 My name is Brent Parton. I'm the Deputy Director of the Center in Education and Labor here in New America. On behalf of the whole team at the partnership to advance youth apprenticeship, all of our national partners, I want to welcome you to day two of the Youth Apprenticeship Summit of 2020. Needless to say, we have a lot to live up to after an incredible day one that was simultaneously inspiring, substantive, and for all of you out there who are engaged in youth apprenticeship, various levels of work, hopefully useful. Yesterday was in many respects about where we are now as a field in light of where we are in the world, across the U.S. and across our engagement with the national network of FIA. We have seen over the past eight months programs adapt to changing circumstances on the ground beyond set of COVID-19 and recommit to their dedication to build equitable youth apprenticeship pathways that confront some of the injustices in our country. What we've seen over the past month is the resilience of young people as well as the ongoing commitment of employer partners and the creativity of you practitioners across the country that are doing this work. But today is about a little bit longer lens. We're gonna take a look back to help share what we've learned collectively as a community after two years of work. The partnership to advance youth apprenticeship was established in 2018. In many respects to create a national learning network to capture what is working across the diverse and growing field of American youth apprenticeship. We're thrilled that you've chosen to spend some more time today to learn a lot more about what we have learned as practitioners, as researchers, as advocates about the work over the past two years. We're going to kick off today with a discussion about systems. Youth apprenticeship is, of course, a program by definition, but it thrives through alignment and integration with our education workforce and employment systems. We're then gonna do a set of deep dive discussions to talk about how youth apprenticeship is being integrated within our K-12 and higher education systems. And then following that, of course, a discussion specifically about how youth apprenticeship is being embedded as a core talent development strategy by employers across industry sectors and of multiple sizes across regions. Of course, like yesterday, we'll conclude with a networking session where we will have a chance to connect with one another because that's what this work is all about. And in between, we will have opportunities to hear about national resources that have been developed by the partnership over the past two years and talk about how they can be helpful to you and your efforts in your states and your communities. And most importantly, we'll, of course, continue to take time to hear the voices of apprentices themselves who really help us ground this work in the why. So with that, I'd like to just say a few words to help set the stage for our first discussion. As I mentioned before, youth apprenticeship, by definition, as Taylor walked through with you all yesterday, is a program. It's a job and apprenticeship is an employment relationship, but it's also a form of post-secondary education. Apprentices must participate in related coursework, working towards college credits and credentials so that their skills and competencies are portable across the labor market and up into our education systems. And third, youth apprenticeship serves high school students. So this means that these programs demand really strong alignment across several systems in our country. Of course, employers and the talent development systems that they work to develop and recruit from. Of course, K-12, that's where youth apprentices are and that's where they start this journey. And as well as higher ed and the broader landscape of training providers who are really critical for ensuring that youth apprentices have the skills and competencies not only to be competent on the job that they're apprenticing in, but that they're working towards a career and that youth apprenticeship itself is a portable expanding options for young people through education and the workforce. Getting any one or any, excuse me, getting any two of those systems, K-12 industry, higher education to work, to align and work better together is a major accomplishment in this work that we do in this field. But getting all three, well, that's what youth apprenticeship is. Across the partnership to advance youth apprenticeship in the national network, we know and we have seen that this work is hard. If the work is hard is because it pushes on those very systems. One could say it asks a lot of them. And as always the case, we have a slide that I'd like to ask that gets put up now just to show us a quick moment, what we mean by that. The famous triangle that we've spent a lot of time sharing as the partnership over time really shows that youth apprenticeship again is this partnership across these critical systems. But building these programs that link these players really again pushes upon these systems to do things differently and ask a lot of them. We often use the terminology youth apprenticeship kind of calls for three revolutions all at once. For industry and employer partners, youth apprenticeship asks them to think differently about how they invest in talent development and fundamentally about how they think of youth and their role and shared responsibility in developing their skills and competencies for the future. For our post-secondary institutions, community colleges, four year colleges and the range of other training providers that have been playing key roles in youth apprenticeship programs across the country. Youth apprenticeship demands and asks that they value learning that happens beyond the walls of their classroom. It's incredibly critical that youth apprentices earn college credit and credentials again to make these experiences portable over time. But a bunch of the learning of a youth apprenticeship happens on the job and sometimes it happens across multiple settings. So if college credit, diplomas and degrees of course remain the currency of the realm, youth apprenticeship is asking these institutions to value competencies in a fundamentally new way. And then finally, certainly not least. For K-12, youth apprenticeship is asking them to align as well as value, an experience that looks fundamentally different than the idea of what often someone would call the typical two or four year college experience. This happens at a strategic level in terms of how we're helping young people to understand what opportunities