TheLoop21.com

By: Devona Walker (Add to your loop)
Mon, 11/30/2009 - 10:14

Job centers where people can receiving job training is the best avenue to economic recovery.

We’ve watched the job numbers and welfare tolls rise, the home equity numbers plummet and the foreclosures and bankruptcies soar. But don’t think solutions for those most affected, black people, are on the way. We need to push that agenda ourselves. 

And there’s a best practices model out there, on which we should be engaging. Bill Strickland, who heads the Bidwell Training Center, has the answer and wants to help other cities around the country replicate his success. He wants to teach nonprofit leaders how to think like entrepreneurs.

"You start with the perception that the world is an unlimited opportunity," Strickland said.

For the past several years, he has been sharing that world of opportunity with roughly a thousand untrained and uneducated potential workers per year. Between 75 percent to 80 percent of the high-risk high-school kids who've come to his after-school arts program have gone on to college. Also, 78 percent of the adults who graduate from his vocational program find jobs.

"The biggest obstacle is education or the lack of education,” Strickland said. “I think for minorities its accessibility to quality services that will allow advancement. We run a training center. We focus on people who lost a job or never had one to begin with. For that group of people, and there are millions out there, we need to try to provide opportunities.”

At present, there are only three franchises in San Francisco, Cincinnati and Grand Rapids, MI but Strickland’s goal is to have at least one hundred centers across the nation and another hundred around the world. But the key is taking the core principles and adjusting them locally keeping in mind the regional nature of the job market.

"Quite a number of my students used to work in the steel industry and that's pretty much gone already. We are doing that with horticulture science. Obviously health care is significant and that's only getting bigger,” Strickland said. “Half the people who come here are coming here from an industry that has been dislocated. Our focus is to get them reconnected, redeployed. We try to line up our programs directly for what the region is doing, not for what it has done. As new technologies develop, we try to be very entrepreneurial in creating those opportunities here in our center.” 

Strickland is graduating about 225 vocation students annually. They work with another 200 students to help them get at least a high school equivalency diploma. There are another roughly 500 high school students in the arts program at Bidwell.

“We are trying to change public policy to embrace this approach," Strickland said. 

The focus is at-risk kids and adults. Many of these folks have not and most likely would not graduate from college with Bidwell, which would likely swell the ranks of the uninsured and those living below the poverty level. Some of them would be likely to end up in the prison system. 

"There is no violence in our center. We have not had a fight or alcohol and drug incident in our center in over 25 years. So the kids we work with go to college and not to prison," Strickland said. “There are good kids out there, and they respond to educational opportunity. When they are presented in the right way, they respond. They care. There are great kids when they are given the chance."

Why aren't urban jobs programs relied upon?

Quite simply, America isn't knowledgeable about what's happening in many urban communities. Folks in Washington, D.C. speak broadly about job numbers which reinforces the idea that blacks are the most affected by the current financial downturn, but aren't  concerned about how to fix it. We need Black economic leaders involved, like Strickland, seeking economic solutions in the Black community. We need groups like the NAACP engaged in economic access as opposed to historical grievances. We need to be talking far more about retraining than reparations. Poverty is about opportunities and skills, not entitlements.  

“A successful life is not something you simply pursue, it's something you create moment by moment,” Strickland said.

You can learn more about Strickland and his Pittsburgh program here.

Devona Walker is TheLoop21.com's senior financial/political reporter and blogger. She can be reached at devona@ theloop21.com.

How would you grade Obama on his effort to create jobs?

A

B

C

D

F