 My name is Lul Tesfima, Senior Policy Advisor with the Center on Education and Labor here at New America, and I'm thrilled to be joined by Mayor Kim Norton. Mayor Norton is the Mayor of Rochester, Minnesota. She has held this position since January 2019, and before becoming the city's first female mayor, she has a long history of public service and leadership, including 10 years in the Minnesota State Legislature and 10 years on the Rochester Public School Board. Really excited to be in conversation with you today, Mayor Norton, because I know you, just like so many other city leaders, have been focused on how to advance policies and practices that create better jobs for community residents who have really struggled during the pandemic, but even before. And that's for good reason. We know that economic mobility in this country has been declining, stagnant wages and inflation has made it harder for a lot of residents to really just make ends meet, particularly low income individuals in communities of color. And so I want to hear a little bit from you today about what you're doing to make sure that people have access to good jobs and are able to advance economically. But first, could you just tell us a little bit about your city and your residents? Sure. So I'm the Mayor of Rochester, Minnesota, which is in the Upper Midwest. We have about 124,000 people in our community and we host the state's largest employer, which is Mayo Clinic. So we are primarily focused on the world of healthcare. We have, we're about 73% white. We have an average median income because we're a healthcare community that's actually quite high. It's around $76,000 for an individual or $98,000 for a family on average is the median. I'm sorry, the median. We have a 6% poverty rate. I've seen it posted as high as 9%, so relatively low poverty. But if you look at our black population in particular, what you will find is the average median income is closer to 44,000 and 40% of our black population lives in poverty. So we have great disparities in our community and we also know that those disparities were exacerbated by the pandemic and that women and BIPOC women in particular were the last and are still many of them at home and not back in the workforce. So that was kind of the impetus to for what we've done and what we'll talk about. I would say one other thing that you might want to know about our community is we have something called the Destination Medical Center Initiative, which was a $6 billion initiative that Mayo Clinic and private Mayo Clinic, it was their idea I guess and they got legislative support for $585 million of infrastructure in order to accommodate a $6 billion economic development and growth in our community. So we were already, prior to the pandemic, starting this infrastructure replacement and upgrades in our city center and a little beyond that between the two Mayo Clinic campuses, the hospital and the downtown area. So we were already poised to have growth and development in the construction. We needed construction workers. We knew that about 2,700 a year for the next 10 plus years and we're also growing community. Yeah, so thank you for sharing that background. It was really interesting to hear that you've been thinking about the need to improve your infrastructure and Mary Alice talked a little bit about some of the federal investments that have been made and will flow down to cities and states to support infrastructure development. So I know it'll be an even bigger priority. Could you talk a little bit about what pathways to infrastructure jobs look like in your community? Well, as I said, we have a great need for those jobs, but what we were finding is that we have 16,000 BIPOC women that live in our community and less than 1% of them were working in this area. And so we determined when we had the opportunity to apply for the Global Mayors Challenge Grant that Bloomberg Philanthropies kind of put out there for mayors to apply. We decided that let's focus on the people that needed upward mobility that had been impacted the worst during the pandemic and provide them opportunities in an area we knew that we had a need for and that was growing and that provided really good careers because when you have a guaranteed investment for 10 or 20 years in your community because of this Destination Medical Center initiative, that's not a job, that's a career. That's 20 years. It was a 20 year plan. We're in year 10 right now. So we know that we had an opportunity for people and what we did then was spend a year researching, looking at quantitative and qualitative data of our community and tried to determine what were the needs, how are we going to get women into that line of work because it did, we have health care, of course, there's a lot of health care jobs and so Mayo Clinic and our community are already working on pathways for health care. We have a program called Bridges to Health Care that's quite successful and we looked at that program and tried replicating it to an extent but we knew that we didn't have the answers. Why weren't women going into construction and built environment careers? So we brought them to the table and I think that's really the story that's worth telling about the work that we're doing is it wasn't someone in our administration or in the construction industry getting a great idea and telling us, here's what you need to do. I was bringing women in our community to the table to say, what do you need, what's missing? And we learned a lot in that eight months to a year of investigation, talking to women, we learned a lot. And then they got to be part of the team to devise our plan moving forward. And this co-design process that you ended up implementing, it was something that you had previously used in the city, could you talk a little bit more about how you had previously used it and how you thought it fitting to apply in a policy context? Absolutely. So we're committed to the democratic process, of course, which involves getting the community, all members of the community, not just those with the loudest voices or the most ability to reach us. We decided as a community doing this design work on our roads and our city center, we decided to use something called co-design. So we found members of various communities, underrepresented communities, including disability and others