 Thank you so much for the great panelists and this very interesting discussion around the potential of social enterprises to generate and to create income generating opportunities and contribute to sustainable development. Thank you once more. Next, we will have an intimate fire chat between Carolina Valencica and I hope I said that right. Carolina vice president of social impact at BlackRock and Mariana Costa, CEO and founder of Laboratoria. One of BlackRock grantees, they will be discussing their in different through their different perspective and lenses challenges and opportunities for upscaling the global workforce through their work. You will gain insights into their specific work and that funder and grantee perspective this discussion will also address how Laboratoria and BlackRock are navigating global chugs such as COVID-19. So let me introduce them briefly. Carolina has more than a decade of strategic grant making and advocacy experience as a vice president of social impact at BlackRock. She manages the economic mobility grant portfolio and oversees operations for the global grant making and employee platforms. Carolina holds an MPA in development practice from Columbia University and a master of arts in English studies and literature from the Catholic University of Lublin in Poland. Carolina is a co-founder and CEO of Laboratoria, an organization that trains women from underserved backgrounds as software developers and connects them to companies in need of their talent. She has received multiple recognitions from her work including being named one of Peru's leading innovators by the MIT and one of the world's most influential women by the BBC. She holds bachelors in international relations from the London School of Economics and Master's Degree in Public Administration in Development Practice from Columbia University. I am personally very excited about this fireside chat because they're both graduated from the MPA in Development Practice program at Columbia University which I'm an alumni myself. This program is also an academic partner for this event so we want to give them a huge thank you for their continued support. But further to say let's let me pass it over to Carolina. Over to you Carol and welcome. Thank you for the introduction Mariela, it is a pleasure to be here today. My name is Carolina Valencik and I'm a Vice President of Social Impact at BlackRock. Social Impact at BlackRock seeks to help advance more inclusive and sustainable economy and in my role I manage a portfolio of grants focused on job access as a pathway for economic mobility. BlackRock has been supporting Laboratoria since 2017 and from day one Mariana you know very well we've been impressed with the outcomes that your organization is achieving and the impact you have on the lives of all of your students and special focus that you put into building a community of women. It has been great to see how your organization has grown from 2017 until this year and earlier this year we actually connected to discuss Laboratoria to discuss the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on your organization. This is something that we did with each of our grantees because we believe it's very important to understand the challenges and opportunities that our grantees are facing and to also know what we as a founder can do to support you through this transition. I would like to go back to the conversation about COVID-19 and how it has impacted Laboratoria and how it has impacted your model perhaps but before we do that I think it would be very helpful if you could tell us a little bit more about the history of Laboratoria what's really initiated the idea and what do you seek to accomplish. Yes thank you so much Carolina it's a pleasure to be here and it's been a pleasure to work with BlackRock over the past few years as we've grown. So Laboratoria was born as an idea almost seven years ago so it's been a long time and my co-founders and I moved to Peru after living for many years abroad and we actually started a software company and did an agency to go and build websites for clients and while doing that we faced the challenge of growing our own team of software developers and we realized that it was actually really hard to find software developers back then and it was growing demand for this profile and just they weren't enough so that was an opportunity. The second thing that was really interesting is that the world of software I think is probably one of the first spaces that has understood that really skills are more important than degrees it's really about the skillset that you have and we realized that many of the people in our team had no official degree but they were building a great career and that for me was like this is amazing it's like a loophole in the system and it's a path to actually build a really inclusive industry and the third thing obviously is that there were really like very very few women in the space it was almost impossible our team grew we had 15 people and no women so we said okay this is interesting we have a space a market space that has huge demand for talent it's very flexible so you can get in people that don't necessarily have a degree and it desperately needs women and it's if we look at the other side of the equation what are young women doing in Latin America unfortunately as I always say we are just missing a huge opportunity because of so much talent that it's untapped just because of the opportunity no women are really underrepresented in the labor market they're overrepresented in spaces in the labor market that are less skilled so we said okay this is it no let's build something here and that's how the idea was born what is laboratory experience like what is what is your model how does a woman go through your door and what does she then participate in yes so we start now with a call for applicants and an admissions process where we're looking for women that haven't been able to start a professional career yet so they're either not working or they're working a very a low skill job that has a very low ceiling and and have the talent and potential and the will to do more no so we look more for potential than prior experience those that get admitted to the program and go through a six-month immersive bootcamp it's it's a full-time bootcamp that not only seeks to to help them build technical skills as front-end developers or ux designers but that also has a huge focus on life skills work skills that the soft skills that are really the hardest ones to build but the most important ones to have and we we've designed our program in a way that really replicates the experience of working in the software industry no i think that that's the most important part with actually engaged companies to be part of that design from the get-go so that we can make sure that in six months our students are ready to go out and add value in a company and i think it's also a very communal experience there's a very strong element of community we have around 500 students a year that are there together all of them pursuing the same dream that it's not really just oh you know what i will learn some code and and that's cool it's really about changing their their lives changing their futures no and using technology to transform their futures for the better and then once they go out they start working and we have a placement rate of over 80% sometimes it's we even have some cohorts where we replace 90 95% of our graduates and they on average nearly triple their income so there's a significant increase there and they they join this vibrant community of almost 2000 women now that are out there that have this this strong will to open more opportunities for more women in tech and that are through their own leadership through their contribution to their companies through what they're doing in their communities i think they're really transforming not only the tech sector for the better but eventually i hope that our region for the better well we definitely can see it already happen and as you talk about how you have grown and you have grown so much since since you started what have been perhaps some of the lessons that you learned in how you work with employers did you have to go through some kind of attitude shift with them like did you have to do a lot of explaining that your your graduates are really good candidates for the jobs that they are seeking to fill yes so at the beginning our first employers i think were the more flexible companies the ones that fell in love with the idea and that you know their processes could be shifted around easily so we had many startups many digital agencies smaller