 And then they go, I did it. This is my kid. This is my kid. This is my not quite two-year-old, but my three-and-a-half-year-old does these big, strong, kind of kind of things. And then his teacher tells me that that's, like, about a very tall kid. Like, that's, like, doing, like, this sort of thing. Exactly. Interesting. I was trying to be, like, I know. If you want to feel better, I have a similar situation. I'm just going to tell you a little bit about that. I think it's good for me. I was trying to switch it up. I think all my students were like, I'm going to be through to the top. And decided he wanted to hang that up on the wall with all of my students. I've been doing a lot of explaining to do with my students. He's made the kind of kid take that and make it something less darker. I've got a lot of things to say. I think he's a sludger. I guess. I know. I'm going to wait. I'm going to wait. I'm going to wait. I'm going to wait. I'm going to wait. I'm going to wait. I'm going to wait. I'm going to wait. Good morning, everyone. We're going to get started. With the workforce development board meeting. Good morning. Good morning. I know it's fun to be back in person and talking to people actually out of the Hollywood squares. We'll do more of these and we'll have more time to reconnect in-person. So good morning and welcome to the first in-person meeting of the New York City Workforce Development Board in more than three years. I'm Adria Powell and I am the board chair. So good to see so many of you in-person. Abby Josiegel is not going to be with us today. She was actually called for jury duty. So her civic responsibilities call. And but she sends her regards to everybody, okay? So first, a couple of highlights related to the agenda for today. We're going to hear an update on the trends in health care from Daniel Liss, who's the executive director of the New York Alliance for Careers in Health Care. And from our member, Sandy Vito, the executive director of 1199 SEIU Training and Employment Funds. And then we will hear from several speakers about the City of New York's commitment to expanding apprenticeships, including the Mayor's Office of Talent and Workforce Development, Accenture, CareerWise New York, which is a nonprofit organization, as well as the New York City Public Schools, which is the newly rebranded New York City Department of Education. Next, I have a fun tidbit to remind everybody about, which is our annual disclosures are due. Friday is the deadline. Thank you for the folks who have completed it. I will say we still have 10 members who have not. Please, as soon as you can, complete those disclosures. There's actually a $250 fine if we don't complete it. And I've heard that they actually enforce that fine. So please do the disclosures. Next up, a couple of housekeeping items, since we're back in person. I just want to make sure folks remember that the state's Open Meetings Law applies to the Workforce Development Board, since we are considered a public body. And as a result, the public can attend these meetings, and the meetings are held in person to facilitate that. The Open Meetings Law was temporarily flexible during the worst part of the pandemic, which allowed for virtual meetings, but now requires that we have an in-person quorum in order to conduct business. We do have some board members, as well as presenters who are remote today. And there are certain exceptions within the law to actually do that. But by and large, we are really working to have these meetings be in person so that we can actually get through the business we have to do. Also note that today's meeting is going to be video recorded, and then it'll be posted online, which is also a requirement of the law. And as a longstanding policy, we ask that only board members speak, because we want to make sure that we have time for questions, discussion, or anything like that. And we are starting a little bit late, so we're going to try to keep everything tight and have a good, productive meeting. So now I'm going to turn to some recent, and we're going to hear about some recent developments in the talent and workforce development in New York City, and I will turn it over to Chris, who is headed up front, to give us this part of the presentation. Good morning, everybody. Can you hear me online? Great. I just have to underscore what Audrey has said. This is our first in-person meeting in almost three and a half years. And I think we were previously in this building on the 11th floor for the last couple of meetings, so it really is kind of a momentous time to be back, be able to see you all. It's times have obviously changed, but it's great to be back and to see your faces and get to see you in person again. I wanted to just briefly go through some updates in talent and workforce development, some things that some of you may be very familiar with, but we haven't met in a number of months, and so I wanted to walk you through some of these things. So next slide, please. So I'm going to cover these items, Executive Order 22, which was an executive order that the mayor issued that created our re-envisioned office, the Mayor's Office of Talent and Workforce Development, which includes the Workforce Development Board. We'll give you a brief update of the Future of Workers Task Force work, talk a little bit about the talent cabinet, reflect on the state of the city 2023, and talk a little bit about a program called New York Cylon, which is a governor initiative to increase resources to help connect people with disabilities to jobs. Next slide. And by the way, these are all good, this is a good preface for all the other stuff we're covering in this meeting. So the vision, and I think Abby has shared this with all of you, the vision that was laid out in Executive Order 22, again by Mayor Adams last year, included sort of broad citywide objectives for talent and workforce development. So to sort of paraphrase that all young people launch successfully by the age of 25, every New Yorker has the access to a living wage job. Employers benefit from having access to local talent that is qualified to meet the roles that they need them to play. Inequities, we reduce inequities, and public and private resources are a lot more aligned and efficiently leveraged together. So again, long-term broad vision of workforce development. Next slide, please. And so part of the reimagining of the workforce system has to do with shifting, shifting from our current state of silos and islands and moving to a more coordinated true system. And that's a big part of what our office has been tasked to do in partnership with the board and partnership with community-based organizations and lots of external stakeholders. Next slide, please. So I wanted to give a brief update on the future of workers' task force. I think we had originally built this meeting as being, you know, we were going to present the recommendations. The report is not quite done yet. We're still refining it. It's very close, but it is not yet ready for publication. And you know how these things can go. So, but the task force was comprised of a group of several dozen external folks to the city that is businesses, nonprofits, labor, funders, advocates, and others. And I think we had, I think Audrey said we had seven workforce development members represented on the task force, which was terrific. So what I'm going to go through now is these are sort of the five broad areas of recommendation. And hopefully we will be able to release the report soon. And then we want to give the board a full briefing on that. Because in part, you know, one of the main tenants is reimagine the role of the workforce development board. And those of you who've been around for years, we've talked about this for years, empowering the board, giving the board more say, more ability to make decisions and really set the strategy and the vision for the city. And so that's definitely a major part of what this task force talked about. Another area is to expand and support apprenticeships. We're going to spend, we're going to sort of do a deep dive on apprenticeship later. You're going to hear a little bit about a model that New York City public schools has launched. By the way, it's no longer DOE. It's no longer Department of Ed. We call them NYC public schools now. That's, that's the new thing. I think it's, it feels less bureaucratic. It's a, it's a friendlier name, but that's, I will not say DOE anymore. It's for both. And then another area is to align public and private investment. I mentioned this before, right? How do we really make sure that, that very private foundations invest a ton of money in workforce every year, but it's been hard to sort of align the cities and the private funders investments, established shared impact metrics. This is a recurring theme in workforce development. We're finally going to do something about it. And then finally build an employer facing front door. So we already have a talent portal that we're developing for job seekers. And there's sort of an early version of this that's out in the world, but we also want to make sure it's really easy for employers to come to the city if they have any kind of talent related need and intern and apprentice, a full-time worker training for incumbent workers and make it really easy for them to get connected to the services that they need. So that's the future workers task force. The five key areas. Again, we will provide a full briefing once that report comes out to all of you. I'm trying to click as if I could move this Jason. Next slide, please. A couple more remarks. So the talent cabinet. Now this was created in Mayor Adams executive order 22. And the idea behind the talent cabinet is let's create a formal body where city agencies and mayoral offices can come together and be really intentional about coordinating and building the system that we've been envisioning for a long time, but I think especially through the future workers task force. It's comprised of 50 different city agencies or mayoral offices. Many run workforce programs. Some hire lots of people through contractors. It's been convening monthly, I think since October, November. So it's meeting very regularly. It's going to build on the future workers task force, right? We're not trying to recreate the wheel or start from scratch. We want to build on the future workers task force to make sure that the city is responding to that and it affects implementing the vision and strategic framework that's being set by the task force. And then finally, it's an action oriented group. It's really building an action plan to build a true talent workforce development system. And so I'm sure we will at a future meeting have more of an update. One of the deliverables is to create an annual talent plan, provide that to the mayor. So I'm sure we will come back and provide more detail. Next slide, please. I want to go through this quickly. The mayor state of the city happened in January, February of 2023. So it's been a few months. But notably, there were workforce was front and center. Jobs was really the first sort of content area the mayor talked about in his speech. And there were five initiatives that our new office, newly expanded mayor's office of talent and workforce development touches directly. So the apprenticeship accelerator, right? The mayor set this moonshot goal of having 30,000 New Yorkers in apprenticeships by the year 2030. We're going to be a big part of that CUNY 2x Tech, very, very successful program. Jason, would you mind trying