exist for them after high school. It happens at a functional level. Youth apprenticeship as a program is about balancing schedules. It's not just the young people that of course have to do that. It's of course the schools themselves to ensure that young people are getting access to the learning that they need, but also the access to the other types of work-based learning that a youth apprenticeship demands. In some ways, youth apprenticeship of course also challenges all three of these systems to think about how it can do things differently, to deliver more equitable outcomes for the young people that are part of them. It's a big ask, we know that, and we know the work is hard. At the same time, there's some good news. The good news is that there are broader policies and trends underway in these systems that align quite well with youth apprenticeship. In fact, we call them enablers often. Youth apprenticeship really depends in many respects around the extent to which states and local governments have taken steps to support various actors across the industry and education space to make youth apprenticeship less of an ask for the practitioners out there that are doing the work on the ground. We have seen efforts across the country for going on nearly a half a decade now to expand apprenticeship programs broadly and to get into incentive employers to invest and partner with public institutions to develop talent in new ways. From building intermediary capacity that helps through formal program development, supporting or reimbursing employers' training costs that support portable skill development, as well as in some cases tax incentives to get employers to the table. There are key enabling policies that youth apprenticeship programs can build from to thrive from. On the K-12 side, youth apprenticeship programs, if you look at their architecture, look a whole lot like our early college program experiences that started in the later years of high school, they just happen to do different types of coursework and be much more work-based than we're used to. As a result, dual enrollment funding and the mixture of different incentives that exist that support learning outside of the high school in the final years of high school are critical elements of enabling youth apprenticeship programs to happen. In addition, support for counselors and work-based learning coordinators who can work with intermediaries as well as employers out in their community provide critical capacity for ensuring young people are able to participate in these highly structured experiences. And most importantly, it's about time management. Young people have to walk that triangle which is just as hard as the people that are out there trying to build them. And so to some extent, to the extent that the K-12 system is able to recognize, provide credit and be flexible around graduation requirements to ensure that young people have the time that's needed to participate in these types of programs has also been an important learning along the way. Finally, for our colleges and universities, again, it's about ensuring that they have what it takes from a capacity and incentive standpoint to be able to provide the related instruction that is really core to what the value of the youth apprenticeship program is all about. This includes looking at issues about what types of higher education funding are youth apprentices eligible for. And most critically, for youth apprentices in their programs and afterwards, how can we ensure that the credit they develop and learn from on the job through competencies are recognized and valued so that if youth apprentices want to continue their higher education, they aren't falling behind and they don't have to start from scratch. In addition to these enablers, we have seen across the country over the past several years, direct steps being taken by policymakers to support youth apprenticeship programs to be high quality and to be equitable. We do think that there are continued steps that need to be taken, but we have examples across the country of how governments have been able to set goals and drive critical momentum across agencies, establish clear definitions and guidelines for youth apprenticeship. We can develop our national youth apprenticeship definition and share it, which we have done, but it's going to be about policymakers about embedding those definitions into their systems. We've seen growing support for state and local intermediaries to focus on youth apprenticeship programs and beyond, and we've seen efforts to embed youth apprenticeship as more or less a capstone type of experience on top of a broader system of career exploration. Something that also goes unrecognized is that actually the public sector is a tremendous employer in the sense that both our state and local governments can be able to lead by example and hire youth apprentices. We've seen this across the PIA network in a number of non-traditional fields. In addition, the need for data and results is something that we always have to critically keep our eyes to as well as the non-academic supports, including, yes, transportation, which we've talked about plenty already on day one, but trust me, we'll continue to talk about over the coming two days to ensure that youth apprenticeships are equitable and accessible by the folks that need them most. Close out and begin our conversation. We know that policy is going to be important and we know that youth apprenticeship is going to continue to push on the systems that exist. From what we've seen over the past two years, we also know that it may be tempting because the work is hard for youth apprenticeship practitioners to want to innovate outside systems, sometimes getting everybody on board to do the hard thing is challenging. But what we also know is that for all the pushing that youth apprenticeship can do on these partners and these systems, programs that are looking to grow and sustain themselves depend on those systems. They need the capacity that exists in our K-12 higher education and workforce system to work with employers and across schools. They need the resources to support core program costs to sustainably grow programs over time. They need clear integration with data and able to measure success and to be able to ensure that youth apprentices are ones that are progressing in the way that we all aspire them to. And to become a mainstream experience and an equitable one, youth apprenticeship needs to be something that is fundamentally seen as a normal thing to happen but something that can be broadly supported for students in the final years of high school. So what we