at various income levels, brought them to the table and did some training and then sent them back to their communities to talk, had a series of questions, had information gathering, if you will. And then they would bring that back to the table. So it's an exchange back and forth that's having a small cohort of individuals who, when they did their work, were impacting hundreds and hundreds of more individuals that we probably didn't have the time or even place to get together to have a good discussion. So we had been doing that for our road work and our plaza design and we decided to bring it back to the community in a different way in that setting policy. So we brought them to the table on this project and also for our Sustainable Resiliency Task Force and utilized the co-design process there and I did provide, we have one booklet which can be passed around here so you can look at it after we've done this work now for the last couple of years. We do have a booklet but we also have it and I believe you have it online so you can get an electronic copy of what we've done and it has some case studies in there that talks about the process but it was absolutely fabulous. When we started it and we brought the women in to talk with our construction workers and an architect and a union laborer and others, we brought them in. It was like dead silence. It was quiet. It was really uncomfortable. By the end of their eight months or so of working together it was dynamic and they shared information and I should also mention we paid these women to come to the table because the men are already there because they're working and employed and they were getting paid but we decided we're using them as experts of their own experience and helping us design our community they deserve to be paid to so we did and have continued to pay these co-designers and kind of ironically but wonderfully at least three of them that I know of our current city DEI director one of our Destination Medical Center a new staff member there and someone in the built environment now were co-designers that got hired because people can see the competence they had the opportunity to work one on one with them so it's been really exciting in fact one of our young women in the built environment called and told us she's just put a down payment on a house for she and her children so that was really exciting even before we have really rolled out the whole plan to see our co-designers benefiting from the experience I think that's so wonderful and it really speaks to the importance of partnerships which are going to be absolutely critical to make sure that these investments in infrastructure across the country are really benefiting the people who need it absolutely now we typically when we talk about infrastructure we are referring to roads and bridges hard infrastructure but there is an extensive list of other critical forms of infrastructure that are really necessary in communities and I'm hoping you could talk a little bit about some of those other elements of infrastructure that have been really important to your city and your residents well I would say throughout this process of having our women our co-designers at the table as we learned a lot about their needs that maybe and it is infrastructure but there are needs and barriers which you know we can talk about but some of the culture clashes we have a lot of a pretty robust immigrant population in town they have special needs that aren't being addressed by our community let alone the workforce issues but child care the infrastructure for child care is just absolutely huge for these families and we talked back in the the green room that we really do need to look at culturally competent and culturally specific child care for these women who want to get into the workforce but really want to make sure that their children are cared for in a manner and a method that is comfortable and familiar to them and their children and so that's one example of an infrastructure that has to be in place in order for women to get to work and to be able to be successful on their jobs flexibility in careers is another that we heard a lot about sometimes our our structures are historic and we continue to do them that way because we've always done them that way and we we hear from the industries we need employees and yet they're not looking at themselves and saying what might we change is that ours or is there some sort of flexibility that we could put in our role as an employer that would then be more welcoming and convenient to people in order to get new workers on the job and so you know we're having to work with those kinds of issues as well and I don't know if you have others that you're interested in that I yeah well no that you know that's something that we've heard in conversations with other city leaders and community leaders and and workers themselves just the importance of addressing some of the overall supports and need for child care in order to really be present and participate in the in the workforce what do you see as the role of cities and supporting those needs that are pretty much universal it's been interesting because what I often hear from people who push back is it's all market driven cities shouldn't be involved in business in the market and yet we know that the market has not been successful for everyone and something has to intervene to change that that pathway that historic pathway that has been successful for some but not for everyone so for us the global mayor's challenge grant was an opportunity and believe me it was a it was a stretch to think we could compete against you know mayors and cities all over the world but we were we were we felt passionate about the the work that we were doing and apparently they felt that the work we're doing and who knew the infrastructure bill and the inflation reduction act would pass when we were working on this because our work now is more relevant than we anticipated because we were looking at it really from a very selfish perspective we had five hundred eighty five million dollars of state funds to to fix our infrastructure which you know we're all suffering from aging infrastructure across the country so we were looking at it very selfishly but now we have we are laying the groundwork I hope for a replicable process and procedure that other