know, upscale. And we have other programs that is not necessarily focused on just youth, but it could be any age group. Similar technology, but it's an apprenticeship program from a technology lens as well. So this fit into our portfolio from the perspective of, we haven't done this before. We know we need to do it. We want to dismantle some of the standard historical systems that have that inherent bias and systemic challenges. So this is just a perfect opportunity to kind of really dig in and say, let's figure this out. That's great, Darius. And I will agree with that same point of us getting to the point where it was like, you know, we see the work that's being done around the city. We see the different connections that we can make. We see the different resources that are being put out there, especially among these times. Why not take full advantage of those? So for context, the Rush Education and Career Hub is a creative career pipeline program. So we work with age levels across the grade band. So we work as young as kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, and now working with adult learners to be able to help, you know, actually create that pipeline for them from their level of education and getting training and certificates to them actually having direct access to a lot of those career opportunities. So for a long time, we have been doing a lot of this work in small increments with a lot of our enrichment programs and making sure that we're building connections with the different communities that we're a part of, locally, statewide, and, you know, sharing out more of the resources that we have available not only as an organization, but as a healthcare organization from the more larger umbrella of what Rush does. So having the opportunity to now take it to the next level and bring in students to Stephanie's point to be able to bridge that gap between what they've been doing in high school, what their aspirations are, you know, post-secondary, whether it is college, career, trade, anything like that. We wanted to be able to bridge that gap for them and provide support for them in those times where, you know, traditionally, historically, a lot of students lose support in those areas, especially transitioning from high school to college or figuring out kind of what those next steps are in terms of kind of that level of experience and training and skills that they have. So we were able to kind of take a little bit of a step back from what we were doing and kind of visualize and identify where some gaps were so that way we can use that feedback to build off of the program that we're building now or career in Chicago with the other apprentices and students that we're able to bring into our programs. So it's wonderful because, I mean, obviously, you two get it, right? You're like the ideal industry partners. You understand it. You understand the need, you understand that. Yes, we need to focus on upscaling and reskilling, but we also need to build the path line. Lower what, creating those multiple pathways for students. So, great. I'm curious, do the rest of your organizations understand that, right? Like, that is such a challenge. When we think about one of the biggest barriers when we talk to people standing for the apprenticeships, it's getting in students, but it's getting employers on board. It's understanding that it's okay to hire a 16, 17, and we just saw two young women who I think all of us want to hire, right, like right now. So I'm curious, did you have the support internally or if not, how did you build that support? How did you get not just you to say, yes, Starius, yes, I'm signing up for this, but to get your organizations to say we're in. We want to pilot this. We're willing to take this plunge. Sure, I can start. Sure. For us, you know, on the outside it was fairly easy because I knew our CEO was bought in, right? So I don't think I ever had a conversation with him directly about this topic, but as soon as I knew he was in, and then our Chief Diversity Officer, who's my manager, was in and supportive and part of the steering group with, say, S. Buffalo, it's just a matter of, we're going to figure this out now, right? So then it became more of a situation where I feel like I kind of went on a campaign and internal campaign within our organization to say, listen, we don't have all this figured out yet, but we are going to figure this out, and I kind of did my best to make it tangible, right? Use a very, for me, I have a background in accounting and auditing and finance. So I use that as an example of, all right, so I can speak to entry-level accounts payable, general accounting, et cetera, and take them through what this could be, what that pathway could be, and talk through with my counterparts across the organization and use their example of the entry-level role and be able to say, let's talk about the different types of experiences that an entry-level person might have, and let's talk about the competencies and the skills that either you want them to come in with or we can make sure that we build, and let's talk about the type of education, what kind of classes do you think you want to make sure that they take? And everyone, it's very easy for everyone to jump to, I want a four-year degree, and say that thing, I want a master's, okay. Let's talk about what's actually necessary to get started and to be supportive along the way. Let's think outside the box here, and that conversation had happened several times, but we were able to get there, and we can really pull out the specifics of what's actually needed, what type of curriculum, what type of classes are critical, as opposed to sometimes a lot of the filler classes that are just in there that are important, but they're not necessary to get the job done. So once we kind of got more of that kind of campaigning out of the way, then it became a lot easier for people to visualize, like, yo, we can support this. We can do this. So I think that's kind of how it got started. Right, and Daris, I want to hear your story. Yeah, and I would agree that the visualization of it is important, because that's a large part of kind of what we've been doing over this last year, kind of moving from our pilot program into a full blown-out year, is getting more employer partners and more community partners involved in the work that we're doing. So very similar to you, I feel like I was kind of on a campaign, sharing our resources that we have available, how we can recruit students and get them in these quality equitable experiences, but also making sure that we're addressing their needs as well and that we're listening to them and kind of figuring out what gaps can we work to solve or find solutions for that are directly impactful to the students and the participants that we're working with and not just us as an organization. A lot of it was very exciting to talk about, because a lot of employers are