have learned in this work is that there is a healthy tension between youth apprenticeship programs and the systems that they engage with. On one hand, youth apprenticeship pushes on them and asks for new things. On the other hand, it depends on them for scale and sustainability. These like these, it's nice to call attention healthy and to help us explore that tension. We are very lucky to have brought together a group of our PIA national partners to have a conversation about where this intersection between programs and systems exists and a lot of what we've learned over the past two years. Each of these folks you're about to hear from has been a big part of PIA in leading our national research agenda. Each of them has had the opportunity to direct engageally with the PIA grantees and network members. And believe me, because of that each of them has plenty to share. So with that, I would like to go ahead and briefly introduce our panel. We have Austin Estes. Austin is the manager of data and research and Advanced CTE. Advanced CTE of course being a nonprofit organization that represents state directors and state leaders responsible for secondary, post-secondary and adult career and technical education. As a small editorial note, Austin has been a key partner in leading PIA's national data work group. So I'll be sure to get toss in the hard questions on that front. Next, we have Janae McLaren. Janae is an engagement manager from the National Alliance for Partnership to Equity. You have already heard from Janae if you tuned in yesterday to hear about the incredible work that Nape has been partnering with us on to develop clear tools and clear strategies to work with youth apprenticeship practitioners throughout the country to ensure that they're designing with equity in mind from the get-go with their youth apprenticeship programs. Welcome back, Janae. Next, we have Andrea Messing-Mathy. Andrea is the director of JFF Center for Apprenticeship and Work-Based Learning. Andrea has joined us and has been tossed into the broad world of PIA working and leading various technical assistance efforts undergoing right now some really incredible work around analyzing youth apprenticeship pathways and how they cut across both occupations, occupational profiles as well as our high schools in post-secondary programs. And you'll hear a little bit from Andrea's colleague about a national research tool that JFF has put together for states and communities to help assess how their systems are ready for youth apprenticeship programs. And finally, last but not least, we have Rachel Stevens. Rachel's the director of workforce development and economic development policy at the program. Rachel's the director of workforce development economic policy program at the National Governors Association. Welcome, Rachel. Incredible work that they do at NGA on a number of issues and have been great leaders in supporting technical assistance for apprenticeship for several years now. And we've been proud to have them as a partner with the partnership to advance youth apprenticeship. They've developed state profiles of leadership for youth apprenticeship across the country showing the critical role that governors play and have been able to leverage years of support to technical assistance for federal apprenticeship grantees about industry engagement strategies. So a cross-cutting set of expertise coming from Rachel and zeroing in critically on the important role that we at PIA believe states have to play in growing and sustaining youth apprenticeship over time. So couldn't be more happy to have you all together on this panel. I'm hoping you all hear me and I'm hoping that we will all be able to hear you. So with that, I think we should just go ahead and jump in and I wanna start with Austin. Austin, our career and technical education system has for a long time been an important platform for youth apprenticeship programs across the country. Within CTE, as we can call it, we've seen youth apprenticeship programs leverage critical funding. We've seen them leverage critical capacity. CTE supports work-based learning coordinators and a range of folks within our systems, the state and local level. We've actually seen them in many cases as well leverage the average actual coursework that CTE has designed to be able to support youth apprenticeship programs. So I would like you to expound on that a little bit and share with us a little bit about in what ways does youth apprenticeship align with what you are seeing high quality CTE pathways in high school heading. From a policy and innovation standpoint, we see states and districts and other CTE providers doing a lot right now working to implement Perkins 5. So reflect a little bit from your perspective in what you've seen of where you see these touch points between youth apprenticeship and CTE, but most importantly, going forward, where do you see big opportunities for practitioners out there today? Thanks, Brent. And there's a lot to tackle in that question too. I mean, first of all, I think there's a natural alignment between CTE and youth apprenticeship and as there always has been. CTE can provide that a robust, relevant, industry aligned education in the classroom that supports some of the learning that youth apprentices are doing on the job. So there's a very neat opportunity for them to work hand in hand. We've seen over the past 10 to 20 years a significant transformation in the world of CTE. CTE or vocational education of the past historically was tied to terminal, low wage occupations generally ended at the high school level, didn't really provide opportunities to transition into higher education and was really seen as kind of an alternate pathway that frankly a lot of students were tracked into based on the perception that they were not academically fit for higher education. But today we've seen a significant transformation in the quality of CTE offerings. Part of that is brought about by state led efforts in partnership with industry to improve the quality of these programs. We've also seen a lot of support from the federal level too with the reauthorization of the Perkins Act which I'm gonna talk about in just a second. But CTE today offers industry aligned instruction across 16 career clusters, dozens of different career pathways to allow students to get the education and training they need in their career pathway of choice. It also just like the apprenticeship spans secondary, post-secondary education and the workforce. So it's not the high school based vocational education of the past but is really aligned with high quality post-secondary credentials and