cities can do to see that a city with a little bit of help and support and frankly if we get this moving my hope is that the systems will change whether it be the education systems the training systems the child care systems there's a lot of systems in place and and the workforce will change in order to accommodate a new and important and necessary workforce in the future so we're laying the groundwork but it isn't the cities can't do it all and we do need partners you mentioned that our nonprofits are huge partners grants philanthropy is also something that is going to have to help us along I think yeah thank you for that Mayor Norton I know we have an audience in the room and an audience online I want to pause to see if there are any questions a quiet audience thank you Bridget if you'd like to do you need to repeat it the question yeah so the the question was could you talk a little bit more about child care since that was identified as a key barrier to share a little bit more about what your team is doing yeah we're just getting started on this part we spent a year doing the work um then the grant you know the winners were announced and we were one of three in the country and we're thrilled and now we're hiring and laying the groundwork to move ahead um one of the things that not just in child care but also beyond that that's really important to me is not just getting people in a job in the built environment that's important yes but it's getting those same women able to be entrepreneurs and open their own businesses right so we're starting with one and I'm and I'm and that's what the grant was for we also won $750,000 in federal earmarks for this project which I hope we can you know layer on the top of that for these entrepreneur jobs and frankly daycare is an entrepreneur job particularly if we're talking you know culturally sensitive culturally specific daycare and then the National League of Cities an organization that most cities belong to um has a couple programs uh communities of opportunity cities of opportunity of which we're involved in and inclusive entrepreneurship and so we're having a child we're doing um informal entrepreneurship track um an ecosystem accelerator track and we didn't get into the early childhood track but we're going to mirror it and do it anyway because we feel it is so important um and we and I'm not sure how exactly we're still working with National League of Cities to make it work and they're committed to helping us because we have to build on the grant it's not the grant itself that's going to solve all the problems we have to build on that to build this entrepreneurship network in so that's kind of how we're looking at it as entrepreneur as as entrepreneurs as business owners as we move ahead and I can just mention um a couple other things just that that we learned in that that phase of of meeting with and talking with our community and through that co-design process women prefer to work in cohorts they don't want to be the only one on the work site it's very uncomfortable if there's a problem on the work site they don't want to be the one raising their hand and saying there's a problem because it might affect their ability to keep and maintain that job so one of the things that we're providing um is navigators on site both for the business as well as for the women so as we move through this pilot project or it's going to be more than a pilot but as we move through the project the starting phase will have navigators for the women that can be on the work site and help be their voice and we're making we're not making our businesses have agreed to go through um a diversity assessment prior to bringing the women on and they're going to have a navigator and the two of those navigators will work together you know paying attention to the needs of each of their group that they represent and coming to solutions that are workable for both so that's another component I thought might be worth mentioning and another one was um the familial influence when we have a pretty robust group of immigrant families in our town with cultural barriers that I that I wasn't aware of it's like you have to go into this type of field it has to be a helping caring field and we need to find ways to not just if the individual the the young lady I spoke with was telling me well I may want to do that but if it isn't acceptable or my family doesn't understand that job or think it's appropriate for me or a woman they're not going to pay for it right so we're going to remove that barrier um of cost but we also have to know we have to work with the families it's not just that student or that young woman it's working with that woman and her whole family throughout the process so those are just a couple other examples of things of these barriers that I don't think some of the traditional methods being used right now are necessarily addressing that came out in our our analysis now it's great feedback to receive I know we have another question hi my name is Amy Cardell I'm with CompTIA the Computer Trade Industry Association and Mayor Norton I really appreciate your co-design approach it was very interesting for us to hear those insights and I think many of them affect so many of the jobs in the tech sector that we're looking at I was curious as well about the co-design of the community or your research that showed what sectors the jobs will be in because obviously you talked about construction and you're a healthcare hub but you know my secret able plan is of course technology jobs so I'd love to hear what you found there too my community as I mentioned before is definitely healthcare focused we also have been home to the largest IBM manufacturing plant which is now changed over time so it's not manufacturing any longer so we have a lot of technology workers in town and we're trying to work that in I guess I would say we've just had an analysis done of the needs of our city and also are looking at what jobs are going to be out not outsourced work from home in the future and so we're trying to look at our city center all the money we're spending on building that out and saying do we need to make changes based on what we're learning during the pandemic and and thinking about the future of city centers and so we know we're going to need more than just construction workers and that that is