like, oh, you all, we're working to train these students, get them certified and you're working to connect them to different folks. So a lot of employers were excited about it, but I think on the back end, it was more logistical. It was more so of, okay, we have these students, even to the point that Leah had mentioned earlier, of these young people coming in and not necessarily knowing too much about the business workspace, but still being passionate about the work and getting the employers to be able to understand that side of things and allow them to see the growth of the participant and not directly expect them to come in and know everything off the bat. But for us to be able to have that transparent conversation with the employer partners and the different departments that we're working with is that these students aren't coming in as full-blown experts, but they will get there. This is why we're connecting you all to them so that way they can have more experience in this field, in this department, in this specific role. They can have conversations with you. They can actually feel like an employee and a staff member that is a part of your team and not just some extra person coming in to do work for you. We want all of our participants to feel valued in their experiences, so as we're having conversations with different departments and even with our internal team about how we're working with students, we always wanna make sure that it's intentional and that it's something that is not blown out the way or something that kind of randomly comes up like they know from the start what this experience will look like and they know that it's a growth period and they're committed to this process with us and that's what we want people to do is be able to go on this learning journey with us because that's what it is. All of us, we're still developing programs, we're still piloting new programs. It's all a learning journey so we want the students to also be involved in that learning process with us from both ends, the internal and the external side so give them a quality experience but also taking a lot of their feedback to help us build out an equitable program as well. That's great. I think what we do is replicate you and average our own community, right? I mean, I think that's the challenge is you guys, you get it, you know how to talk about it. So I don't have time for this but something to think about in a further group is how do we arm industry, the people that are passionate with those right conversations or how to tailor and talk about skills, not just education, how to inspire that this is what we have to change business, right? Because it really is actually changing business and how we do that and that's hard but I mean, evolve or die. I mean, that's what we're kind of at I think in the economy and the workforce. So I wanna bring Stephanie and Daphne back in. So we got the why, now the how, right? You got on board, we're in, let's figure this out. So I'm curious a couple of nuts and bolts, like how did you decide with your industry partners which occupational pathways to start in? There's obviously broad. So we'll start there and then I'm gonna come back to the also how do we make sure that college, right? Is equally important to the career piece as well. So whoever wants to start. I can start, yeah. So we launched, we were just talking about this because I feel like we launched our first cohort so long ago and we actually launched our first cohort in February of this year. Okay, like, and when we talked about it like, you know, two years ago and it's like, no dude, like we just did this and you know, I came on in November of 2020, like super pandemic, right? Like I was hustling trying to find, you know, folks who understood it, people like Darius who saw the vision and when we got started, you know, I was like, what positions are we looking to work on? To be 100% transparent with you all, it was what is the easiest thing we can make happen, right? Like we have to get this off the ground. Definitely taking it into consideration like the trajectory for this role, right? So that is something that you consider. You're like, what comes next after this? But it was like, what can we get lifted that won't maybe ruffle too many feathers that will just get us moving and gaining momentum? So that was a big piece of it. You take the job sector analysis, you do look at the job projection growth, you look at the trajectory within for mobility, but it was also like, how do we make this happen fast? You know? Mm-hmm. Yeah, for us in Buffalo, we, with the help of New America, did a labor market analysis of what the region's workforce needs were. So we settled on advanced manufacturing, business operations and IT to start with our verticals with, you know, room to grow. We're hoping to expand that. And as we move to year three, so once we had the industries in place, and we had our six inaugural employer partners, like M&T who is a shining star partner in our work, we had partners like Michelle Marie who did those internal campaigns and really figured out what are the entry points that students within those three verticals were able to take on. So there was some deep work that was done and there were also some employer partners that had immediate needs in specific positions that fit within the vertical. So it was a combination of how can we make this work and this is what we need right now. Triangulating the, what can we just do? Right, what's the easiest to do and then what are our employers asking us, right, where we need help? I think it's all of the above, right? Whatever it takes to get it off the ground, right? Like just to get that first one going to build that proof point and then to be able to scale. So I want to talk a little about the college aspect. I mean, I think what is so unique about the apprenticeship we heard today is it's not just workforce training, right? It is not an alternative path for students not going to college. It's an alternative path through college that actually gives meaning, right? And pay has always benefited. So obviously, Stephanie, you're at city colleges of Chicago, Stephanie, you all started as a college promise program, that's so core. How do you really make sure that that balance stays? And I'm actually really curious, how do you also work with your employer partners to make sure they're equally valuing, right? Not just the on the job and the work-based learning component, but also that they're taking college courses and high school courses kind of all the same and make sure that all those things really come together and provide all those options for students. Given our history as a college access organization, it's central to what we do in this program. So it was never a question, I don't think from the beginning as we started to roll this out that the college coursework would be embedded in the program is just a requirement of our employers