gives students the opportunity to get a leg up on their careers by getting post-secondary college, getting college credit in high school. And then through the Perkins Act there's a real kind of opportunity right now to bring youth apprenticeship and CTE more closely in alignment. So one of those opportunities is through data and accountability. So Perkins 5 introduces a new program quality indicator that allows states to collect and report out the number of students who are completing work-based learning experiences in high school and that's something that wasn't previously reported through the Perkins Act. And by our count there are more than half of states, 27 of them have decided to count and report out work-based learning participation. So we're gonna see a lot of new information and transparency about student participation in work-based learning opportunities as well as an incentive for recipients of Perkins funds to expand access to work-based learning opportunities including youth apprenticeship. And there are a number of other opportunities too in Perkins 5 for more alignment. We've counted a number of states that are using state set-asides through the reserve fund and other mechanisms to support and invest in work-based learning opportunities. And then more broadly Perkins encourages the engagement with employers in alignment to industry needs and a number of states that we've been working with and that we've spoken with are really prioritizing industry alignment and are taking kind of a new approach and a new look at CTE programs and committing to investing in and expanding programs that are aligned to high-still, high-wage and in-demand occupations. So I think over the next two, five, 10 years we're going to see continued acceleration of this transformation in CTE and further alignment with youth apprenticeship. That's great, Austin. One quick follow-up to that point because you've mentioned the pathways piece of this. States right now as they're implementing Perkins 5 is being implemented, to what extent are they going through efforts to kind of refresh those pathways and to what extent is that something youth apprenticeship practitioners out there in the audience could be engaged with or should be aware of? Yes, absolutely. So one of the new provisions in the Perkins Act is this comprehensive local needs assessment requirement. So all recipients of Perkins funds are required to participate in this needs assessment. They have to look at labor market demand in their region. They have to look at the programs that they're currently offering. They have to look at disaggregated data by student subgroup. So they're asking a lot of questions around equitable access, around program quality, around labor market alignment. And that's kind of spurred a lot of reflection around the quality of CTE systems, both kind of statewide as well as locally. So right now is a real opportunity as we're starting the first months of the official implementation of the Perkins Act. There's a lot that states and communities have committed to in terms of updating and improving the quality of their programs. Great, thank you, Austin, very helpful. We'll come back more to the data side of that because that's a big one and you're not off the hook there. Rachel, I want to come over to you next. For some time, apprenticeship has been on the agenda of governors across states, across parties, which has been an exciting thing to watch over several years. And I know NGA has been at the center supporting a lot of that work. Governors can play key roles in apprenticeship as you'd know well from the standpoint of bringing together not just practitioners in the apprenticeship system but higher education workforce development to be supportive of those goals. Could you share a little bit about what have been some of the bright spots you've seen around state leadership for expanding apprenticeship, particularly in these non-traditional spaces in recent years, and share a little bit with our audience about where you see opportunities for folks that are working on youth apprenticeship to sort of build from and align with those innovations. Thanks, Brent, those are great questions and thank you for having us on this panel. We are really proud to be part of the partnership to advance youth apprenticeship and to be having this conversation with you all today after a couple of years of working together. For those in the audience who are not as familiar with what my team and I do, we provide research policy guidance and technical assistance to governors and state leaders on essentially expanding economic opportunity through a few key areas of work around reducing barriers to economic participation, fostering economic dynamism and job growth, and providing training and employment opportunities that serve that dual purpose of supporting employer's talent needs and leading to family sustaining careers for young workers and for adult workers. So as you can imagine within that body of work, apprenticeship and increasingly youth apprenticeship and other types of work-based learning for youth and young adults have really been gaining a lot of traction interest among governors who are very concerned with this dual purpose and making sure they're making investments and fostering partnerships that serve that dual purpose for employers and for the workforce. So as far as some of what we've really been seeing at the state level around kind of fostering those partnerships and leading in expanding youth apprenticeship opportunities, youth apprenticeship is often considered the highest quality version of work-based learning in terms of the employer engagement, the engagement with educators, the translation into post-secondary credits or to credentials. And so my team has done some research through our engagement in PIA on the ways that governors and state leaders have been most effective by our observation and really encouraging youth apprenticeship as a key workforce development and talent pipeline development strategy. And that really boils down to three main areas where we think governors in particular are most effective. The first, it has been around public advocacy and really being champions of this notion that youth apprenticeship is an excellent pathway to careers, to quality work, to post-secondary education and that it should be regarded as something to integrate into learning experiences as opposed to an alternative or a lesser option to learn traditional learning experiences. Second, of course, the funding question and governors do have sway along with other state leaders, of course, over where investments are targeted