to hide that? Did I do that? Oh, that's me. That's all me. Sorry. See, we're getting used to the hybrid meeting. It's very, it's still new. I still like failed to unmute myself three times a day anyway. So that's a difference. But CUNY 2x Tech is, it's a successful program to help prepare CUNY students for tech careers. And it's expanding to two additional CUNY campuses. The nursing education initiative, we're going to hear very shortly about the nursing shortage and some of the related healthcare trends in New York City. But they're the mayor announced a partnership with CUNY to support 30,000 nurses over five years because the shortage is so dire. We all, the mayor also announced a Center for Workplace Accessibility and Inclusion. We may have talked about that a little bit in the past meeting, but that is meant to help people with disabilities access more employment opportunities. And our office will be leading that. And then finally, community hiring. We've talked about in past meetings, basically, if we want to leverage the city's enormous purchasing power, we need to pass a state law that allows us to require contractors to say hire a certain percentage of people from high poverty zip codes. And so the mayor announced that in the state of the city and the city is advocating for that in Albany as we speak. It was in the governor's budget proposal, but then pulled out in the, what do they call, one house memos or whatever. So it's still, we're still trying. I think this is the third or fourth year we've been trying. So anyway, all good news though, because Workforce has been really front and center in this administration. Next slide, please. All right, finally, and I think I'm already over time, but New York Scion, it's this governor's initiative to increase employment for people with disabilities. And Governor Hockel has been very supportive. The goal is to make the, what are called the American Job Centers, what we call the Workforce One Career Centers. All across the state, more accessible to people with disabilities, more inclusive of them to help more get access to job opportunities. So New York City, we're getting $500,000 a year. It was just announced that that will be for up to five years. Originally it was for three years. So the governor has extended that, which is terrific. And by the way, other local areas only get 100,000. So we're way ahead of the rest because we're New York City. So we're going to hire staff. And I think you'll hear a little bit more about that program when we hear from our colleague Janine from SPS. Okay, so I'm going to turn it back to Audrena. Thank you, Chris. Now I'm really excited to present a new segment in our meetings. And that is industry updates. As many of you are aware, Chris was also talking about Executive Order 22 that was issued last year. Actually consolidated the former mayor's office of workforce development and SPS industry partnerships. SPS industry partnerships were small teams of sector experts who would identify staffing pain points among employers and then devise creative human capital solutions to address those challenges, usually in the form of job training. So now today we're going to actually talk about, Chris referenced it in the notes from the mayor, about needing 30,000 nurses over the next five years because of a critical nursing shortage. So we're going to focus on the healthcare industry and that shortage. We will hear from the Executive Director of NIAC, Daniel. And Sandy Vito, the Executive Director for 1199 SEIU Training and Employment Funds. And their bios are on page four of your board packets. And so I will quickly turn it over to Daniel and Sandy. Sandy's on the screen. Morning, everyone. So I am delighted to be here with all of you today, as Adrienne. It's not on. Oh, there we go. Let's try again. Good morning, everyone. I am delighted to be here with you. As Adrienne mentioned, my name is Daniel List. I'm the Executive Director of the New York Alliance for Careers in Healthcare, which is the healthcare industry partnership now with the Mayor's Office of Talent and Workforce Development. I'm joined by my friend and colleague, Sandy Vito, who is not able to be here in person. She is on the screen. And so I am super excited to be here with all of you, both to talk about the healthcare industry, and also because I've had the chance to talk with many of you over the past few years, as we've been trying to deal with the emergency that has been the life that we've been living. So a few sort of broad strokes comments about the healthcare industry, and then I'm going to turn it over to Sandy. And then we'll have probably a minute or two for Q&A, understanding that we are short on time. And apparently I'm being told I need to have the mic even closer to my face. Is this better? Great. So first off, you can't talk about the healthcare industry and the healthcare workforce without starting with the immense strain that people have been under over the past three years. Being on the front line in whatever way, whether that was directly caring for patients, or whether that was sort of on the back end in healthcare, it has been enormously challenging for people in the sector. And it was really no understatement to say that the workforce is in a state of despair. And this is a really a self-reinforcing cycle at this point, where the more strain we have on people, the more people burn out and leave the workforce, the more the people who are left have strain, and it sort of continues and continues. In certain occupations, the cycle has been made even worse by a reliance on contract or temp labor, in places where employers felt they really had no choice but to employ these sort of temporary staff in order to care for their patients, especially as we saw sort of surges in infection, or people rushing back to get care that they hadn't been getting, and they were staying out of the hospital or community clinic setting. And we are now at a point where we have really serious labor shortages in titles we cannot do without as a city. So whether that is something like nursing, the entire nursing pipeline, nurse assistants, licensed practical nurses, registered nurses even up to nurse practitioners, as well as some of these more middle educational attainment kind of jobs, like respiratory therapy or central sterile processing, rad tech, surgical tech, lab technician, technologists kind of jobs, and then even in jobs that require that are sort of at the end of an educational pipeline, like physical therapists or occupational therapists, nurse practitioner, physician assistant, doctor pharmacy. I mean, these are jobs that we are desperate to have more workers in, and we as a city just cannot afford to not have enough of. And I will also say that as a result of all of this, while healthcare employers are desperate for some of these workers, all of the strain means that in the financial circumstances of running a healthcare business right now means that they have limited capacity to engage with the talent development ecosystem, right? And so we are finding that it is really an uphill battle to grab some attention in order to work on exactly these problems that they are so desperate to solve. Switching gears slightly, the pandemic also put a renewed focus on equity. That's both in terms of equity for patient outcomes for the health of our communities, as well as for businesses and workers in some respects. That said, a lot of this health equity work has slowed down because we are too strained and the people that would actually do the work, right? I will also say that we have still some real equity issues across sub-sectors in healthcare, right? So healthcare is not a monolith. It's about a fifth of the economy, about 750,000 people work in our healthcare sector here in New York City. And we have places like in home care where, and I know Audrey as our board chair has talked about this many times over the years, where while we continue to have a labor shortage, this has much more to do with things like wages or the structure of the business or how much revenue can come into our home care businesses than it does with training, right? So training is a thing that we should focus on, but it's not like we can do a training intervention and fix a labor shortage in home care. We also have home care workers continue to not get sort of recognition even as healthcare workers, which is a problem early in the pandemic and still continues to be a problem. And this is also an issue that is increasingly true in nursing homes who were really scapegoated during the pandemic as a place and nursing home workers in particular, a reason why some things were going wrong in our society when in fact it was not the workers at all, right? So a lot of that is about the pandemic and about sort of the impact of the past few years. There are also some underlying trends that have been true for a long time and continue to be true and we continue to ask our healthcare system to change. These are things like we have an aging population with people living longer with chronic health conditions that otherwise they might not have been, and that's great, but it also requires more health services. We also have trends in new financial models and workflows, great? Thank you for joining. So things like new financial models and technologies and workflows and ways that we need our healthcare workers to work with each other differently and to work across organizational boundaries differently. And all of that requires new skills, new competencies, new behaviors, and we're asking them to take on this burden while they are also just trying to do the regular job of caring for patients in the way they always have. Forever we've seen increasing need for mental health services. That's not new, but it is of course much more dramatic and in the public eye in a way that it hadn't been for a while. And that's both in terms of providing mental health services directly as well as training our healthcare workforce to deal with a population that may have mental health needs. So even if you yourself are not a social worker or a mental health counselor, you might still have to work with someone who is struggling with mental health issues. On the bright side, we are also seeing a trend in trying to connect social needs and social services to healthcare and an understanding that social stuff has an impact on people's health. And is there a way that we can hook social services into the healthcare dollar to be seen if we will be successful, but it continues to be a sort of priority and trend in the sector. And yeah, I'm now going to repeat myself, which is all of this is a lot shall we say for members of our healthcare workforce and for leaders in the healthcare sector to try and respond to the current moment and to adapt to where they think they need to go in the future. I'm going to actually pause here and hand it off to Sandy both to correct anything I said that was strange or add anything she feels she needs to and also to talk about the current state of the New York state budget because she knows that in much more detail than I do and can share with the group. Good morning, everyone. Hope you're all well. Let me first start by introducing Daniel Bustio, who is the deputy executive director. He's about three months into the job for 1199 training and employment funds. He is fresh off of his role as the executive director of the healthcare advancement project, which is a national labor management training partnership. So we're really excited to have him back