for them to make time for our students to take that related instruction. And our related instruction is embedded at a local private college. So our students are enrolled in associate degree programs but they're taking them on a part-time basis so they can ease into college because this is an alternative to going to college full-time. But we worked with our employer partners to pick the courses within those programs that we wanted to sequence that would align with the role that they were hired for, for business operations and IT. And then we have a workforce training center, the Northland workforce training center that we partner with for the RTI for our advanced manufacturing roles. But those courses are also college credit-bearing as well. So our tuition scholarship actually pays for the coursework. Our Promise program pays for the coursework and the employers are only covering the wages at that point. I think, you know, sort of similar there, like when we bring on an employer, one of the first things that we do is we evaluate our academic program at CCC, right? So we'll show the employer like, okay, you want an apprentice in machine tech, these are the programs we have at city colleges, we share all the classes, you know, the path, we say, does this make sense? You know, so we'll kind of have it vetted by the employer to make sure that it aligns with what they're gonna be learning. And then the other piece too is, you know, with Roadmap, which I mentioned, the Chicago Roadmap, the second domain of Chicago Roadmap is access to high quality programs. And the goal of that domain is to increase the number of CPS students that are earning early college credits. And one of the ways that we're doing that is with our model pathways. So the model pathways, which we have one in health, we're launching one in IT, we'll have another one in advanced manufacturing. The idea is that all the students that are going through this are able to graduate with up to 15 college credit hours, right, and they have the youth apprenticeship. So by the time they're coming to city colleges, they're just positioned really nicely, right? The other piece too is, which is not necessarily college, but it's a key piece, is we have a youth apprenticeship course. So all of the high school students are enrolled in this youth apprenticeship course. It's an honors course. They get graded for this class based on how they're moving in their work process schedule. And it's also what allows them to leave early from school, right? So I think all of these pieces are important in sort of institutionalizing how this works so that it's not a one-off, but it is just how the work moves. I feel like the amount of work that is under what both of you just described to build all those pieces and have it all come together with all those partners, I mean, you say it a very succinct way, but I mean, I know that that is, there's so much we can learn as we go a level down. So I now want to talk about working with youth, right? What does it actually mean? What's that experience? And I love to start with our employer partners in terms of what have you learned? What has this meant for your companies, for your other partners? What have you learned about working with youth and what that means for your culture? You know, the first thing that I think we, like I think we all probably had an expectation of, now we know that there are high school, for us it's high school graduates and it's more of we cannot assume anything, right? Like I think that is something that once we realize, oh, we may have made an assumption, let's go ahead and correct for that. So for example, you know, in the past, the majority of our work, our managers, et cetera, may have assumed that the students come in with having certain skills with Microsoft Office or certain understanding of email etiquette, right? Or say those things that we just have just assumed would happen, right? Like, so we're trying to, we go into it just knowing that there's certain things we're gonna build in from a programmatic perspective that we're going to provide and then there's gonna be other things that we learned and we have learned that, oh, okay, so let's make sure we build that into the program level support that we're gonna provide. So one of the things that we definitely realize up right off the bat is we want, with similar to what the young leaders are saying earlier, we wanna make sure that we're building that environment that's supportive. So while we have the great partnership we have with CES Buffalo, they have a career success coach, right? Like, that's been important and critical. And at the same time, we have a program management team that's also working with them, some of which are more near peers to them and so that they can feel more comfortable to talk with them so that we can flesh out some of the things that we probably heard and learned from young ladies earlier today and things that we may not have realized we need to actually focus on. So we quickly also, as we set this up, we created, did our best to create an ecosystem so that they came in having a buddy, right? More of that near peer, someone that's assigned to them that they could hopefully get to know, relate to, ask anything they want, right? Anything they want. And in addition to that hiring manager, in addition to, also as they move on, they have a mentor as well. So we're going into it knowing that we don't know everything. And we have to be ready, be empathetic, we have to be ready to listen, to get feedback, to respond and be able to just be open, right? And not go into it with assumptions. So some of the things we've learned too, in particular is the support that may be needed as they're juggling, right? There's a lot going from being in high school, they have to juggle their course curriculum, going to work, doing their homework, all those different things and that again, historically we may not have thought of, like someone else has to, we never had to worry about that with perhaps if you're hiring someone just an entry level role or if you're hiring an intern, et cetera, because it's during a summer break. So what we're finding is that we're building more empathy and more kind of into the program itself. Like it is a requirement for us to listen and to react and be able to work together to solve for the challenge amongst us within our employer base and also with our partners, let's see, yes. For us I would say that it's probably been two things that we've been able to identify and one would be the state of the world that we're in right now and learning what they looks like from a young person's perspective. They're growing up in what this new world will look like in terms of remote learning or hybrid work or even in the way that we engage with youth and employer partners. So like they're going through a lot of changes but then we also notice how the needs of young people have changed