 Welcome everyone. Thank you for being here and being part of this exciting event. I'm excited to be here today to officially announce a new workforce training program that members of the city's team, the CEDO team and many partners have worked hard to get underway. And we've got a number of folks from CEDO here. We're here later from Brian Pine, our CEDO director, but I also want to call out our assistant director Jillian Nanton, who has worked so hard on many city workforce development projects. And this one has been a real passion of hers. The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear the essential nature of caregiving and health care services. In particular, the COVID-19 emergency combined with the changing aging demographics of Vermont has put acute pressures on skilled nursing facilities and long-term care providers, whose staffs have worked incredibly hard and really at considerable personal risk over the last 15 months to protect and care for our most vulnerable neighbors. Our community-wide effort over the 457 days of the COVID-19 emergency here in Burlington brought with it many lessons and innovations that I am confident we can and will rely on to forge progress towards a stronger and better future. This new workforce training program is an example of that. This program is called Moving On, Moving Up, and it is for licensed nursing assistance. And what it does is to leverage both the knowledge we gained by facing the unique pressures of the pandemic response and by using the prism of equity and planning, executing and iterating our emergency response to really create this new program. What makes this program unique is that it intentionally lowers barriers to participation by providing wraparound services. Not just the job training, but wraparound services like technology, transportation and childcare support, in addition to the soft skills development, intensive technical instruction, and paid real-world work experience. The first two cohorts of this program, including the pilot phase that began in May, reflect that investment in equity. Participating in this training are women, former refugees, immigrants, and people of color who I know will, in turn, apply the skills and opportunity this program provides them to support a whole healthy and thriving community here in Burlington. As we work together to make progress both on our economic recovery and tackling racism as a public health emergency, I have great hope that the Moving On, Moving Up program, and hopefully future programs like this, will have a real and immediate impact by supporting BIPOC Burlingtonians in moving into meaningful and well-paying careers and by expanding access and equity in health care across our region to everyone who needs it. Now, I am pleased to turn over the microphone. We're going to hear from a number of folks here. I'll introduce them as they come up to the podium. The first person we're going to hear from is Sarah Hoffman, who is the Interim Director of Nursing, Education, and Professional Development at the UVM Medical Center. And Sarah, thank you for everything the Medical Center has done for the community throughout this incredible period, and we're excited to hear from you today. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm so pleased to be here with you. I'm Sarah Hoffman. I'm a registered nurse and the Interim Director of Nursing, Education, and Professional Development at the UVM Medical Center. I'd like to take a moment and thank the City of Burlington, as well as the community members that are interested in pursuing opportunities in health care. We are so grateful to be proud. We are grateful and proud to be part of this program and this collaboration. So as we heard from Mayor Weinberger about the shortage in health care related to many factors, this is definitely an opportunity to address that complex issue, one that can be solved with strategic partnerships such as this. We are so appreciative that the City of Burlington directed some of their Community Development Block Grant funding to support our local community's members' access to LNA training and certification. We definitely see this as an example of those strategic partnerships that we will need to navigate these times in health care. This program will not only help fill the void in our area, but will provide an ongoing opportunity for all of the participants within health care. All graduates of the program will be eligible to sit for the state LNA licensing exam and upon completion will be qualified to take LNA positions across the state, of which there are many, not only in the acute care setting that I'm very familiar with at the UVM Medical Center, but also at some of our other partners that you'll hear from today. LNAs are so critical in providing the high-quality patient-centered care and the need for this position will just continue to grow. We are particularly glad that this program extends to our many-valued community partners as we know that having strong community-based clinical support makes our community members healthier and able to live independently for longer. Thank you. Thank you, Sarah. The next we are going to hear from Mohamed Basha, who is the CEO and founder of TLC Home Care, a key partner in this initiative. So, Mohamed, welcome. Thank you and thank you, Jillian, for bringing this to us and having as part of this amazing program. TLC Home Care is proud to be able to offer the LNA workforce training program in partnership with CDO. TLC Home Care has been offering LNA training program to our community since 2018. As many LNA training programs are dismantling due to teaching staff shortages, TLC has heavily invested in our training program by building a dedicated training center at our office on Williston Road in South Burlington. According to a new report from Professional Healthcare Institute, caregiver shortage could mean 7.8 million unfilled jobs by 2026, which is only five years away. Caregivers such as these LNAs are at the front line of delivering care. Caregivers, more specifically caregiving, is one aspect of healthcare that cannot be outsourced to artificial intelligence or to any robotic technology that has become prevalent in our daily lives. We've been aware of healthcare staffing shortage and of the crisis over the last 10 years and we're just at the onset of the healthcare shortage. Staffing crisis is further amplified in Vermont due to our rapidly aging population. At TLC Home Care, we believe that investing in our community by helping trained people who have the desire and the earning to care for others. CEDOS LNA workforce training program removes any financial or technical barriers allowing TLC Home Care to train those who are looking for a career path in healthcare. We're just a small piece of the puzzle in helping address this crisis today and we are proud of the solution we're able to deliver to our community. Thank you. Thank you, Mohammed. We will next hear from Catherine Titus who is the Director of Operations here at