with us and I will share with you that his expertise in workforce development is fairly broad and deep, but also includes apprenticeship. So as you look at the apprenticeship work, I hope we'll loop him into some of that work. Let me just finish some of the things that Daniel List was saying, then I'll talk a little bit about the budget. I want to frame the problem. Daniel List really got all the things right, so I'm not going to really have anything to add in. I'm just going to give a higher level frame. And I would say we have in healthcare industry two very significant equity issues that are driving the shortages. The first is what we call occupational segregation. It's a term actually used in multiple industries, but is fairly writ large in healthcare. So what do we mean by occupational segregation? We have the professional technical jobs where there are shortages, nursing, respiratory therapy, some of the occupations that Daniel imaging, nurse practitioner, some of the occupations that Daniel mentioned. So in that case, and I'm going to get back to this, we have a fairly significant challenge around education equity. So let me come back to that. The second piece of occupational segregation relates to the fact that our economy has funneled women and women of color and poor women and immigrants into low wage jobs and the renumeration for those jobs, the job quality, both in terms of compensation and other factors is bad. It's not good. So when we think about home care, and I know our chair, Audrey can talk eloquently about this. This is historically an undervalued occupation. And although there are of course education issues as Daniel mentioned, education is not the primary driver of the workforce shortages. It's the quality of the job. And that is increasingly becoming true in our nursing home world. We just met recently and some of our employers and our union noted that the differential between a minimum wage job and certified nurse assistant used to be about four times, 400%. It is now only dollars. So if the minimum wage is 15 entry level certified nursing home workers are only making $18, $19 to start. So that's a fairly significant diminishment of the quality of some of those jobs in the nursing home. So as workforce development entities, we're often focused on education, but there is a broader set of issues around job quality I think is front and center and of focus to us. So that's the first thing. The second piece that I want to note and get back to is the education equity issue. Just at a time of these decreasing shortages, we are also seeing a decline in enrollment. And there are lots of different theories about why we're seeing a decline in education enrollment. People are tired. People are juggling too many things. The pandemic has really stymied the ability to get childcare for work, let alone for while one is in school. So there are big issues to address in our education system. And like many industries, healthcare is a very credentialed industry at the higher wages. What the world calls middle skills. We like to think of them as middle wage or family sustaining, life sustaining wage jobs. And those are at the professional and technical level and tend to be two year degrees as entry level points. So those are my points. And I know you may have questions for Daniel and I. Let me just go to the budget. So the big budget piece right now for healthcare, I mean, there's four issues. One is the 1199 is and employers in the hospital sector are asking for a dedicated funding stream for safety net hospitals. So as I think many of you know, let's start with the obvious. There were raises given to workers, hardworking healthcare workers who deserved raises, right? So 7%, 6%, 5%. So that's the three upcoming increases, not just for nurses, but for health care workers. In the home care sector, there was a raise given of $1 last year, $1 next year. Again, insufficient, but still a raise. Sorry, Sandy. $2 in October of 2022. $2. Sorry. Thank you. Thank you. Right. So $2 and $1. So $3 total. Sorry about that. And then so just back to the safety net hospitals, because of their reliance on Medicaid funding for reimbursement, their ability to afford the raise is stretched. These are hospitals that serve the poorest communities in New York City and throughout New York State. So the dedicated funding stream for those safety net hospitals is one request that's on the table. The second is what we are euphemistically calling cut the Medicaid gap. So Audra could tell you there were these increases given and then there were proposed cuts in different sectors throughout healthcare, which means the raises to home health age, for instance, are in peril, because if there's not enough money to pay for the raises through the Medicaid rates, then we won't, you know, there won't be the other things will get cut, even if you're paying that level of salary. And then second is actually a request to increase Medicaid rates by 10% across the board. And then finally, there is a proposal to repeal what's called 340B. And this is related to the hospitals that we want to stop the repeal, you know, so there's a lot of controversy around the stop the repeal of 340B. That repeal would cut hospital prescription drug benefit reimbursements. So there's a request to pull back that repeal to keep them the hospital reimbursements for prescription drugs. So those are the big issues. Audra, I don't know if you want to add anything that's home care specific. I think the big issue is increasing the Medicaid rates. Yeah, I'm yes, I the only thing I would add is that those increases are required by law. And because we work in the Medicaid space, we receive reimbursement through the Medicaid funded programs. And they flow through the managed long term care insurance companies. And the managed long term care insurance companies are not forced to pass on the money that the state has given them for those wage increases. So currently what we are experiencing are underfunded rates for those increases. And the insurance companies being able to draw upwards of $700 million out of the system that's intended to go for races for the home care workforce. Okay, I'm going to stop there and turn it back to Chris. Chris, I don't know where we are in time. Do we have a time for a question or two? So we will do five minutes for questions if folks have any questions. One question, how do we force the insurance companies to do the right thing? So I appreciate you asking that, Dave. Currently, what a large broad swath of stakeholders are doing is actually trying to get legislation that is really around transparency and accountability in terms of building the rates, the reimbursement rates and having a mechanism where it will ensure that those, the rates that what it costs to deliver the services is captured and then passed through to the home care agencies from the managed long term care plans. I don't have the number off the top of my head, but that's, you know, the policy work is being done to really try to ensure that the Department of Health is building the rates and taking into account the different aspects of what it costs to deliver the services and then having a mechanism to see if the plans are passing along those rates and if they're not, then there's, there will be mechanisms to explain why they're not doing that. One thing I might add here is as much as we talk about healthcare as a market in many respects, it is largely not a market and doesn't really behave like a market is a highly regulated, like very tightly controlled system. And that is exactly why we have a situation where in order to increase wages, you have to have legislation and in order to make sure it passes through, you have to have legislation. And we're not going to sort of snap our fingers and make it suddenly demand for services is the thing that and demand for workers is the thing that pushes up wages. Any other questions? Okay, so then I think we'll close that there and hand it back to the rest of your agenda and always happy to come back and chat more with with you either as a group or individually. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you, Sandy. And welcome to Daniel Bustelo. Okay, so now we're going to move on and we will hear a brief update on the adult Lioa programs from Janine Jones. Hi. Good morning, everyone. Is that working? All right. So good morning. My name is Janine Jones. So for those of you that don't know me, I'm currently the assistant commissioner of SPS on the workforce division. I've been with the agency for about 10 11 years now, which is crazy to me. I first started off on the vendor side then worked my way into operations, had the opportunity work to work within center based programming, which was really the development and implementation of programs for both the general as well as targeted populations. And I currently sit in the role as the AC here. So I'm here to talk to you a little bit more about skyline, which is what Chris mentioned. And that really stands for the New York systems change and inclusive opportunities network. I will say where we are at the very beginning stages of this, the pilot that we're going to be doing. So I hope for this to be really just be a level set and we'll have many, many more conversations in terms of lessons learned and what we're doing within workforce system in general. But again, just wanted to give a high level update in terms of where we are now and to allow for any questions that you might have. But the real mission of the sky on program is to really improve the participation of individuals with disabilities, including individuals with intellectual and development developmental disabilities. And more importantly, we really want to try to improve the outcomes of individuals. They're going to be very for very specific goals that we work on during this process. So again, improve that employment outcomes for individuals, expand available career service services provided through our workforce one centers, which is hugely important to us. And I think comes to us at a really opportune time. Just as an agency and as a division, we're really looking to double down on our services for targeted populations to begin with. We think it's it's opportune, the market's ripe. We understand that individuals need more supports. And we're really working on that collectively. So this is again, a great time and collaborative collaborative experience for us to be able to do so. We're going to support and expand partnerships and collaboration coordination, really across New York City itself. So we have a really robust community partners program within workforce, meaning that our job is really to understand the landscape of community partners that exist within all across New York City, because we understand in a lot of cases, it's not necessarily always the resources that are available that tend to prevent people from participation, it's really being able to navigate that. So we really want to understand basic eligibility criteria. We want to really assist individuals where they are. So if there's services that we don't provide specifically in workforce one, we want to be able to provide the next best steps and really to partner with each other in terms of how do we best understand where that partnership begins. So it's really through conversations, really through understanding what supports someone needs and really trying to build more inclusive communities to make sure that we're better serving this population. So again, we think this is going to be an opportune