over time and they might not need the same things that they did five years ago because we're in a completely different state of living, learning, working. So we've been able to take a little bit of time to actually learn with the students about kind of what the things that they're going through and ways that they might need to be supported. A clear example is remote learning, kind of transitioning from this hybrid virtual work that we were in, we thought that having students on a more learning platform would be better off for them but it's been three years of that and the children are tired of it. So even just having conversations with students about kind of their experience in some of our certification classes and the way that they're engaging with employer partners in their internships whether that's in person or remote, being able to take full advantage of having them in our space to be able to help continue to cultivate the workplace that we're building and shaping not just for us but also for them. It was at a convening last week with partners from JFF and one of the things that stood out to me was a conversation that we were having around creating our workspace to be environments that you feel like they can also be our colleagues in. And to me that really stood out and kind of changed my perspective of the work that I was doing because as an employer partner coming in and training students, we were training students to enter the workforce but are we necessarily training them to be our colleagues sitting right next to us on panels having these same conversations. So I think that just being more mindful and intentional in how we engage and how we understand and listen to young people really does make a difference in how we change the work that we're doing to create better, equitable outcomes for all of them. I think we could all use more empathy generally. And I mean, what I'm hearing is this isn't just benefiting these apprentices. It's benefiting your entire company and frankly this is an insight into what's coming, right? This is the next generation of employees and they're really good like bell, leather and insight into how we do need to involve, right? To continue to be an inclusive, belonging environment which is what younger individuals, what all of us want but especially Gen Z in terms of what they're demanding at the end of the workforce.  So it's a pilot. You started, you've been in works for, I mean you say less than a year but COVID year so that's like a decade.  What's your vision five, 10 years? What does this look like? What's the dream, right? That you keep this going and move from the pilot to the proof? How do you scale it? What does this look like 10 years from now? So definitely more. Yes, I think for us, we do wanna be at scale. So right now we are in sixth of our high schools. Our goals over the next five to 10 year is to be at every high school. We have a team of career coaches that are embedded in the high schools doing the student recruitment. So our plans are to grow that team so that every student in Buffalo that wants access to an apprenticeship will have that access. So that will include recruiting students and making sure we're at scale but also growing our employer partners and relationships. We had an overwhelming response in our first year of student interest in the six high schools that we were in. We had 53 positions in over 1200 applications for those positions. So I think it showed us that the desire is their students want access to good paying jobs and they want them right after high school. So we want to be able to provide those opportunities. So growth, growth is what's next for us. Meet the man of those 1200 students, amazing. Stephanie. I love this question because I love imagining what this could look like in 10 years and five years. I echo a lot of what you're saying, Daphne. But I do want to say one piece that I hope we're at in 10 years and I hope that Career Lawn Chicago plays a pivotal role in really is in demystifying what youth apprenticeships are. And I'm just going to call out like, Stephanie, is this your dad? No, my co-worker. Your co-worker. OK, OK. I was watching him record and I was like, this is all beautiful. Ooh. Still beautiful, by the way. It's so beautiful. It's super beautiful. But in my mind, youth apprenticeships become that thing that families, that co-workers, that caregivers are so excited and proud about. How family brags about that one cousin who got that full four year ride. I want families to brag about their young person in their life who got that youth apprenticeship and is going to move into that next year. And I think a lot of that work is just demystifying what youth apprenticeships are and creating that awareness, especially in our city in Chicago. I feel like that's the reason why I believe youth apprenticeships are so life changing and can be life changing. It's why I do this work with so much tenacity and passion. But it's like, we need to get the word out. We need to get it out more, even more and more and more and louder and louder. So we're at the place where we have tons of employer partners meeting that need that our students are demonstrating and having communities behind this. Like, families need to know what this means because they play a big role in this work. They're part of our ecosystem and they have to know this. Well, thank you all. I want to make sure we've got time for questions from all of you to be able to ask these amazing, there they go. Hello. And Stephanie and Daphne, just to start, thank you, thank you, thank you for your tireless work on this. It's sometimes a thankless job. So your gut, you are both wonderful. And then to your employer partners, Darius and Michelle Marie, like this is so incredible to see employers taking the lead of this work. And so just thank you for what you're doing and for being here. My question to you is kind of two-fold and you touched on it, but I want to go one layer deeper. Were there any specific policies in your company that you had to change to hire these young people? Anything specific that you actually had to change a policy or work with HR to adapt? And then my second question is one of the challenges we have is, how do you get your managers excited about hiring these young people? So you kind of get different camps of that. Some of them are really, really excited. Others are like, this is a lot of work. I'm not sure I know how to do all of this. And so I would love to hear a little bit about how you've inspired that generation of hiring managers, because they're so critical to this movement. And it's a lot of the responsibility and work sort of falls within their camp. I can start. So to address the first question, so one thing that we started to do a little bit more is kind of expand on the current apprenticeship program that we have to bring in more adult learners. So that was a little bit of a barrier with HR, because