companies as we started having more traction we started reaching out to the big companies not to the big banks the big retailers insurance companies the government and it's it's been really interesting to see because on those 30 days many of these big corporates were like oh but i really need that degree you know sorry that's part of my process i need someone with a five-year university degree and but with time they started changing that so they were like okay i'll take part in an event and they participated in one of our placement hack at both and then they were okay i'll do anything that i can to change whatever i need to change because i really want this type of talent it's fresh you know it's different from what i have and that's that also implies value we make sure that our students really are they they learn in a way where they start leaving the the agile values from the first day so they're used to be very proactive giving feedback collaborating well so i think that our our bed was let's just make sure that we can be the best program out there uh that the best place to find junior tech talent and that's how we'll convince companies and and that's how it happened so now we have every sort of company in every industry you know from digital to mining hiring talents from laboratoria and and that's really exciting to see because those companies are now better equipped to build more diverse and inclusive teams from the get go and one last thing that i love is that in our first i would say two years really a large number of our graduates were the first woman to join a team of software developers so many of them were the first now that actually only happens very rarely because most of the companies come back and be hired so now many of the recruiters that we have in our events are our own alumni know that joined the company started growing and they come back so i think it is this virtual cycle where you make sure that you start having a solid pipeline of diverse talent with time that really changes those teams and those companies for the better this is fantastic and really great to hear that you have those long-standing relationships and now that you know your graduates are really the hiring managers this is fantastic and and and you know we we've been talking a lot over the years about how we can do like give an opportunity to more women right what's like how to scale while not losing this very very nuanced and and details you know approach that you that you have to each of your students and how it is very critical that they feel a part of community and there is this attention on them but then we know that the need is immense and right now in covid with millions of people who are out of jobs how can we scale the programs so maybe if we pivot to that and the world right now do you see apart from the challenges any opportunities because of because of the pandemic yes this is this is the question that i go to bed with every night know how do we scale our work because i think it's a really powerful solution but it's it's it's challenging to scale i i i wish we would reach thousands of women a year with our boot camp but interestingly interestingly enough i think covid has opened a number of new opportunities so we went remote when the pandemic began it was challenging at the beginning but a few months into it we said okay you know what we've learned so much we're seeing opportunities arise we should just stay like this and i mean instead of holding to all as as soon as we can go back we'll go back let's just take the opportunity to transform ourselves too and and we've done that so now we're going to stay remote and first impact that we're seeing for example our centers our physical centers were in the capital cities you know that's where you get most of the demand for 10 jobs so that was a limitation in terms of how many women we could reach or from where they were coming now that's no longer the case now we've opened our corporate our corporate applicants to say anyone in the country can apply to laboratoria also now we have students from much more remote areas where there's less opportunity also benefiting from this and many of them will probably be able to work remote as as many of the jobs will continue to be remote i think for the long run and so that's one thing in the in how we structure our team i think we've also gained some important efficiencies and also we're starting to see what new opportunities arise so for example we have thousands of women that apply to laboratoria every single year and they they don't get in because we have a limited capacity of students that we concern and we've always been thinking what can we do with them no and i think now one of our important priorities the question at least the guiding question is can we sign a lighter touch version of this bootcamp that can help increase the employability of these almost 20 000 women that have an interest in laboratoria yearly and we'll see so i think it obviously won't be as intense as the bootcamp we might not be able to say yes 80 chance that you're going to get a job that triples your income after this experience but i think we can do a lot to give these women more skills so that they can become more empowered on their own journey of of skilling and looking for better job opportunities and so those are some new new horizons that we're going to start exploring soon actually that leads me to another question that i had as you are doing a lot of thinking around the opportunity right now you must be also thinking about what careers your graduates will have going forward and what does it mean from a learning perspective they you already taught your students that you can learn new skills at any point in life and then find the job that fits your skillset and you're in overall predispositions what's what do you see how do you see the future jobs are going to you know be impacted by automation by technology and what do you do you think do you feel strongly that your students will be able to keep up with this pace of change yes so actually that's that's what i one of the things why i really love our our bootcamp because it really instills this lifelong learning mindset in our students and this sense of being the owner of your own learning journey and i think that's really the most powerful thing we can do to prepare students for a world of work that's constantly changing you know as we see our alumni and now we see that they're on their second third job they go through a javascript program but two years down the line many of them are doing ios software development or anything else in the world of software so there really is this mindset that empowers them and then i feel i think today more than ever with gov it it's crucial that we build a growth mindset a lifelong learning mindset and the community and the support network that young people need to face a world of work that will only continue to change i think it's perfect now to also finish our conversation today and i really appreciate all your inputs from our perspective as we watch laboratory and other organizations that we have supported it's really impressive how agile your organizations have been through the pandemic but also before how we constantly place the needs of your students at the center but you also work super closely with employers and i think this is the critical intersection of understanding the skills that your students need to get but also the employers needs and getting their trust so you're not only trained students but also have already the jobs where they can be you know placed and and successful so my wish would be for more more laboratories happening globally so we can really give access to this opportunity to so many talented young people globally thank you so much mariana for your time today thank you carolina that's an amazing wish i love it and thank you for for your continued support that's a fun there i think that's what us social entrepreneurs need so thank you so much for that and it's been a pleasure thank you so much carolina and mariana for incredible examples of how to upskill the global workforce and those very interesting perspectives you're very different perspectives from the grantee perspective and from the funder perspective and how you have adapted to coven i really enjoyed you you both sharing your experiences and and you know learning how all of us are adapting to this very challenging times and to coven 19 also thank you so much for being examples of powerful women that are leading the way of sustainable development very proud of you thank you so much for taking the time from your busy agendas to join us today