time to really develop that even further. And then also to what's really important to us is that this is sustainable. So Chris took a little bit of my thunder, so the pilot has been extended from three years to five years, which is hugely important for us. Because as you know, this work is really hard and it's going to take time to get it off the ground and to make sure that it really works. And typically what happens, a new initiative comes on board by the time we're able to figure out somehow it gets the funding is no longer there. So we're really excited about this opportunity to have this expanded across five years to really get some lessons learned from everything that we do. And our goal is to really, like I said, integrated into our service system. So it's not intended to be separate and apart. It's really, we're really trying to figure out ways to really increase our capacity and our understanding and our knowledge built across our system. So again, that no matter what center you go into, you're getting the same quality of services. And I think that there's an opportunity for us to continue to grow and learn upon that. What I didn't say at the beginning, so this is a partnership, we are working really closely with the mayor's Office of Talent and Workforce Development, of course, but also with the mayor's office people with disabilities. And over the last couple of months, we've really started on the ground in terms of really understanding each of our services, right? We've been operating, although we've been strong partners, we've been operating almost in the silos perhaps. So it's really important for us in terms of being able to get it right for us to really understand operational approaches and then how do we better fit that in to one another. Our guess at this point that is that this pilot will occur in phases, meaning that it's going to probably look different in year three than it does in year one. Again, with the understanding that we're coming together with different philosophies, different ways of operating, and we're really trying to incorporate those ways to provide a service that's going to be best for the job seekers that are coming through our doors. In terms of the supports that are going to be hired, we're looking to hire at the beginning three individuals that will really be spearheading this. But again, they're going to be, the importance for us is that there's going to be support really across our system and our centers. And we really look to do this from not only in an operational approach, but also a true educational approach. So we will be providing training to all of our workforce one centers and staff members that exist within them. We're going to be providing additional training to our community partners that exist within our own network. And of course, we're going to be providing some additional trainings to our employers that are within high demand sectors. Again, the goal is to really increase capacity, understanding and knowledge to make sure that job connection is more successful for individuals with disabilities. And with that, I'll take any questions that you might have. Again, it's the very beginning of the pilot, and I hope to show you much more. But if anyone has any questions, now's the time. Can you say a little bit more about occupations or just like paint a more vivid picture of like an example just to bring it to life a little bit more? Yeah. So we're really kind of at the beginning phases in terms of conversation in terms of where we think that specifically from an employer perspective we can go because I think our understanding really is that employers just don't know and they don't know what they don't know in terms of better ways to really support individuals with disabilities. So I think we're starting from a perspective of just understanding what ways that we can inform that educational piece. Because as you know, it's slightly different from I think what we do in terms of work first one in terms of the advocacy piece. That's something that we think that'll be extremely important to this population. And we're really trying to figure out ways to implement that within our own sales. So does it take the form of like drawing a sales picture? We're really having conversations and discussing it. Are we having additional workshops or presentations that will better inform employers in terms of what it's like to better support the communities in general? But in terms of occupations, I can talk a little bit about the way we've approached it in the past specifically with our community partners. And it really comes down to because disabilities look very different in all forms in all communities. And it really for us really is dependent upon really two ends of the bargain. What really are the occupations that the job seekers are looking for or opportunities to connect? And then also too in terms of what the demand is and really trying to meet those needs in both ways. I think that's really the approach that we're going to take in general. So I'm just curious about the timeline. Have you begun where are you at? So right now we're in we've been having conversations for about six months at this point in terms of the planning phase. We're actually at the point of the process where we're looking to hire on board these three positions. And then we have started having conversations with our centers in terms of understanding integration, talking about operations on our end. As of next week, we're really going to be talking about operations from the MLPD side. And so again, very beginning phases of this. But we hope to have someone or individuals in place within the next two to three months to really get things off the ground in terms of implementation in the centers. And then what I did, so even with that, sorry, one more thing and then I'll hand it over. But even without the actual individuals or positions, we are starting the process of I'm just starting to plan out our trainings to across our system within within our centers again, because we just see there's so much opportunity for our staff to grow and to develop in terms of really being able to better support. So that that work will start. Jeanine, we have a question from Les. He has his hand up up here. Actually all around the room. Yeah, so so so as having family members with developmental disabilities, one of the big one of the big issues is getting the message out to the people who need the programs, aside from the employers, which is certainly a huge lift, but also how how do people or is part of the mission to increase the accessibility, you know, the idea of someone with this development of disabilities just walking into a workforce one center is not going to happen unless they know that there's something there for them. Yeah, so that's definitely a part of our overall mission goal. It's really increasing awareness and really being able to partner with our community partners really across New York City as well. So to your point, so MLPD already has a robust community partners program that they've already interacted with and and continue to engage in workforce one does as well. We have about 350 community partners that we work with at any given time. So to your point, the goal is really to combine those efforts to ensure that we're really being very specific and engaging and can communicate a the changes that are being made and also to communicate the services that are available to individuals. Because to your point, like no one just walks into a workforce one center and they're typically walking in because of something or because someone has directed them in that and that way. And we're also just being mindful in terms of our just not only our partners, but our communications in general, right, in terms of some of our social media platforms that we're going to be looking at really being able to highlight our services and our wins. We think that having branded messengers is certainly going to play an impact in terms of highlighting the successes that we've seen. I'm talking about our dedication to that within our traditional publications as well. That will be a continued communication piece. But the goal is really to ensure that people ensure that there is an awareness of the services that we have available and to ensure that we're also connecting with people within the communities that can also serve as an engagement piece as well. Because there's trust that's already been built up that we want to be able to certainly take advantage of. Thank you. One thing I would note that I think is important in this budget that the legislators have been working on is actually increasing the income limits for people who are on Medicaid and like people with disabilities because folks have had to impoverish themselves in order to qualify for Medicaid and get home care services. And these same folks are very capable of being able to work in jobs and really contribute and be viable parts of the economy but have been held out because of those income levels and stuff. So it's very promising that there's actually legislation to expand the earnings for folks. Okay. Thank you, Janine. Thank you. And again, if you have any questions feel free to reach out at any point in time. Thank you. So now we're going to have a brief update on the Youth WIOA programs and the Summer Youth Employment Program. So I'm going to turn it over to Valerie, Deputy Commissioner of Youth Workforce Connect at DCY. Thank you. Hi everybody. Happy to be here representing DYCD. We are extremely busy. I think as Chris mentioned the administration has had a tremendous focus on workforce and that is not, am I doing that? You're doing that. Okay. That is really trickle down to our team. Our charge is growing and growing and growing. And so I've brought two of my amazing directors here to talk to you a little bit about some of the things DYCD is working on. Our charge is large. Like I said, we oversee the WIOA Youth Programs and we also oversee the Summer Youth Employment Program, both of which are going through massive expansion changes and you know innovation that we're working on at DYCD. So I'll turn it over to our director of strategy and integration, Zane Khan, to talk a little bit about what's happening in our WIOA programs. Good morning everyone. So I just want to give a brief update on what we're changing in our WIOA programs and maybe just a level set, talk a little bit about what those programs are. So we receive the WIOA allocation for youth funds from the state for New York City and the funds two programs. The first is training and the second is learning. Training is our out-of-school youth program and learning is our in-school youth program. We've been moving in a direction that's trying to respond to some of the changes in the labor market because of the pandemic. And I think what we really learned from what's been happening for young adults who are out of school at work is that they were historically employed in industries that were sort of face-to-face. Some of that was in healthcare, some of that was in retail, hospitality, and they were overrepresented as a kind of like a demographic of that workforce. And so what we wanted to do to address this is kind of move our programs to have more of a sectoral approach that would kind of make them more resilient to these changes in the labor market. So they had skills training that was aligned to what employers are actually asking for now. So some of the major changes that we made to train and earn. Firstly, we are requiring any contractor to