Cathedral Square. Catherine, thanks for hosting us today and welcome. Thank you. Thank you everybody for coming to Cathedral Square. Cathedral Square has provided housing for over 40 years and converted the bottom three floors of this property next to us to affordable assisted living over 18 years ago due to the growing care need. In addition, we opened the first affordable memory care focused on assisted living in Williston four years ago. Recruiting well-trained direct care staff have become increasingly difficult in recent years and this last year of the COVID-19 pandemic has been especially challenging. Our direct care staff have shown dedication, love and courage in the face of the most trying circumstances and when loved ones became separated by windows lockdowns and travel restrictions it was our direct care workers that became their family not only for the residents but also for each other. They're truly amazing. This training opportunity which came out of a group of senior providers meeting with the city officials through the pin throughout the pandemic is so needed. We are excited to participate as an on-site clinic is training for the part of the LNA workforce initiative and encourage direct care staff to highlight their knowledge and skills and offer the students a connection to the long-term care community here in Burlington. It's inspiring that this initiative creates a collaborative network of providers that historically have been competing for staffing. Cathedral Square is thrilled to be partnering with CEDO, TLC Nursing, the Ethan Allen residents, UVM Medical Center in this program to build a workforce pipeline that can address our current critical staffing crisis and provide an ongoing training opportunity for direct care workers in long-term care. Through our collaboration we can address a vital need in assisted living and residential care while providing LNA training opportunities for Vermonters that is second to none. We are so grateful that the city of Burlington and Gillian Hinton have recognized this issue and responded to this challenge which all of us are facing. This exciting initiative not only recognizes the importance of continuing to provide high quality care and affordable long-term care services to our older Vermonters but it also provides accessible training for critical compassion-based work for Vermonters looking to serve our community. Thank you. Thank you, Catherine. Next we'll hear from Mary Moujie who is the administrator at the Ethan Allen resident. Mary, thank you. Thank you. So my heart's racing. I don't know if it's racing because I'm nervous or it's racing because we're talking about elders. You know, elders in our society are not a priority and I applaud the city for making it a priority. It's been a very very difficult year and the support of the city has been vital to our success. You know, it said it takes a village to raise a child but we all know it takes no less to uphold our elders and this training program established by the city is a terrific example of the community coming together and caring for some of our most vulnerable Vermonters, our elders. So we're very grateful to be a part of this and look forward to hosting the clinical part of this program and the support that the city has offered us over the last year and a half. We've been on weekly calls with them identifying issues and problems and for them to hear what our problems were and then to act was great. So I thank the city very much and I'm happy to be a part of this. Thank you for that, Mary. Speaking on behalf of the city team, I think it was a privilege to work with the senior providers that were doing such heroic work throughout and do anything that we could from the city to support those efforts was very meaningful for everyone on the city team and we certainly are excited about this opportunity to learn from that and expand on that and make this part of our community even stronger going forward. We have two more speakers. We have next Sanya Stewart who is one of the LNA students. So Sanya, welcome. Hi, my name is Sanea Stewart and I am lucky to be part of the first cohort for this CEDO LNA training and this is a great opportunity that I was giving. I've faced a lot of obstacles in life and this has been a great opportunity to further my education and a stepping stone to go further in the medical field and become an RN and I'm so grateful for that. Not only for that but this program is great for people of color, people who are diverse in our community because we don't have a lot of things like this for us and it's really, really great to see that people come together to help us to succeed and this program is so supportive. I went through a little obstacle while being in this program and I got a little discouraged and Marnie, she helped me through it a lot and she she did her job and she looked at things and she came back to me and she was like, well we can do this and we can do that and she helped me a lot through that and there's not so many other LNA programs who are supportive. They just want you to come and work but they're helping. You guys are actually helping us and I'm thankful for that and also with the program comes child care. They help you with child care and I have a daughter myself. She's three years old and it's great that you're giving education but also you're helping us with our children and a lot of people don't have a lot of people are single parents like myself and it's great that there's workshops and things set up so that we can succeed and also with the soft skills that our first training was last night, it was very great. It was also great to learn new things and to know how the work environment is changing over time and you think you know, oh I'm professional but there's always more to learn. There's always more to learn and thank you. Thank you for this great opportunity. Senea, thank you for sharing all that and for being part of this program and good luck. Finally, Brian Pine, I think I can still say our new director of the Community Economic Development Office is here and Brian, please bring us home here. Sure, thanks Mr. Mayor. Thanks to Cathedral Square for for having us today. I do want to acknowledge the work that Gillian Nanton has put into this program. Largely her creation, her idea has come to fruition here and the idea is one that CEDO has been promoting for the four decades that we've been in existence which is that the economy needs to work for the people of this community in order for it to truly be a just and sustainable local economy. So when Gillian set out to create this program, it wasn't just to respond to the incredible needs for additional people in the field of nursing which is critical but it was also to recognize that overcoming barriers isn't something we can expect people to do who are facing those barriers themselves. We've got to do a true embrace of the people who are going through a program to make it meaningful and to reach folks who are facing lots of challenges in life and