we realized that a lot of students, participants, interns that come and work at the Rush University Medical Center are typically college level students. But within this last year, we wanted to make sure that we address equity across all fronts. So that meant people that weren't enrolled in college level programs that still were looking for an extra layer of education, of training to get involved, to make connections. So we had to work a little bit with HR to adjust our job descriptions, to remove the barrier of students needing to be enrolled in college to participate in our programs. And we realized that that was a huge barrier that needed to be addressed a long time ago, because it was something that restricted us from engaging with certain communities that still needed that same level of support. So to be able to do that, it helped us increase kind of the work that we were doing, to also have more conversations with our internal and external teams about the barriers that some of our participants were facing. So to the second question of how do we get more of our managers excited about it, is letting them know about this work and bringing them into the conversation and the meetings. One thing I try to do is I try to introduce a lot of our interns and apprentices and students that we work with to a large part of our team so that they can make those connections, can see a familiar face, and so that the person at the top and the top, they're still involved in these experiences with them. They get excited to see a room full of participants that are coming to serve us and to train with us and to learn with us. But I think that a large part of the barrier, sometimes that gets missed in translation. And we do a lot of work. We have a lot of programs that are going on all year long. And for sometimes some of those leader managers, they don't have as much flexibility to be at every event. So one thing I try to do is try to have some of those staple events for the managers to come out and actually see the work that we're doing, for them to be involved in the process, have conversations. They might get five to 10 minutes a part of the program to give their spill of how the proud they are, give a little bit of background to the work that they've been doing as well. Because I think that that's also important for us to be transparent with the participants that we work with on what our journey has looked like. Education-wise, career-wise, young, growing up, whatever that has looked like for us, they're probably also going through similar experiences. So I love for all people on our team to be vulnerable enough to be able to share that so that we can continue to build stronger bonds and relationships with the participants that we do work with. So for us at M&T, we didn't have any policy changes we needed to make. I thought there might have needed to be when it came to thinking about our job architecture, for example, but a few years back, the organization already gone, went through a job architecture kind of this redo. And I say that in the context of being able to see, like for a particular job, a particular level of the job, did they need what's required, right? Like by way of education or experience. And then after working with my colleagues within HR, specifically in the compensation group, we were able to quickly see that, you know what? When we're done, they're gonna meet what's here, right? By way of the education they're getting, by way of whatever certification they're gonna get when they're done, by way of the actual job experience that they're getting while working with us, they're going to meet those requirements. So I was kind of elated that that wasn't a barrier for us, it wasn't a blocker. When it comes to the excitement, you know, there was a couple things. So when I talked about earlier about that campaigning, I intentionally went to people that I knew, like senior leaders and executives, I knew would be excited behind it. And I went to the level that I knew I needed to go to. In some areas it might be the more executive person. In some areas it might be the senior person below someone. Like I knew who to go to to get that excitement and support and then from there it's then like helping, working with them to figure out who the right folks would be to kind of be that person, to be working hand in hand with that apprentice. And what was really helpful too to kind of build up that excitement and then understanding as well is working with CES Buffalo, that racial equity training, that was a great kind of way to kind of level set and start with, this is what we're doing, this is why. And this is some of the things you're gonna be thinking about or need to be thinking about while we're working with our apprentices. And then from there, internally within M&T, we had some orientation efforts, right? We had an orientation training session onboarding, whatever you wanna call it, specifically for our hiring managers, those supervisors, to kind of make sure we demystify kind of what we're talking about even more, at be able to answer their questions, be able to get them excited and see how we're all gonna be working together, how we're creating this ecosystem to support what we're doing. So I think on an ongoing basis, it's that providing the connectivity amongst them as well so that the supervisors can have that networking capability to say, what's working for you? This person may be having a challenge, this manager may be having a challenge over here, this one may, I've got some tools, I've got some ideas, and share it with a program management team so that we can perhaps build that in to the program going forward. So there's a lot of that kind of connectivity and ongoing support so that we can all realize why we're doing this. If we bring it back to the why, like that excitement has to be there and if they're not there, then you're not right for the program, frankly, right? Like, and that's gonna happen and it has happened, it's like, okay, well, we're going to go ahead and make this change now and go ahead and correct for that. So, and we keep going. All right, we might have time for one question or two if they're really quick. So we'll see how. This will be quick. This question is directed toward Stephanie and Daphne. I'm really interested in how you recruit your employee partners. I come from Siemens and we have, I'm proud to say we have a couple of youth apprentices in our company and I feel bad sometimes because I feel like we've exploited these kids.  We're really proud of this and we showcase it, but it's just happened through these connections that the local facility might have had with, you know, their local kind of NCTAP or Chicago, for instance.  