be sectorally focused on either media and entertainment, infrastructure, and infrastructure we're defining as how the federal government is giving their infrastructure funding through the bipartisan infrastructure legislation, healthcare, and then tech. And so you essentially have to, as a contractor, align training internships, your employer partners, all within that sector. And we are going to try to, it depends on how strong our proposals are, but we're going to try to really focus on getting at least one contract for each of these sectors. I think we'll see a lot more in infrastructure because of the funding that's going down from the federal government to the state. But I think we really want to be ripe for being able to access that funding by having more of our contractors focused on these sectors. So what we really wanted to maybe beef up in these programs were the support of services. So we changed our staffing pattern to add a mental health counselor, knowing that a lot of out of school, out of work young people need additional supports. We added a service navigator because all of the UWA programs have a year of follow-up services. And so we want to be really keenly focused on retention, on changing placement of that, you know, if a job wasn't right for that young person. But we know that sometimes because you're managing multiple case loads, that not all of the staff can really give attention to a participant when they exit the program. So we also beefed up our case managers. We have two case managers now in the program. And then we changed to having a full-time job developer and an instructor or training these onto. So the idea there is that we'll have a greater capacity to serve the young adults in the program. And then we're hoping to really shift to being just very focused on training. There won't be any more high school equivalency supports in the program because we want to focus more on doing referrals there, so that the program is just focused on exactly what it's meant to do. And knowing that that population of out of school, out of work young adults tend to be more educated now. We have, I think, an 82% graduation rate out of the DOE. And so more people have their diploma or equivalency. And there are other programs also, including in DOICD and in the DOE that offer the HSE services. We're trying to be more cohort-based too. This is something that we learned from another program that we do for out of school, out of work young people called Advanced Center. And I think the idea there is that we want to encourage more peer learning, more peer support and structured activities, because there has been like significant learning loss, significant loss of socialization for some of these young adults. And because they're disconnected by nature, we want to encourage that they learn from each other and are part of something that's more rigid. And then now moving to Learn and Earn. So Learn and Earn is our in-school youth program. It's very focused on being a college pathway program. It's for high school juniors, and seniors, but we try to start with juniors so that they could be retained as a senior and really get a two-year program. The idea that we want to really see that kind of changes how we've been doing this program is we are focusing on select schools, rather than having just the contractors propose schools. We want to look at all of our investments as a city, both what we do at DOICD and what the DOE is also doing. And think about supporting programs in schools that are very under-programmed and in historic neighborhoods that don't have high graduation rates and college enrollment rates. So we are going to release that concept paper for both Train and Earn and for Learn and Earn in the next month. The RFP is going to be going out in fall. Programs will start contracts will be awarded for June, July 1st, 2024. And I think when we release the concept paper, Chris will share it with the Workforce Development Board. We hope to really get feedback and answer questions like in-depth with you all and really make sure that the RFP reflects what you as board members, as employers, are seeing to so that we make sure that it's aligned to your partners, to your industries. Yeah, those are the main changes. Any questions? All right. Thank you, Zane. And of course, if you all have questions about what he just talked about, please reach out to us. We're really excited about these concept papers. We've been working really, really hard on them and trying to move them forward. Zane's done an amazing job shepherding that through the process of what it is to do a big city RFP. So we're excited to put it out there and then to hear feedback from all of you. And now to my other big favorite initiative that the city has been hyper focused on the Summer Youth Employment Program, which we are in the middle of launching. So Becca, would you like to come speak a little bit about where we're at there? Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Can we go to the next two slides over? Next one. Next one. Great. Thank you. So SYEP, it's that time of year again. I know many of you probably are already aware that SYEP is launched this year. I've seen Grant's emails go out. Thank you so much for that support, Grant. So just overall program details, Summer Youth Employment Program supports young people ages 14 to 24 with the summer job experience. For our 14 and 15 year olds, they're doing project based learning experiences with their provider. So what that looks like is a summer project based around career exploration, exploring different industries and what it's like to work in specific jobs. And then for 16 to 24 year olds, they're placed at an actual work site getting maybe their first time job ever or just continuing to explore what it's like to work in different industries. Participants are paid by the city for the six weeks that they work, $15 an hour. They can work in two different cohorts. It's completely up to you whether starting July 5th or July 10th. Thanks to Mayor Adams. We have an incredible investment supporting 100,000 jobs for summer youth employment that launched last year and we're continuing that charge this year. What I think is super interesting about this year is it's the 60th anniversary of SYEP. The program launched in 1963 under President Kennedy and it's New York City has been the really the only city that's been able to continue the program without any breaks in service for this entire time. Really special year. We look forward to celebrating with all of you and our young people. So if you're interested in getting involved in the 60th anniversary or you or someone you know worked in SYEP, what we're doing right now is capturing different stories of employer perspective, participant perspective of what it was like to work in the program through many different decades. If you know someone who participated and they want to share their story, you can go on the DOACD website under SYEP and there's an area where you can share your story. SYEP is also launching different initiatives. So we are focusing on two. This year we have SYEP Pride, which is focusing on young people in the LGBTQ plus community and supporting them entryways into specific industries or careers and giving them and also our employers extra support to be able to support young people within this community. So what that looks like is we've partnered with the Mayor's Office of Community Affairs and NYC Unity Project, which is going to be doing provider trainings and employer trainings, basic tips and tricks and ways to support this community within the workplace. We're also focusing on equity and ramping up opportunities for young people with disabilities. So for example, last year our partners at the NYPD hosted 40 young people who were deaf and hard of hearing and this year they're going to be focusing on young people who are blind. Other agencies are also focusing on ramping up initiatives. Just wanted to share an example of a larger agency that's really invested in supporting young people with disabilities. Can we go to the next slide please? So just wanted to share some basic like what it looks like for a young person to go and work in SYEP. Many of this is like entry level jobs. If you have specific projects, maybe you don't have the capacity to handle this would be a perfect opportunity for a young person to work with your company and do some type of project, be able to foster some new skills and opportunities for them to really get their feet wet in within your company organization, but also within the industry. Some of the employers we work with I have listed here we worked with over 18,000 different employers across the five boroughs last year and hoping to increase those numbers again this year. Next slide. So this was my favorite part and thanks to Mayor Adams we have launched this enrichment series with SYEP so last year we hosted 50 enrichment opportunities for young people to be able to explore careers in here from professionals across different industries of what it's like to work in specific industries at their company and like what their career journeys look like. So this is just a couple examples of what we did last year. Morgan Stanley hosting a networking career panel lunch and learn event for young people. Mayor Adams actually hosted his very own enrichment at Gracie Mansion. He did a cooking demo for about 300 young people followed by a celebrity chef career panel hosted by the careers and through culinary arts program. Young people were able to go and thanks to the EDC on the New York City ferry tour so they went to the ferry terminal heard about different career pathways and how folks got their jobs there and then went on like a unique tour of the harbor on the ferry. Go to the next one and then another kind of cool opportunity. Governors Island opened up their facilities for young people to be gate tours of the buildings tours of what they do there and then just have like a general overall fun day at Governors Island and then a fan favorite our FDNY career day. Young people got to go to the FDNY training facility and see what it's like to be a firefighter for the day. They were putting out car fires, scale in five-story buildings. It was a really incredible opportunity. Next slide. So how can you support? There are many different ways you can support the Sarmie Youth Employment Program. In addition to hiring interns we understand that you know we're back from COVID office life looks a little bit different now and some folks maybe discontinued their internship program due to you know the COVID and all of the things but and they're lurking to ramp it back up but in addition to that in addition to hiring young people you can host a career exploration event you can host a career panel you can design your own enrichment event and what you want that to look like and of course we're here to support you with whatever you want to do. You can convene partners and your contractors your professional network just kind of spread the word about SYEP and then you can help us celebrate our 60th anniversary. We're looking to maybe host some events here and there across the borough so any space or just anything to support the 60th anniversary is appreciated. Next slide. Yeah so questions have a few minutes. We're actually short on time. Okay no minutes. But I can leave some of my cards I'll leave some of my cards with Grant if anyone is interested in SYEP you want to host an event or do anything feel free to get in touch with me. Thank you. Thank