and allocated. And so as part of their championing activity, being able to really advance investments, whether that's direct investments in programs or investments in incentives to employers to engage differently, that's one place we've seen several governors be very effective. And third, on the policy side of things, signing legislation or executive orders that create some of these new partnerships, establish task forces or commissions to really look at youth apprenticeship and how to expand it in the state and other sort of policies that will support the long-term and sustainable implementation and scaling of quality youth apprenticeship programs. Underlying all of these strategies I just went through has been really just how critical partnerships are to the points that you were making earlier, Brent, for making these programs work most effectively and for making the systems as a whole function together as effectively as possible. As Austin mentioned, states are really prioritizing employer engagement and understanding what employers in businesses really need and how they can best serve those needs. And that I think definitely translates into how governors in particular approach the subject of apprenticeship and youth apprenticeship. So just a couple examples, if I may share a couple. I know for example, in Maryland, we've seen Governor Hogan really demonstrate a lot of leadership on youth apprenticeship with one of the most rapidly growing programs in the country. Apprenticeship Maryland program is seen by the governor and really advertised by the governor, if you will, as a real opportunity for Maryland businesses to directly influence and train high school students to become high-performing employees. And in Maryland, the Department of Labor and Department of Education partner on implementing this program. And that helps make sure that both the employer voice and the educator voice are at the table to design that curriculum. So this kind of what gets into the specifics of how to engage in strong partnerships that the governor's really been able to push and lead on and kind of use his bully pulpit to bring all those pieces together. He also has a significant influence as many governors in their states do over the business community. Whether that means in practice, working with local chambers of commerce, other trade organizations to recruit employer interest. The governor has really been able to leverage his connections and influence in that community to channel people toward this program among several other workforce initiatives. And since 2014, this program has grown to include 16 school systems and 174 businesses across the state, which is really impressive for a six-year time period. So I wanted to kind of share that as a specific state example, where we've seen really strong governor's leadership here. As far as opportunities, I really think the youth apprenticeship community has a lot of opportunity to consider how they might be connecting to their state leaders, to their governor's offices, to some of these employer networks that are very closely connected to the governor and state and one that I know my team and I work a lot with and one connection we help make with youth apprenticeship as a concept is through state workforce development boards. That is one point where the business community is already heavily engaged based on how those boards are structured. And especially right now, as states look to economic recovery, I think there's a real opportunity to think about how can existing partnerships be leveraged to scale these opportunities so youth aren't left behind in recovery, as we've seen happen to a lot of youth and younger workers in past recessions. And there's an opportunity to leverage youth apprenticeship as a way to further strengthen and expand relationships that maybe need to be stronger at the state level. And that's something my team's working with states on over the coming several months. That's an excellent point. And the great idea on the state workforce board side, they're certainly strategic bodies that do bring together industry and a lot of different agencies. Do you have any quick tips for folks out there who are thinking, how do I get in touch with these folks? How do I make them aware of the work that I'm doing? That's a wonderful question. I would suggest identifying the executive staff that serve these boards. So staff are housed in state agencies, in state workforce development offices. And they're always looking for great examples of program success stories. They can go then tell other employers. Ed Brent, as you said, one of their key roles really isn't being kind of a strategic body to kind of organize partnerships and also encourage employer engagement in a range of workforce initiatives and knowing how important employer engagement is here. I absolutely think reaching out to the staff is a wonderful starting point to let them know what you're doing, let them know how you might benefit from their support, how you might be able to support the goals they've laid out for the state through the work that you're already doing. That's definitely something I would encourage. Great, thank you. I wanna shift gears a little bit and go to Eugenay. We've talked a lot about sort of how the Youth Apprenticeship so far can build off and then integrate with various systems. Sometimes the challenge with that is programs themselves who particularly ones that are designing in a way that they want to create opportunities for young people that have been from communities who have otherwise been cut off. In many respects confront the baggage that those systems themselves carry in terms of inequities and outcomes. We know our labor market is rife with systemic inequities and we certainly know that there are persistent equity gaps within our K-12 as well as higher education systems. So as practitioners out there engaging with these really systems level issues, could you just take a moment to share a little bit about the work NAPE has done and the thinking you've done around this work? And what you see is the role that Youth Apprenticeship practitioners should be helping play and helping ensure programs are both recognizing and confronting some of these more endemic inequities within the systems they engage with. Yes, thank you so much for the question Brent and thank you again for having me back for day two. First, I just want to say as we enter into this conversation, it just requires us to think about a couple of things. The first, the historical context that exists between Black and Brown communities and educational workforce systems, it just has to