Like, you should guys try to see, like, how are, what is the strategy when it comes to employer recruitment? And your employer partners. Yeah. So for us, for the first six employers, they were on board through the exploration phase as we were figuring out what this looks like for our region. So they were already there. They were already committed before a program existed, which was amazing. And we're just recruiting now for year two. And my colleagues that are here, Stephanie, I don't know if she's in the room, she leads our business partnerships. And, you know, for us in Buffalo, thankfully, it just kind of spread organically that this was happening and employers have reached out to us even before we had to go into actively recruiting for positions. They're reaching out to us and we got a lot of, we did a press conference in the fall and got a lot of publicity there. So with our goals for next year of 50 apprentices, we already have our six coming back, but we also have about 15 that have expressed interest. Some organically, we did reach out to a few of them and we do work with our local Chamber of Commerce as well to bring in new employer partners as well. So we're lucky in a position where employers are asking us, how can we be involved in the program? I'll try to be quick, like I see it. So for career launch Chicago, we knew we had like focus sector. So similarly, you know, we wanted to do advanced manufacturing, IT, health. We grew beyond that. And how we bring employers is I am like cold calling. I am knocking. I am going to places. I'm sharing what career launch Chicago is. I am finding where their employer tables can I present in front of them, right? So there is a lot of like drive, you know, I'm pushing and pushing and pushing. We had six employer partners in our first cohort. We're getting ready for cohort two, where we had 21 apprentices year one. We're going to have, we have 68 slots for year two. We went from six to 14 employer partners. And now it's getting easier because the word is out, right? And like I think that's been key is like, the more we do this work, the more people know and hear, like all of our year one partners are returning, right? That says something. That says they enjoyed the experience. They're telling people that they know. And so that's, I think that organic piece is going to happen. But year one was a lot of like, Hey, I got this thing.  Great. Well, please join me in thanking our amazing panel. I am very pleased to introduce our next panel. So we've gotten a chance this morning to hear from apprentices, from employers and from intermediaries. Our next panel is going to focus on policymakers. So youth apprenticeships provide seamless pathways from high school to the workforce and higher education. But it asks a lot of those systems and building bridges across those systems is no easy feat. So our next panel will focus on some federal and state level system leaders who are leading ambitious change agendas to align those systems to support the expansion of youth apprenticeship. So our panelists who are going to make their way out shortly include Tony Harrell who is a state director of career and technical education with the Indiana office of CTE under the governor's workforce cabinet. Since joining the office of CTE, he's been heavily involved with redesigning Indiana's CTE programs of study and work-based learning. Tony has also served in school administration as a principal, an assistant principal and a dean of students for over nine years. And he has also taught business education and economics and served as a professional career internships coordinator for 12 years before becoming an administrator. Meanie Lamar is a senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Labor. In this role he advises on federal workforce policies and legislation. He leads and supports industry engagement strategies, registered apprenticeship priorities and sector-based strategies. Previously, Meanie served as the founding executive director of the Nevada Governor's Office of Workforce Innovation where he focused on career pathways, apprenticeships and statewide strategies for strengthening the workforce system. Dr. Bruce Mack is here with us. He is the vice president of economic development for the North Carolina Community College System. And prior to taking this position, Dr. Mack served as the vice president of economic and workforce development for Cleveland Community College where he served for 25 years as a faculty member, a director, a dean and vice president. Prior to working in higher education, he came from industry where he worked as a manufacturing engineer and an applications engineer. And these panelists will be capably moderated by Rachel Stevens Parker who serves as the director of workforce development and economic policy at the NGA Center for Best Practices. Rachel oversees research policy guidance and technical assistance to governors and state leaders on expanding equitable access to economic opportunity. Current areas of focus include workforce and economic development innovations for a more equitable economy, including youth apprenticeship. So with that, I will turn it over to Rachel Stevens Parker. Thank you so much, Kelly. Thank you, everyone. It's such an honor and privilege to be here and be part of celebrating four amazing years of the partnership to advance youth apprenticeship. I've just got to start briefly by saying the National Governors Association is so proud to be part of this partnership and to be involved in and supporting the work of so many amazing grantees that are part of PIA and are doing incredible things to really advance and elevate young people across the country. So thank you on behalf of governors across our 55 states and territories for everything you're doing in their communities. Just a kind of quick introduction on other reasons. I'm here in addition to our involvement in PIA. The National Governors Association, I mentioned 55 governors of our states and territories that we really exist to serve and represent those governors and their interests and their policy priorities. And the Center for Best Practices, where my team is, exists to sort of help them explore innovative solutions, identify best and emerging practices to help them achieve their goals in creating better economic opportunities in every community within their states and their territories. Youth apprenticeship and other models of high quality work-based learning for young people have been and are continuing to grow as a huge priority for our members across the board. And I think that's really reflected, you know, the reasons for that are reflected in the conversations we've had so far here today and in the achievements of the grantees over the last four years. I'm really excited for our conversation today because I have the honor of talking to an incredible group of panelists here about one of the biggest challenges that we see in our work when we work really in many policy areas at the state level, certainly in youth apprenticeship, and that's the challenge of alignment. Aligning across education, workforce, economic development, post-secondary education systems, employers, it's challenging. It's hard, a little hard to talk about but it's really hard to do. And so we have some wonderful panelists here who are the doers and the change makers, as Taylor said earlier, and I'm really honored to be here learning with them and with you all today. So to start, I'd like to kind of invite each panelist. We were kindly introduced by Kelly with New America but if each of you could just share a little bit more about what you're doing in youth apprenticeship, kind of the unique vantage point you're bringing to this discussion on alignment to support and advance youth apprenticeship, that would be wonderful. And I'd also love if you could include why this, why youth apprenticeship became such a priority for your state or in Manny's case, the Department of Labor. We'll start with you. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you guys for having me. It's a pleasure to be here with you. We're just excited about this journey. Just a lot of great things happen in the great state of North Carolina. We have a lot of alignment that's happened in between the K-12 system and the community college system. In North Carolina, we have 116 LEAs. We have 58 community colleges as well. We've seen some really work around, some great work around youth apprenticeship and since 2017 since we came over with the PIA initiative. Of course, this all was done before I joined the system office. I joined the community college system office last June of last year. I do want to recognize our director who's actually over the apprenticeship program, Katherine Castells. She's actually in the audience here as well. Thank you, Katherine, for all you do. But Katherine's been with the apprenticeships for a while.  But a convergence happened in 2017 at the community college system that really it was just an initiative of a lot of different things going on. We had the PIA initiative going on. We had our apprenticeship program that moved from the Department of Labor. It went to commerce for a short while. Then it moved to the community college system as well. So we had a lot of different things happening in North Carolina. We changed up our workforce system as well. We went to workforce boards. We went to prosperity zones as well. So when we look at the work that's been done around youth apprenticeships, and I think North Carolina has really strategically positioned themselves to do youth apprenticeship as well. When I think in 2017, we had about just a little over 600 youth apprentices between the ages of 16 and 18. When I looked at the numbers this year, we were right at 1400. And that's this actual fiscal year. So last year we had about 14, 20. And then we're almost at that number this year. So we've more than doubled our numbers in North Carolina as it relates to youth apprenticeship. And I think a lot has to do with, of course, all of these initiatives that's happened, including the PIA initiative as well. So let's kind of give North Carolina a round of applause for doubling those numbers. Thank you. So it's great to be here. I feel like I'm kind of crashing the party a little bit. Part of the reason I say that is the lion's share of the work around youth apprenticeships in Indiana has been completed by local intermediaries, including Ascend, who is one of the partners. But we also have some other groups in our state. HEA out of Elkhart, which is in the northern part of the state, has always been involved in this. I think where we kind of came into the play. So the office of CTE is very a little bit uniquely positioned in the state of Indiana. We serve under the governor's workforce cabinet rather than the Department of Education. There's only one other state that has it structured that way. I think that kind of gave us a kind of a natural connection to the workforce development side of this, which, as we go through, I'll probably talk more about today just because I think that's so vital to what we're doing. But also as a part of being under basically our state workforce board, our office has been spending the last three to four years redesigning every one of our CTE programs of study. And it just became so apparent that the same goals that we had for our CTE programs and what we wanted to accomplish through our CTE programs were the exact same goals that we were talking about when we were talking about improving high quality work-based learning experiences and specifically looking at the youth apprenticeship model kind of as a way of delivering those CTE programs. So about a year ago, this time, it wasn't formal, but basically informally, our office has kind of accepted responsibility for the work-based learning experiences, youth apprenticeship work that's taking place at the state level. Again, it's just one of those things that kind of happened. It wasn't something formal or anything like that. But I think what we've come to realize over the last six months or really the last year or so in working more closely with Ascend and some of the other intermediaries is that they've done great work up until this point, but we really need to have more support from the state level to really help grow this out and to help scale this out. So that's why this is so important. That's why it's great to be here today. Tired to be here. I feel like a little bit of deja vu, because when Paya launched a few years back, I was on the other side sitting at the state and governor's office. But in terms of involvement and engagement, we really see this at the Department of Labor, a sense of urgency. We feel a sense of urgency. You all may already be familiar with some of the statistics already, but we have 4 million youth that are disconnected in the country. We have an unemployment rate of 8 and 1 half percent for young adults. And so when we look at those statistics, it creates a sense of urgency. At the Department of Labor is complimented by the fact that our acting assistant secretary and our secretary both have a deep passion and background and engagement around young adults, particularly around thinking about youth apprenticeship opportunities. So it kind of marries those worlds together, as well as, for me, in my background, when I was at the state level, one of the things that kind of really pushed us working with NGA a lot through the work-based earning cohorts, but some of our broader work is I had surveyed 1,000 young people. My belief is, go to the source that's closer to the problem or the issue, or they're going to be closer to the solution. And so serving 1,000 young people across the state, both in terms of focus groups and literally talking to them, the lessons that we learned from hearing from them drove an initiative to help us get new legislation at the state level to particular around young adult opportunities, particular around thinking strategic around youth employment. Now, I say that to say is, now at the federal level, it's