you. Grant. Okay guys I want to welcome the mayor. He's here. No I'm Joe. I got excited. Well no first of all thanks everyone for taking the time to feel my calls. I've been reaching out to a lot of board members and we're really just trying to get the conversation going about how could we actually foster this relationship to get more slots you know like Rebecca McDonough she mentioned that employers actually having to May 26 to take SYEP interns you know so we really just kind of want to keep pushing that out and everybody that's taking interns we appreciate we know last year you guys took some interns but you know it's very important for our city to move the city forward you know as Rebecca was saying work readiness training project-based learning financial literacy training summer jobs this is an ecosystem that's going to continue growing because so many people come through SYEP so um just you know keep the conversation going if you have a cell number I've been trying to reach some of you guys and it's the office number so I know some of y'all ducking me be the cell phone number I will call you personally we can talk through some of these things I talked to a few board members that mentioned they would be interested in actually being part of some of the kickoff events if you want to be a part of a kickoff event or you want to partner give us a call give us a email like I can connect you with Rebecca I can connect you with Valerie and that can happen um last but not least um ask yourself how many interns would you like to take this year we need more interns we need to come and continue keeping it going so you know talk to me after the meeting and we can continue to dialogue but thank you and uh see later thank you Grant we're a fairly large board right I mean I think we could for the 60th anniversary maybe come up with 60 touch points to SYEP and do something yeah okay um so now I am going to sorry excuse me as was mentioned earlier in Chris's report right um Mayor Adams signed the executive order executive order 22 last year one of the many things that that did was really was to create the future of workers task force and one of the the key areas as we saw in the five that were listed there was around apprenticeships so we will now hear from four individuals about the various aspects of the city's efforts to expand apprenticeships so our own Chris Neil Rachel Vantosh from Accenture Jessica Simonson from New York City Public Schools artist formerly known as DOE not saying anymore um and Noelle Parish and Greg Matteo both of whom are from career-wise New York and everybody's bios except for Chris's will be in the packet so I'm just going to give a really brief seated introduction to these folks um we already said this earlier but you know in the mayor's state of the city the big moonshot goal was 30 000 apprentices by the year 2030 we know there's a lot already in the skilled trades historically and some in manufacturing but it requires really thinking creatively about how to grow apprenticeships and part of it is understanding how many do we have right now and what is an apprenticeship right um because not all apprenticeships are necessarily registered with the New York State Department of Labor um and so our office is working with Accenture on a landscape analysis to try to figure out a number of things about the current state of apprenticeships in New York City so we're going to hear from Rachel in just a minute and then we'll hear about a specific program where the city is already investing heavily in apprenticeships with young people with high school with high school students so high school students that will participate in three-year apprenticeship programs which is a really exciting and innovative initiative so we're going to hear from New York City public schools and then as Audrey said from uh career-wise New York the the nonprofit partner to public schools so with that I will turn it over to my colleague Rachel from Accenture to talk about the landscape analysis they're working on morning everyone can you hear me can I need to yeah yeah can everyone hear me now yeah all right good morning everyone um good to see some familiar faces and um also be introduced to new folks and I will say as I was listening to the last presentation I was texting of my colleagues at Accenture saying do we host people or is there some way that we could be involved so I can't promise that we'll see if we could be one of the 60 if you could go to the next slide so I'm going to take just a few minutes today but then I'll be around for questions after if anybody wants to talk about the work that we're doing I'm going to start with introductions give a quick project overview and then depending on the time that we have Chris I can answer questions either now or at the end of everybody's presentations um my name is Rachel Vantosh I am a senior manager at Accenture in the public service team based in New York I have worked in the world of economic development for many years prior to starting at Accenture I worked for a like non-profit mission driven financial services firm but for about 10 years before that I worked for the city most recently at SBS so this is a an area that is near and dear to my heart and yeah if I want to go to the the next slide as Chris mentioned there has been a significant commitment as all of you know from the administration to think about how to expand apprenticeships apprenticeships in New York City but also even beyond what we think of as traditional apprenticeships what does it look what is like a 21st century apprenticeship look like what are some innovative earn and learn models that provide a real future path for individuals to like good jobs and so that is what the mayor's office is aiming to expand and is what we are helping them think about in this landscape analysis yeah I'm going to go to the next slide perfect so we are essentially working on a few different buckets of analysis in collaboration with the mayor's office we are analyzing data and a whole bunch of different ways to look at you know what is the current landscape of apprenticeships in New York City what types of occupations there are and thinking about also what might be a set of priority occupations to further investigate for apprenticeship expansion we are also conducting a lot of research through talking with individuals just a selection of the folks that are being spoken with throughout this project are listed on the slide and thinking about you know things like what are the value propositions for apprenticeship for several different audiences not for just employers not for just apprenticeships for the public for our educational system as Chris mentioned we are doing some thinking and some work on what is really a threshold definition of apprenticeships may not only be registered but what does it mean if you go beyond that and then finally once we pull together the data pull together this research will be offering a set of recommendations of short medium and long term actions that the city can take to help meet their goal so we really see this as like a set of building blocks that the city can use to like take the next step make an action plan and you know hit and maybe surpass the 30 000 by 2030 next slide it was a relatively short project we just started at the beginning of April we'll be wrapping up before Memorial Day so if you all are getting data requests or interview requests from us thank you for your quick response so we are you know get we're going to be delivering many different pieces to the city in this time frame right now we are sort of in the current state of assessment still talking to stakeholders and we'll be continuing to do that for the next week or two and then we'll start getting into some findings and recommendations work next slide so how you could get involved I mean very interested if you feel passionately about apprenticeships you know and we have not already spoken I'm happy to set aside some time to do that before the end of this project at the end of May or after but it won't be included in the report but we are looking to speak directly with some apprentices and with employers and we have you know started to to get folks signed up for different sessions with us we're aiming to have sessions sort of the beginning middle of May so if there are apprentices that you know if there are employers who have hosted apprentices who'd like to share about their experience good or bad we would love to hear from you and we're looking for all different sectors all different ages for apprentices we're going to have one workshop with youth apprentices specifically and one with adults so you know you can find me right after this I can share my contact information if it's not already shared out and we would really welcome your help in identifying folks to speak with next slide Chris do I have time for questions now okay no all right until the end from everybody happy to take questions at the end our next presenter Hi everyone Jessica Simonson I'm senior director of the career readiness and modern youth apprenticeship initiative at the New York City public schools and so I'm not sure how familiar everybody is with the initiative it's a three-year pilot program and so I want to just build a little bit on what Chris may have introduced earlier in the session um the pilot was launched back in I believe June of last year I came on board in October and so it's been a really quick ramp up there are 58 schools selected to participate and the career readiness modern youth apprenticeship initiative I always say it has these two arms to it right there's the career readiness side and then there's the modern youth apprenticeship side and everybody you know we we talk about the apprenticeships because it's so exciting and it's so innovative and and really shiny and new but the career readiness side is is a really important foundational component of the pilot so it is a three-year pilot and in these 58 schools students will receive ninth and 10th grade students will receive um three separate career readiness curricula um in ninth grade they receive a curriculum called um career exploration and the intention is that that is universally delivered to all ninth graders in 10th grade they have a curriculum called career development again the intention is that it's universally delivered to all 10th graders and then second semester 10th grade students participate who are interested in participating and committing to a three-year apprenticeship participate in a course called pathway matching where they go through the actual application process where they can apply for an apprenticeship and this is a partnership with our friends at career wise it will talk a little bit more about the nuances of of the apprenticeship and uh program in itself but the really important part is that these students who are eventually selected for apprenticeships have this foundational understanding and this foundation of career exploration and career development upon which to kind of launch their apprenticeships so they're coming to employers ready to work with some sort of foundational understanding about what it means to embark upon a career and really make this commitment to um as an apprentice um you can go to the next one so we we speak to our employer partners um many of which this year for the first time our New York City agencies um and we speak to them as though this is not a corporate social responsibility of initiative this is yes it's something amazing for the students in New York City