be acknowledged. There's a mistrust that exists and the limited opportunities for people from that group really have not been resolved. So that's part of that baggage you were referring to. Secondly, we have to name the issue. I think in so many ways, the current pandemic and the racial tensions that we are seeing across our nation and the world have brought this to light. So by being able to call out these inequities for what they are is really important because it's difficult to address a problem if we are not in fact comfortable calling it by name. And so as you've also mentioned as other panelists have mentioned, this work is tough. Working in equitable environments is a tough thing. It's never ending, it's unyielding. And it gets to that point where you hit your head on the wall and scratch your head but you pick back up and do it again the next day. But in saying that, it requires all of us, especially those who have the power to make those changes, look at things like cultural stereotypes, implicit bias. And it's not about blaming. We all do it, so that's not my point but it's about taking us from this place of unaware, like we didn't know these things existed or maybe we didn't know they existed to the extent that we've seen them exist. And now that we moved from this idea of being unaware to aware, now we have to do the work of understanding, like understanding the role that systems play, understanding how it affects those persons who from all the different groups, demographic groups, social and economic groups and thinking about how we move forward into this call to action, what do we do next? So we often ask the question, why don't we have more people of color in this program or why are women not in this program or why don't we see people from different backgrounds doing different things? And I think it's important for us to ask the why but not get stuck there and to really think about addressing the what and the how. Like what should we be doing at this point? How do we overcome those barriers? We've talked about transportation but there's also barriers around technology, wealth gaps that exist. And so once we can confront all of those issues we can move more freely into this idea of how do we face these issues, how do we address these issues and how do we make sustainable changes so that these programs can thrive in a more equitable environment. Recently, the work we've been doing with NAPE we do a lot of professional development although it's now pretty much all virtual. It has become this topic of accountability. People are looking for these deep embedded discussions not just on the surface level of equity and making sure we're not showing microaggressions but really like what is it gonna take for leaders and the education system and the industry to really make a change to move the needle so to speak. So we created this year there's an equity leadership academy. We're working with nine states across the United States to really talk about that. And in doing that, the next point I would add is that we're also seeing the more inclusion of student voice which is hugely important. We often talk about making it better for the youth but we don't ask them how to do that or what would it take for them to feel that it's better and then using communities experts you cannot leave out the conversation with parents who have a huge influence over those students' lives. Local leaders is really important and other types of practitioners have to be brought to the table. Their voices really have to be heard and acknowledged. It's not just enough to have them present but really to dig deep because as we expand the diversity pool of the people we're working with to build these systems out everybody's input is just really key and important if we wanna move to the next level with our programs. Thank you, Nene. Let's appreciate all that and I would say that you all have pushed us as a partnership and I know that you have a long history of doing professional development and I've always kind of encouraged us to look bigger and broader and in fact deeper into our education systems because you've I think pushed us in particular on thinking about youth apprenticeship doesn't start with the recruitment side it really has to be a much more integrated embedded experience and working with teachers and counselors and guys have done incredible work and really thankful for the partnership and excited to kind of come back and pick on a few of these other points too to elevate them. Before I do that, I want to say if you have not yet submitted questions for Q&A we are going to kick that off just shortly after I go to Andrea, please put them in the box. Submit them, we will get to them. I know some are starting to kind of come in but before I get that I'm gonna ask Andrea I'm gonna turn to you to kind of bring home this point that we've kind of been touching on quite a bit here around youth apprenticeship is systems changed in many respects. It's about breaking down a lot of barriers across different systems. It's easy to talk about systems sometimes systems we have to appreciate are just people too and I know you've been in it and you've had a long career working with folks who are working across these areas. So could you share a little bit from your experience about where you see youth apprenticeship helping break down silos across systems or more positively encourage partnerships across folks who don't always kind of sit in the same space? Sure, and thanks again for having me and for having JFF as part of this work. I think that the work that we're doing is part of PIA kind of coalesce our ideas around this gets at some of this broader national need for kind of a collaboration through entrepreneurship play. So in my experience, community initiatives are far more likely to succeed in general if they're anchored or developed to address a local challenge. And I think youth apprenticeship offers a really concrete way for communities come together to address those local challenges whether it's to address local hiring needs, a lack of alignment between secondary and post-secondary systems, issues around youth employment. Sometimes those issues feel really intructable and tough to tackle and youth apprenticeship I think is a really actionable way to get people to come around the table for the so what conversation, right? A lot of what we do feels really academic and at the 30,000 foot level, but the actual implementation and application of youth apprenticeship is very, very granular. And I think that being able to put some real language around that and helping communities to come together kind of like