helpful to blend both the state and federal kind of perspective. And at the Department of Labor, we've articulated an explicit priority around youth employment, around youth pathways and youth apprenticeship. And really, those priorities consist of three things. One is a business commitment to young adults. We know that, quite frankly, for this to be successful, we need employers at the table to engage. So a lot of our work is around connecting with industry and elevating. And we hear that from industry. That sense of urgency, that they need to find the talent. And we know that the longer it takes to connect to a young adult to create these youth apprenticeship opportunities, the harder it is. And the more expensive it becomes, quite frankly. Number two is, we want a no wrong door approach. And so that really connects to the local workforce board. I sat on the state workforce board. And we always talked about the resources around supportive services. So as we think about youth apprenticeship, it's the importance of thinking about some of the challenges we hear with this transportation, insurance. There are solutions that already exist. And we just have to get the partners together. So that's number two. And then the third one is, quite frankly, and this is where, again, youth apprenticeship is paid work experience. So we know that, quite frankly, when we talk about equity and the importance of it, if the young people aren't being paid quite frankly, then we're being limiting the opportunities to individuals that aren't able to. So that paid work experience, business commitment to young people. And number three is, paid work experience, business commitment to young people in no wrong door approach. Those are our three guidelines at the Department of Labor that will drive my discussion today. Awesome. Thank you so much, Manny. And it's really striking to me to hear shared across the stage here the level of urgency around this and what's built such momentum over the last four years through the initiatives, including PIA. And just thinking about where we can go in the next four years with a shared momentum is really exciting. Bringing the great programs that so many of us are working on to scale, alignment across K-12 post-secondary workforce is a really important component of that. And Tony, I think you really touched on that and kind of the sense of urgency around doing that in Indiana. I'd love to get a little more specific on exactly kind of why it's so hard kind of defining the challenge. So each of you could maybe share in your view, what do you see as some of the biggest challenges in state or federal policy that's facing K-12, higher ed, and workforce efforts to really align and scale youth apprenticeship programs. We'll start there, and then I'm on a more positive note about some things you see working well. Manny, why don't we start with you this time? Sounds good. So I see three things as challenges and also opportunities to alignment. The first one is coordination. And so we have these different worlds. Sometimes I jokingly say they're like cousins. So weoah, Perkins, apprenticeship, they're really all cousins. They are in terms of the connection to the federal government. And oftentimes they're seen almost as unrelated relatives. So we're trying to put things together. So the first part is coordination. And what that means is having a central point, whether it's an office, individuals, or a group of individuals, that's helping to coordinate across. Number two, I think, is language. And so this ties into the coordination because sometimes I'll give a concrete example. In apprenticeship, we say RTI, Related Technical Instruction. And so I remember being on the State Workforce Board and we were working with Perkins and CTE and we were doing the New Skills for Youth Initiative. Someone from CTE would say, would not realize that. We're always just talking about discussion and instruction. It's not way more fancier than it needs to be, but that's just the term that we use. And so translating that language. So I think number two is language. So coordination, language, those are like two, I think, really key pieces. The third quick one on policy, I think it's just the incentive structure. So I think about high school graduation requirements. When we talk about youth apprenticeship, quite frankly, if you're still incentivized as a counselor or graduation is how many students are going directly into a four-year institution, which is fine, but if that's the only incentive, then there's not a mechanism to incentivize the ecosystem to pursue and scale youth apprenticeships because it's not part of the intent. There's that saying, we measure, people essentially align to what they're being measured about. And so I think at state levels and of course at federal, how do we incentivize so that if you create a youth apprenticeship, if you have done people going into youth apprenticeship program, you're also rewarded for that as well as if they're going into transitioning into a traditional post-secondary. No, I'm glad you mentioned, I think we've started to see some really interesting movement at the state level around things like graduation requirements and some of those other metrics, which is great, Tony. Yeah, so I think you were sitting in the same conversations that we've been having for the last three or four years because those are all the same things and it's really interesting to me to think about this from, so I was a business education teacher who never even really thought of himself as a CTE teacher because that was the trades down at the other end of the hallway to a building level principal who then thought he knew CTE, who then went to work and found out everything that's in Perkins and now has transitioned over to kind of the workforce development side of this and now see like all the things that are in Wioa that are also in Perkins. So I think the hardest thing though, like when you're talking about K-12 to higher ed is they don't know Wioa and sometimes that's intentional, right? I mean, I've always said that education doesn't like thinking of themselves as workforce development. That is not, you know, it's the joy of learning, it's not necessarily that they're preparing them for the future and I think that's a real challenge. I think the other thing that we kind of are still battling in Indiana is we've had this, we've had an incredibly broad system of CTE. Like we do about 67% of our students participate in CTE courses during their high school year. We are extremely blessed to our state made about $170 million investment into CTE enrollments last year. That's above and beyond Perkins. That's state level dollars. So schools are really incentivized to offer CTE programs. But also at the same time, we deliver it through a variety of models. So we have career centers, we have co-ops, we have individual schools, comprehensive high schools that are offer