the area that we're focused on but we think the co-design method can be used in other areas as well and we think just like we used it for physical infrastructure now we're using it for policy infrastructure for our communities and I think it can I think it can be replicated into any industry frankly but it is purposeful it takes time and you have to I think if you're gonna this is the message we heard we could ask time and time again this is our community our women saying we could ask time and time again for our opinion and then we nothing happens right so people don't want to be asked and then nothing happens so again they are part of the design team not just uh we want your opinion and then goodbye right I think that's part of what makes this so important but I think it can be transferred and and I hope people will will try it and as I said we just put together the framework in this booklet or online booklet so I don't really have a hard answer yet because we're just at the beginning but I do think it's transferable but it's really helpful to hear kind of your initial thinking even early on in this process and then we have another question yeah Norton thanks so much for being here Shailen Jotishi from New America my question is about how we can go about funding these kinds of efforts at other cities you know it's it's really great that you know your community won the grant and you mentioned partnerships with non-profits and philanthropies but you also mentioned you know employers and getting them to look inward and think about what they can do and I'm curious if you have advice for mayors and city leaders and other communities and regions who might not have the foundations or the philanthropies but do have employers as partners have you seen anything that works well to incentivize employer financial contributions to these kinds of uh efforts on co-design and sort of how do you fund that as a city leader and as the mayor thank you so much thank you for the question I would say we were fortunate and that we had the destination medical center initiative out there which did give us money not for some for people but mostly for the infrastructure so and we had a model in place to do that so um I would say the other piece and we talked about this in the back room is that at the start of the pandemic we needed to make sure everyone was taken care of in our community so we met as as part of our nonprofit consortium the city jumped in the county jumped in and the chamber frankly came to those meetings as well the chamber of commerce and we we met every other week with all the nonprofits in our community online and that that continued throughout the whole pandemic and what was fascinating and it wasn't so much about an infrastructure change that this may come to bear but I think this idea of building that really strong partnership with all of us every one of them but we would have 60 or 70 or 80 people from time to time the major we have a lot of nonprofits in town but the major nonprofits would come and we could talk to each other about where we saw a whole who's going to help this group or we've identified this problem does anyone out there have the capacity to address it and so on these regular meetings these regular calls we were able to say and someone would say yeah I can help feed that group or I can help provide housing or get a job or you know so because we were all working together I would say the challenge has been keeping that going post-pandemic we do meet monthly but I think it's trickled off a little bit and I think you know here moving ahead into the next year we need to make sure that that stays strong we were fortunate that during the pandemic we had that and we need to continue to do it and I do think we have the course Mayo Clinic is a major employer they know that having a strong community and a strong economy helps them right other businesses know that too and we were so fortunate we had a couple an architect we had a construction company we had the unions who identified their own needs and said we're going to come to the table and help you because it helps us too right so I think yes I think absolutely getting businesses on board because it's helping them if we if we have a if we have a project and there's nobody that can provide the work you know they're in trouble we're in trouble yeah so it takes us all yeah really really identifying the the common needs that you all have to identify some common solutions together I think that's right and we've done that in health care in our community in the past of course because of Mayo Clinic the bridges to health care programs have been highly successful they target new immigrants and refugees who come to town help with language training get them through training and again they provide one-on-one supports so if you're struggling in school there's always someone right there who knows and we're going to be doing that as well as we get people into the training whether it be a union training or whether it be rctcr community college or they want to be an architect and go to a four-year university because we know we need architects too there will be someone there that will be there to to help support them if they need it okay we have another question hi hello I have just a quick question I actually builds on the end of your response there I'm wondering how much of this work is being targeted to young adults and in in particular getting young adults into some of these fields that you've mentioned in infrastructure here at new america we lead a national working group on youth apprenticeship and work-based learning in the skilled trades and we hear from our from some folks from minnesota based and from other partners around the country that it can be very difficult to recruit young people into these roles both because they may not necessarily know about them or know how to access them but there are also regulations and sort of insurance barriers to hiring younger people before they graduate from high school so I'd love to hear any strategies that you all have used to try to target younger learners whether it's specifically through this infrastructure activity or you mentioned earlier in your remarks just trying to reduce cost barriers and access barriers to post-secondary training generally for for young adults yes all of that we did learn