what are the pieces of this puzzle is a lot of the work that we all as practitioners do. And then I know I'm gonna jump ahead of here a little bit, but in terms of systems change in all cases that I think all of us have seen and I don't think that this is gonna be anything revolutionary is the role of the intermediary is paramount to making this work succeed, sustain long-term kind of following from season to season, right? I think anything this work, particularly in this COVID and political environment has shown us as the role of an intermediary as employer facing, as system facing, as school facing and as student and family facing, those four roles are so crucial for an intermediary to understand and kind of get saturated in. And that being able to break down those silos and bust those silos down is really contingent upon where that intermediary is situated in the system and what work they've done to break down silos with their partners, whether it's at the chamber or the workforce board or the K-12 school system or the post-secondary system. So I want to make sure that I think that's an incredibly important part and all the examples I'm going to share, the intermediary plays a really important part of that kind of silo busting exercise that we're all hoping that youth apprenticeships really do a really good job of. I'll give a few examples that I think really exemplify some of the work that youth apprenticeships are able to do in breaking down some of these silos. One example that we all know really well and we saw Melissa Stowaster from Trident Technical College yesterday. I think the Trident Regional Youth Apprenticeship, so the Charleston Regional Youth Apprenticeship System, it does a really exceptional job of bringing all the partners together at the same table. And they were developed as a result of companies coming together to address local hiring needs. Large company came into town and kind of sucked up, observed of all the local labor and the consortium of local businesses came together to approach Trident Tech with a plea to help them support those needs. And so over the course of many years, youth apprenticeship has become a key way to address both critical workforce needs within the region and the way to mentor the next generation of skilled workers in the region. And that exists across manufacturing occupations all the way into IT occupations. It's really broadly applied and their model is broadly applied across all occupations. And I think in addition to the unique role that the intermediate organization plays, the institution works across partners to fund the ecosystem around youth apprenticeship. And those partners include K-12, workforce board chamber and philanthropy, really thinking cohesively about how they use all the different pieces of the system, including really robust policy, strong employer relationships and a really committed chamber and how they use all of those partners in a really seed and committed to scale and fund the youth apprenticeship system so that it's not just an island of excellence but it's something that's helping to drive the region into something new. At the state level in Delaware, I think it's really interesting. They're keenly interested in thinking about what Austin was talking about earlier. They're keenly interested in thinking about highly rigorous and aligned instructional models that they can stand up throughout the state. So the State Department of Education is working closely with K-12 and post-secondary partners to align those CTE standards and has embedded youth apprenticeship into its accountability model, which is such a super exciting part of this work, thinking about how we start to think about accountability differently for K-12 systems and how we think about accountability differently as it's connected to post-secondary systems. What that does then is it makes it easier for Delaware employers to engage with the system because they're not trying to speak two different languages and that's usually where we end up losing our employers. In New Mexico, Future Focus Education in New Mexico is a nonprofit that's bringing system players to the table as a way to reorient their very successful into youth apprenticeship model, which is a very new space for them and they're wading in and figuring out which partners to speak to and how they speak to them and figure out the funding model. And it's an exciting new space to be situated in with them and helping them work through that work. And to bring up another topic that Rachel mentioned, in Maryland, we're working with IAC Chesapeake and that's the independent electrical contractors. And they're leveraging really successful school to apprenticeship models, which uses a successful pre-apprenticeship model that allows employers to kind of date the idea before they commit and the Department of Labor Financial supports those pre-apprenticeships and then they're able to get those school systems ready because each school district is very different and very distinct. And finally, I think North Carolina and the apprenticeship North Carolina offers a really unique way to think about what, how they can rethink their own system. So they're working on a vision for Pioneers Carolina which is focused on regional collaboratives and it's a way to organize the region so that everyone's kind of rolling in the same direction. So breaking down silos really requires a thinking about kind of which partners of the silos do we want to connect with and who's gonna play that connectivity role? Who's gonna hold the hands of everybody to get them to all move in the same direction? Great, I wanna touch on something you just mentioned and this is for everyone because I'm reading some of the questions that are coming in. Several of them are about youth apprenticeship is one type of work-based learning among many. Where, could you comment about where you're seeing examples of how youth apprenticeship can build on earlier stages of work-based learning or career exposure experiences and even talk about why you think that's important or what's important to keep in mind when doing that. Anybody who wants to jump in on that. And I can start. I mean, I think in many cases we're seeing this as a really national extension of some of the early work around career pathway system development. I'm thinking of a district that's very near and dear to my heart and that's right in my neck of the woods in outside of the city of Chicago, district 214 that has done a tremendous amount of work around career pathway system development. Really thinking through kind of how their students can discover careers. Working closely