public schools but you know whether or not equally as important is that it's a really great talent pipeline for employers and it is it is not an employer doing something nice to host a student and have a flirting opportunity but this is a way for employers to develop their staff and develop their workforce for years to come so the the hope is that students at their end of their three-year apprenticeship will go on to secure a full-time employment with their host agency or employer you can go to the next slide so this may be a terminology that everyone in this room is familiar with but just want to really highlight as this is the conversation we have with a lot of employers and city agencies as we talk about hosting apprentices what is the difference between an intern as we heard from syep earlier and an apprentice um obviously an apprentice is a much deeper um commitment so in for the crmya initiative which is a mouthful right career readiness modern youth apprenticeship um it is a three-year commitment by both the student and the employer um there is this is they are serving in occupationally specific titles so they're not going in to find out about what it's like to be in an office or get some time you know developing relationships or networking they're going in in a specific occupational title to learn a skill and we typically think of of apprenticeships as in trades but we're really thinking about this primarily for crmya in business finance and it and thinking about how are these students or these apprentices at the end of their three years prepared with a on-the-job training to say I am a junior coder right like I have this experience this apprenticeship under my belt and now I can put that on my resume with specific skills and projects that I worked on and so it is a far deeper more intensive experience than a than an internship which is valuable in its own right but different than an apprenticeship and you can go to the next so some some basics that we share with our employers the students begin their apprenticeship with employers in their 11th grade year things look a little different when we're talking about transfer schools we understand that every school is a little bit different but this is the typical model that's that's has been created they begin their first year of their apprentice apprenticeship in 11th grade then second year in 12th grade and there is a third year assuming a year 13 for a student that year 13 as Noelle always speaks about is you know an options multiplier and so this is a time when a student can work part time go to college part time maybe take a gap year maybe say hey two years was good I'm where I want to be and I'm going to go to school full-time or however they want to continue that relationship but the end we expect that employers and apprentices are going in with a three-year commitment we ask employers to take on a cohort of of apprentices we want them to have each other to support one another to have some sort of community it can be a really daunting experience going in as a as a 16 year old into a corporation or into a city agency all by yourself and so so we do ask that that employers bring on a cohort of you know at least three apprentices doesn't have to be in the same office doesn't have to be in the same supervisor but they know they have each other in the space and the hourly wage is determined and paid for by the employer and there is a and Greg I believe we'll talk a little bit more about the engine on the job and credentialing process with the New York State Department of Labor and you can keep going so this speaks a little bit to the coursework that comes prior to the apprenticeship opportunity you can keep going I know we're time is of the essence here want to make sure we touch on all the big stuff okay great with that I will pass it over to career wise talk more about the apprenticeship initiative in itself thank you Jessica again my name is Noel Parrish I'm chief innovation officer at career wise New York and work really closely with Jessica and NY NYCPS so the mission of career wise New York we are a 501c3 nonprofit that was incubated by an organization a nonprofit in the Bronx called here to here in 2019 and we've been going strong since then we've already placed about 500 students in these three-year apprenticeships in companies like Amazon Accenture and JP Morgan Chase our mission is to really build a system that supports modern youth apprenticeship so some of the jobs that you heard Jessica talking about you know IT business and finance and then we're also moving into hospitality and health care in occupations like junior coder graphic design you know human resources associated etc part of our work with the career readiness modern youth apprenticeship pilot is to support the curriculum that Jessica was talking about so we have the three curricula that sort of act as front-loaded training in a pipeline from the 58 schools that are part of the initiative and then there's also three entry points into the apprenticeship so we recruit in business IT and finance directly from that 10th grade in the spring semester and then students get some training over the summer and then they start their apprenticeship in 11th grade we're also recruiting in the fall of 11th grade into hospitality into occupations like event planning or retail hospitality and then we're also working with the five largest hospital systems in New York City now to launch a health care pathway that will recruit in the fall of the 12th grade and then do some of the pre-apprenticeship work required to get a certification that allows students to start an entry level position and then partnering with the New York's job CEO council to move them into a next level role in things like you know RNA LPN radiology assistant etc so in addition to that we work closely with our employer partners to support the students as apprentices and Greg will talk more about that and then we also make sure that students are well prepared you're the next slide so some of the things we do like I said are the curriculum in 9th and 10th grade we also have a team of project managers that works directly with the schools it supports them instructionally we provide coaching and training to the teachers in the schools and then in year two of the pilot we're working with New York City public schools to hire school design coaches to work with principals to help integrate these three curricula and the three entry points into the whole school model so they'll be part of the school culture and part of this whole school programmatic structure we also offer a hiring hub that helps match students to the opportunities so after they've been studying they've done three semesters work worth of thinking about who they are what they're interested in and what's available to them and then what's expected of them they start to actually choose a pathway and so that's when we begin to match the student to the individual companies and the different occupations within those companies we use some algorithm within our hiring hub to do that we also make sure that we have our project managers working directly with the CSMs who support our employers to get good matches and then we also make sure that we have you know student friendly job descriptions as well as student friendly interview questions and we work with companies directly on how to interview young people and then through the apprenticeship students are able to earn college credit credentials so I'm going to pass it over to Greg Matteo now to talk about that next slide please good morning Greg Matteo here also with CareerWise New York so I'm going to briefly touch on college credit and why we focus on this right so one is the reality we saw relatively quickly that most of our apprentices were college minded and we're going to college anyway and that had some implications onto that third year so we wanted to create options multiply we want to ensure that they stood with the program but as they decided to go into college we create an accelerated path to graduation so we partnered with New York's New York CEO job council who has connected us with many of the CUNY campuses currently only CUNY SPS school professional studies in Lehman College have agreed to partner with us and we've developed an assessment that would ultimately award 12 credits for their apprenticeship and here's the breakdown of essentially how they would do it based on our program elements right so one is three credits for the career development from Maya they will offer upon successful completion they would also offer three credits for the career ready competencies so each of the apprentices get evaluated on career ready competencies that we develop and then three additional credits on occupational competencies which we also develop and then finally three credits for the apprenticeship in itself right so 12 credits in total would be awarded simply for an apprentice going through and completing the apprenticeship and currently again this is with CUNY SPS and Lehman College moving down and I see Angie's here so we're also partnering with NYU SPS and they're taking a slightly different approach to creating you know having the credit equivalencies and part of what we are partnering with NYU SPS is the reality is not everyone is going to CUNY right and we realize that they're like I mentioned earlier they're really college minded students and they they want some selected college options right but a lot of these college options tend to be out of state or upstate and they leave in droves which then you know has implications on that third year and inability to complete you know so we we've had partnered with NYU SPS we're currently in the midst of that rather being a curriculum that would award up to 12 core credits and IT and business ops the difference between and I'm being really abbreviated here because of time the CUNY options are bachelor's degree and then NYU SPS is an applied associate's degree right so going back to a comment someone made earlier about options multiplier I think you know we need to cast a wide net to be able to you know bring in and ensure that as many apprentices are staying with the apprenticeship but also see college as an option for them so that's briefly on the college credit component and then I'm going to move on to how we support the employers right which is a question Chris asked us to speak to so on the engagement column you'll see we do site visits mock interviews of recruitment events with schools and so on we create sector-based approaches to pathway creation in other words you know if an employer wants to hire an apprentice in the occupation that we currently don't have we work with them to develop that occupation so we can stand it up and they can ultimately hire an apprentice so you know one relatively hot and recent is like cybersecurity hospitality something that's coming down the pipe as noted on healthcare as well right these are some new occupations we did not have in the first three years about our apprenticeship we convene community practice so employers can talk to each other about some of the best practices that they're facilitating within their own companies and perhaps you know someone can replicate and then we also have a youth apprenticeship advisory board that's been critical and championing youth apprenticeship within their respective companies how we further support you know employers each employer is assigned a client success manager and that clients assess managers dedicated to that account they meet with