so I actually started my career in the Old North End 35 years ago doing job training and we tried to do what we thought was sort of an innovative idea which is high school dropouts were renovating old buildings and we did pretty well. We renovated a lot of buildings. We got some kids who were otherwise heading for trouble out of trouble but we didn't do enough to make sure that we were supporting their entire them in an entire way in a holistic way and when I look back on that it's a bit of a regret because we had an opportunity there. We had support. We built support in the community. We had business community support, state government support and it's exciting to have an initiative coming out of City Hall that is really focused on removing the barriers because as we talk about recovering from the pandemic and we want the recovery to be one that's robust and that folks who were really hurt by the pandemic especially low income people, people of color, people with disabilities were hurt badly by the pandemic, we can't just hope and hope is not enough it's not a strategy it needs to be more than that and so I think we've proven here is that with a program that's well designed with all the partners here today we can provide people with not just the hope but the actual support to take their dreams and aspirations and hopefully improve their lives for the long term so I'm really grateful to be part of this. I feel like I just sort of showed up at the last game of the World Series and we get the trophy and I get to hold up the trophy so I didn't do much except to support Gillian and the Mayor of course provided lots of support to make that happen so thank you. Well great thank you everyone for really fleshing out this program, sharing what it's about, where it's headed. We'd be happy to try to answer a few questions if there are any. Good. Because I always wanted to help people. I feel like I'm here to help and that's what I want to do. I want to help people in any way that I can and I also feel like my grandmother was a big reason why I wanted to go into the medical field. She passed from breast cancer and just seeing and to be able to work with people and to just help them and the time that they need so that's why. Yeah I'm gonna, I believe this is primarily funded through the Community Development Block Grant program. Yeah that's right it's a Community Development Block Grant program is a federal program that the city gets a direct allocation. This is from our federal allocation so this is federal dollars that come straight to the city of Burlington and we are investing that money in this program and I believe the figure is 130,000 at this point. Yeah great great question. Do you want to speak to like okay go ahead Jillian come on up. Sure yeah just to get it right my name is Jillian Nanton. I'm an Assistant Director in CEDO and I hail from Barrie Vermont. That's a joke folks. I'm not from Barrie Vermont I'm from the Caribbean but I'm an honorary Burlingtonian. The mayor has dubbed me that I've been here for five and a half years. So in terms of folks now getting connected to this program we have done a series of social media advertising front porch forum. We have flied the city and I just want to underscore and I figured this question would come up so that we understand what we're talking about here. The first cohort of students they started on the 24th of May. The maximum in any cohort is eight students. We had seven students because there was a short lead time between when the documents were executed the contract and here I want to pay particular you know I want to really extend my appreciation right to Mohamed Bashar and I say this because I was initially working this program with perhaps this is better left unsaid right but one of the training institutions and in March I started last October and in March of this year they said they didn't have the capacity to do it and so I was scrambling looking around to see who could deliver this program because the program was going to happen and so we started to google I consulted with man we googled and we came up on TLC home care and without missing a beat Mohamed said yeah yeah we'll take it on yeah we'll do this program so I'm truly grateful and so the program was launched with a little bit of delay and so in your first cohort as I said seven students you have and just to give you a flavor we had 19 applicants right to pick and we picked seven people the second cohort we have the maximum of eight they will begin their training next Tuesday we have 22 applicants we haven't done a whole heap of advertising and I know that the ceremony today and the mayor's you know official launch will ratchet up this program and give it greater visibility so may you're on the block here right for additional funding because this is not the end of the road this is something that with no no no and I say this because the state is already talking about replicating this program and I have to say hold on we need to get some results first you can't replicate right until we see the results so long answer to your question there is great interest in the program and the other point I want to underscore is targeted to Burlington's underserved populations and we heard this and so what we're seeing quite a number of unemployed folks are interested in the program the under are employed and folks who are working part time so that's the cohort this this second cohort which will begin on Tuesday it's all all immigrants and refugees we didn't set it up that way but that's how it has turned out the first cohort of seven we have four immigrant and refugee folks in the program we have two BIPOC and one white person so um I figured you would want some details I mean understanding the press and so came prepared right to kind of answer at your question so all right um there is we have um information on CEDO's website and there is the application on our website and so you go um you fill out the application that comes to us and then there is a screening process right which follows we interview Mania and I interview our applicants and we want people to succeed to be honest with you there were a few applicants whose English proficiency was not up to par this is a good story and one young lady in particular she was so disappointed she couldn't go into the first cohort we are about to sign an MOU we mean in CEDO with the Vermont adult learning so that they can work with students to get their English language skills up to speed this young lady did that and guess what she is in the cohort starting on next Tuesday the 13th of July so there are five cohorts and the overall goal is to train up 35 35 um students from Burlington's underserved communities over one year period okay all right well thank you everyone for coming thank you again everyone involved in in getting this launch right and uh we look forward to hearing updates and and seeing this program blossom from here so then we can talk about replicating it once we once you do all right thanks everybody