with employers in that area. Working closely with their CTE state connectors and youth apprenticeship has kind of just been a natural outgrowth of that work. So they've laid the foundation to make that happen and can put all the pieces of the puzzle in and got employers kind of ready for that work. Yeah, and if I can kind of build a state level layer over that example you just gave Andrea, which is a great one where, and of course we're very interested in seeing states, you know offer some models for districts across their state of how they might build kind of almost a continuum of work-based learning opportunities in which youth apprenticeship can play a role. And there are some perhaps better known examples and thinking of Washington for instance, but also some lesser known examples that we've been able to work on with states through our sort of past work in the work-based learning space. One that I'm thinking of is Idaho and their leader framework, which stands for learn, do, earn. And they include pre-apprenticeship, youth apprenticeship on the job training, other types of work-based learning for high school, post-secondary students, but they also have a kind of beginning part of the continuum that was a little new for them to articulate around things like career counseling earlier on, very early interviews with employees at regional employers, sort of job shadow days, having industry speakers come into schools. And I think one of the things they were interested in using this framework to do was then help local school districts work within their region to identify the most relevant employers and sectors to do some of this work with. And the benefit in their mind is not only does it prepare students to be more open to some of these later opportunities, such as youth apprenticeship programs, it also gets students kind of connecting what they're learning in school to the potential of the real world, if you will, earlier on, which is one of the things we love about youth apprenticeship and work-based learning, it gets students doing that earlier. So those are just a couple, states I mentioned a couple examples of, you know, a state that's kind of laying out a framework that then local districts can use in their own programming. And Brent, if I could just add something to that as well, I think it's really critical for us to start to think about this at the middle school level. We often wait till we get to high school, where it's difficult for some students to jump into those pathways because they didn't have the right math classes or they just didn't have the exposure or, you know, the counselor may have this view of what particular students should belong in certain programs. So if I could date myself, I remember being a part of junior achievement in middle school and going to our local career center in the Midwest and Indiana. And just to see the various career options that were there, and it was the encouragement of trying new things that really helped to build that rapport and got me motivated. I got my classmates motivated. So I think we kind of have to go back to the basics on this topic and not wait till the students in 10th grade to say, where do you want to be when you grow up? I think we have to start to put some options in front of students in the middle school. I believe I heard someone say, you know, college visits and having industry leaders come out to the school, but also just expand on the definition of what an apprenticeship program is. For so many people, it has a negative connotation with the about apprenticeships. We think about, you know, getting our hands dirty, the more the hands on type apprenticeships where we have seen through the work with PIA, we have people who are doing things in post-secondary education around working with, sorry, I'm drawing a blank on California, of working with early childcare systems or healthcare system or banking. And so we have to get beyond this idea that apprenticeship is just manufacturing careers, but that it cross-bands and it gives students the experience of looking at other careers they may not have thought about. Great point, Janae. Any final comments, Austin? Take us home. Yeah, and I'll make this short, but just to kind of build on what Janae was saying, we've been seeing a lot of attention on early exposure to career pathways at the middle-grade level and even the elementary level. I mean, part of that is spurred by a new opportunity in Perkins Five to use Perkins funding at the middle-grade level. So before this year, there was a prohibition on spending those funds below the seventh grade. So that's a major opportunity for states to kind of invest in new areas. But we're also seeing too, I mean, there's the rate of kind of retention within a career pathway once a student transitions from secondary to post-secondary isn't as high as we would want it to be. And part of that is because students will concentrate in a career pathway and then decided that's not for them. It's not something that they're interested in and then they'll change their focus and start a new major once they go on to college. But early exposure gives students an opportunity to sample different career pathways, figure out what they do and they don't like, maybe start to build some relationships with industry mentors and make those decisions early on so that by the time they get into 10th or 11th grade, they've got a pretty good sense of what they want to do and what they're good at. And that just helps them make progress towards a credential and towards a career even faster. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there and Perkins Five just really kind of provides a little bit of fuel for that fire. Wonderful. Well, I have to believe it or not, we are at time. I thought this was an incredibly rich way to just kick off today. So I just wanna give a big thank you to you all for your time and being thought and your thoughtful comments. I will say there are a lot of questions that came in that we did not get to, that's okay. Part of the reason we have this partnership to advance entrepreneurship and these great folks here who are representing our national partners is we get to bug them all the time with all your questions. So we see your questions out there. There certainly are resources to be tapped in through PIA. So we will make sure that everybody has the context information that they need to come through us and get some of these questions answered. But with that in mind, I do wanna again thank everybody and thank you for kicking off the first day. Plenty of these themes are gonna be exposed in greater detail. So thanks folks.