that account on a weekly basis whether that's with the program lead who manages the program internally for the company they also conduct post checks with supervisors and apprentices to gauge how things are going on where there may be skill gaps and and support them in developing training plans and so on there's also a senior case manager similar to you know the approach that the YCD recognize I think we're recognizing too is that you know these young people are coming to us with lives right and those lives are not sort of linear and we need to figure out ways to support them beyond just what happens in the workplace so that senior case manager will sort of really look at things beyond how they're performing in their job so I think that's an immensely critical role for us and we're hiring so if you know anyone who were for case social work background is interested in workforce development send them away and then finally you know we facilitate training whether that's synchronous on a quarterly basis or asynchronous we create short videos based on needs and the poor feedback on things they need and sort of you know dispense it across the network so employers can sort of disseminate internally to their supervisors who may not always be available to attend a synchronous training and then we also provide quarterly training for apprentices outside of what no I'll note it we do some front loaded training right before the start but we continue that training throughout the the year and if they're registered apprentice on the Department of Labor and they have additional training that that happens as well but those are more occupation specific whereas our quarterly training tends to be more soft skills oriented and that's what we have thank you thank you all for the presentation yes you and I as a hand up thanks I was looking at just doing some quick math on the hours required especially for high school students you know I saw 12 24 certain number of hours per week how how is this how does this mesh with you know the the required curriculum hours I mean I mean these or is this happening is this overlapping is it in addition to yeah that's a great question what it typically looks like is that students go to school in the morning and then they leave it about noon to travel to their company and they work Monday through Thursday from 1pm to 5pm and so what we've also been able to do is some of our summer training that leads into the program is actually taught by licensed teachers and is worth a high school credit and so students are able to front load some credits remove a class from their schedule and then spend the second part of the day learning at work where they can get be working on their college credits while getting paid while completing high school on time so it's again to that options multiplier point really stacking the deck in favor of the students so they can accomplish many different goals at once all while making anywhere between 15 to 25 dollars an hour I laud the the goal and I'm just I'm I just question or concern you know about you know students capability capabilities of getting everything in in a given day especially if you're reducing the hours and the you know the standard curriculum yeah you know less I can't just speak to it from the from the principal side so we are working with school leaders to ensure that they are scheduling courses so that students can make sure that they have all of their required graduation courses in the mornings when they are in the school building it does take some creative scheduling on part of principles principles really have to be very thoughtful not just how they schedule for that that one student or those three students who are from their school who have apprenticeships but for all of their students right we had one principal say well we have a like a rotating schedule so for their whole school so one day on Monday period one might be first but on Tuesday period one might be second and having that rotating schedule is what worked best for the whole school but not for these few students that had apprenticeships and so principles are doing the work and we're you know as New York City Public Schools we're guiding them through this to ensure that students have all the required coursework that they need it is hard it is taxing students are on the go from early in the morning they get home late just like you know it's it is a full day for them we're also providing principles with guidance this year in because principles can decide whether or not they want to offer high school credit for these apprenticeships so that may also be a way for students to continue to accrue credits while they're participating in their apprenticeships thank you I see Sandy has a question also hi this is more of a general question about the general approach not for this particular description should I hold on that Andrea no go ahead no no okay so I love in this this youth apprenticeship model I love the rigor of it that that it's a paid engagement that it's for credit that it's a you know a deep approach to apprenticeship one of the things that was said I think by Chris early on I don't know if it was Chris or a censure but early on is there is that there's a moment of trying to define apprenticeships and I'm wondering why we're not using the registered apprenticeship as the model which has particular uh requirements around things like wage progression employment at the end of it there is a there's some concern about confusing work-based learning projects which are very good and and important in their own right with apprenticeships and therefore weakening what an apprenticeship is and so I guess the question is really maybe more towards the board around when we say we're trying to figure out how we define apprenticeships can we use the registered apprenticeship as the definition or if we're not going to use the registered apprenticeship definition how are we going about defining it to make sure that some of those important quality measures are maintained this is Chris I'll I'll take the first stab at responding it's a great question sandy I think we definitely at least in the mayor's office of talent workforce development view registered apprenticeship as the gold standard but as you also suggested you know there there can be rigorous models that you know could reasonably be considered an apprenticeship but aren't yet registered and so that is one of the things that we're working on with Accenture is to figure out like and with the future workers task force recommendations you know we we're not looking at just a regular internship right it's a lot more than that there it has to have certain very clear cut standards so we don't have those that threshold definition yet um and we certainly welcome your input and the input from other members of the board I don't know if Rachel you have anything to add to that no because I think you captured it it's certainly still in development but um you've raised very good point sandy and you know those are the exact types of things that we're thinking of how to um think about this in a way that doesn't dilute apprenticeships like for example Accenture's apprenticeship program would I think otherwise be registrable but we haven't registered it yet with the Department of Labor um so we don't want to preclude participation in programs like that as part of our holistic thinking I think that's true of a lot of sort of non-traditional apprenticeships although maybe career-wise could add more on that yeah really quickly uh we are petitioning or have a set recommendations so the Department of Labor what one of the issues as many of you know um apprenticeship is a pretty old um sort of pipeline initiative and they have no definition of youth apprenticeship so we're trying to help them shape what that is because it is slightly different right so we talked earlier around you know our apprentices work 12 to 16 hours in the in the first year a traditional apprenticeship they're working 40 hours a week per year right so they're reaching a thousand hours um at the end of one year our apprentices don't reach a thousand hours until you know year one and a half right so helping them redefine what youth apprenticeship is and looks like um whether that's just you know redefining New York State minor labor laws that would allow a youth apprentice to work more than four hours on the day um looking at graduation requirements there's a host of things that I think are baked into our efforts to to really redefine it without sort of diluting you know registered apprenticeship and that's you know what we're doing in earnest here in New York State but also nationally great can I just underscore that point I think I mean is it fair to say that career-wise and NYC public schools are trying to make sure that either all or most of the young people participating in the youth apprenticeship program that they're participating in an apprenticeship program that is registered yes the goal is to have the all of those be registered I think it's a work in progress because you're growing very quickly um but the intent is at least for this program to have them all be in registered apprenticeship right yes um so cohort five which is where we're currently recruiting um we will have most registered and cohort six any employer who decides to join us would have to participate in the registered apprenticeship program that would be non-negotiable right so that that is our path we recognize that again registered apprenticeship is the gold standard and that's the route we're taking um I under thank you thank you hi my name is Cherise Davis and I'm from um access of ER a new york state agency that helps individuals with disabilities obtain employment if in advance in their career if I understood correctly you're working with 500 schools and I would just like to know how the schools were selected and if any of the schools are in district 75 which serves into students with disabilities thank you yeah they're actually there are 58 schools um and we the goal is to have 500 apprentices at the end of year one so 58 schools there was an application process last summer where I believe again like I wasn't on board at this time but I want to say over 100 schools applied to be part of the CRM YA pilot um of them 58 were selected one is the district 75 school mm-hmm yeah that's a good question I'll just add to that too we have a full-time fd director at career wise whose main job it is is to figure out how to work with programs like access VR and with different populations of students to get them access to the registered youth apprenticeship great um this was really interesting and I can imagine we will have more conversations and this will continue since it's such a large part of the future of workers task force uh or the city's objectives so look forward to continuing conversations and seeing what role we play as a board and all of this um so we're going to get ready to close I want everyone to note that our next board meeting will take place in person unless you have a law abiding reason to be on screen it will be June 7th from 9 to 11 back here uh a reminder for the folks we need disclosures for please get those in and finally connect with grants so that we can try to hit that 60 something number uh in terms of summer youth employment and and celebrate um I think that is it it has been great to see everyone in person so nice to be here and I will take a motion to adjourn the meeting thank you and I saw a second million okay all in favor thank you everyone