in the interview process early on about we did interviews and I actually have the sheet here the questions we asked people most people had not even heard the names of probably two thirds three quarters of the trades and the jobs in the industry they didn't know what they were I said well how can I you know how can anyone aspire to something where they don't even know what the term means it's not a job they don't even know what it is so we identified that early on so it's so we're looking at it at several levels the industry level and getting people in that may have gone through the training because we've been trying to do a little training before but working through the k-12 system with career awareness some hands-on experiences we do have a program a c-tech program in our community so our high school students can come out and do some technical careers some training and some of those are like welding some of the skills that we need in the community so we have that for high school and we need to grow that and also outside of the school setting and that's an area that's really fascinating the Girl Scouts in the in the state of Minnesota do a wonderful I went this summer was up in the Twin Cities it's called power girls and so it's a week-long camp where they stay up in the Twin Cities and it was for southern Minnesota so I went up and experienced it and there was a day on electricity and there was a day on carpentry and there was a day and each day was a different trade and the girl spent the entire day building something computer cables that they could take home and use you know for their computer and ethernet cables and so it was hands-on what we learned however and again the best idea right but nobody bothered to ask some of the families what we found out in a in a different setting in our community is that for many families particularly immigrant families overnight aren't a thing they don't do overnight not to their neighbors not to their friends and certainly not to a camp up in the Twin Cities and so the camp was primarily for white children not a hundred percent but you know and that's that's great because we want all women in construction so that's fine but how are we reaching our our BIPOC community we're not so we are actually going to work with the Girl Scouts of this summer in Rochester at a day camp that will be similar but it will be a day camp for kids in the region who can come in and experience the same thing and go home at night so we can remove that barrier of overnights that literally none of us were aware it was a thing so it's it's that kind of learning and again if you bring people with lived experience and bring people from different cultures to the table they can tell you that and you don't have to wait 10 years to find out you know that the kids in the class that didn't come to my daughter's overnight for her birthday were because it's not it's culturally uncomfortable and I didn't know that right I have one one final question for you and this has been such a really great discussion but our conversation is going to be followed by a discussion between the deputy secretary of labor deputy secretary of transportation we will also hear from someone from the department of commerce three agencies that are a part of the broader federal effort to make sure that these historic investments in infrastructure projects are also leading to really wonderful infrastructure jobs for communities particularly marginalized communities and so I'd love to hear from you your reflections on the role that the federal government should play but also state governments and in making sure that we are effectively leveraging these these resources that we can expect over the next several years it really is an exciting time we're working on this and and as I said kind of surprise infrastructure and there's money available for all of us and I'm busy trying to get infrastructure dollars into my communities you know which means more of a workforce but it's it's just absolutely vital that we do this and it's it's not just vital that we have an influx of money for infrastructure or for electrification or for you know energy that energy transition yes that's all wonderful but this is an opportunity to make sure that every single person in your community gets to benefit from that and not the same people that have always historically benefited we but we have to do the work in the cities and in our communities and in our jobs and in our nonprofits to make sure that we can provide that upward mobility to everybody in this country we haven't had this kind of opportunity that I'm aware of for a long long time maybe ever so my hope is that the work that we're doing can be replicable that other communities can be you know see it as a model that they might want to do in order to take advantage of the wonderful infrastructure that is so vital at a time in our country's infrastructure is aging right and we all are going to need to do that work and this will allow us to do it and let everybody in our community benefit yeah yeah thank you are there existing structures within your state that you're tapping into or that could be you know leveraged to really facilitate the sort of coordination that's necessary not just at the city level but at the regional level and then across the state we're building those out we've started having meetings with some of the for instance our state union boards after that after we were identified as one of the you know 15 global marriage challenge cities we made those calls and we've had some of those initial meetings to say how can we all work together and make this not just about Rochester but but changing the way we do things to benefit people all over and I would say there have been efforts underway and the one point that I made is well if less than one percent of the construction workers in my community are our BIPOC women then we've got a lot more work to do so it's not to say that anybody wasn't the best efforts and intense weren't there but it wasn't working and so we're hoping that through our efforts and the the co-design model that we can start making sure that the efforts that people are making pay off for the people that we're trying to provide upward mobility to at this extraordinary time in our history. Thank you Mayor Norton please join me in thanking Mayor Norton.