Transcript- Episode 126: The Future is Working: Addressing The Skills Gap in an Evolving Workforce with Shelley Hoss, Chief Executive Officer at Orange County Community Foundation Episode 126
Aug 20, 2024
00:00:00 - Shelley Hoss
California is a beautiful place to be because we have such an incredible network of, especially public universities, from the community colleges to the state to the UC's, that are just these laboratories for innovation and critical thinking that are both vocational as well as academic. And I think it's a really exciting time to be here.
00:00:35 - Christina Barsi
The workforce landscape is rapidly changing and educators and their institutions need to keep up. Preparing students before they enter the workforce to make our communities and businesses stronger is at the core of getting an education. But we need to understand how to change and adjust so that we can begin to project where things are headed before we even get there. So how do we begin to predict the future?
00:01:00 - Salvatrice Cummo
Hi, I'm Salvatrice Cummo, Vice President of Economic and Workforce Development at Pasadena City college and host of this podcast.
00:01:08 - Christina Barsi
And I'm Christina Barsi, producer and co-host of this podcast.
00:01:12 - Salvatrice Cummo
And we are starting the conversation about the future of work. We'll explore topics like how education can partner with industry, how to be more equitable, and how to attain one of our highest goals, more internships and PCC. Students in the workforce we at Pasadena City College want to lead the charge in closing the gap between what our students are learning and what the demands of the workforce will be once they enter. This is a conversation that impacts all of us, you, the employers, the policymakers, the educational institutions, and the community as a whole.
00:01:46 - Christina Barsi
We believe change happens when we work together, and it all starts with having a conversation. I'm Christina Barsi.
00:01:54 - Salvatrice Cummo
And I'm Salvatrice Cummo. And this is the Future of Work. Hi, welcome back to the Future of Work podcast. I am your host, Dr. Salvatrice Cummo. Today we have an extraordinary guest with us. Since May of 2000, Shelley Hoss has been at the helm of the Orange County Community Foundation, one of the nation's largest and fastest-growing community foundations. Shelley's work with OCCF includes a broad range of initiatives, from supporting veterans and military families transitioning to civilian life, to spearheading efforts in building a resilient Orange County workforce. A notable initiative launched under her guidance is the Workforce Development Initiative, which aims to equip young adults with the skills and credentials needed for high-quality jobs aligned with the needs of local employers. We're very excited to delve into Shelly's expertise in workforce development and explore how OCCF's initiatives are really shaping the future of work and the innovative partnerships with local colleges and businesses. Welcome, Shelley. How are you? We're thrilled to have you here today.
00:03:05 - Shelley Hoss
Well, thanks so much, Salvatrice. It's a pleasure to be with you, focusing on a really important topic that we care a lot about here in Orange County.
00:03:13 - Salvatrice Cummo
I think both of our respective counties are just right at the center core of these conversations, and that's really the only way that we'll get to any kind of results and impact is if we just continue to talk about it.
00:03:26 - Shelley Hoss
Absolutely. We're in thriving economies here in Southern California, and we want everyone to be able to participate in shared prosperity and economic vitality of our regions, and that builds stronger communities. So what is not to love about all of that?
00:03:41 - Salvatrice Cummo
That's right. Very, very true. And I think the appropriate question right now, Shelley, if I can be brutally honest, is like just so that our listener understands and has a better idea of the Orange County Community foundation of what is OCCF, what is your role there? Share a little bit more about that.
00:04:00 - Shelley Hoss
Sure, I'd be happy to. And some of your listeners may be familiar with our cousin, the California Community Foundation. We actually sort of emerged from their early work here in Orange County. And then our founder, Judy Swain, established the Orange County Community Foundation in 1989, being inspired by the work she had seen in LA. And community foundations have the great honor of being a partner for philanthropists in their community, individual donors, families, multi-generations of community members that want to prioritize giving back and then bridging to our local nonprofit sector and engaging in partnerships and collaborations to solve local needs, as well as to partner with our donors whose interests may expand beyond their local community to interests across the country or around the world. And we get to be their partner in giving, helping to amplify the impact of their philanthropy and build, we say, momentum for good.
00:05:06 - Salvatrice Cummo
Thank you. As we talk about workforce development, I think you and I will both agree that workforce development is very fluid. It looks different depending on the organization that you're speaking to. Also the organizations that are really putting behind some of the initiatives around workforce development. It really depends on our assets, the talent, the resources, all those variables. And I'm really curious about your workforce initiatives there at OCCF. And really how did it all get started? How did it come to life? And if you could tell us a little bit about not only how it started, but also how has it evolved over the years, either pros or cons, but how has it evolved over the years? And where would you like to see it in the future.
00:05:53 - Shelley Hoss
The inception of our workforce initiative that is now called the Future is Working, which is a very close cousin to your podcast title and was a great story, actually. That is a perfect case in point about what community foundations do. We had this amazing, unexpected occurrence in 2016 with someone who had passed away and had left a large estate gift to OCCF to carry out his philanthropic wishes, and one portion of that was to create an endowment. The only instructions that we were given in that case was that the annual payout should support educational institutions.
00:06:37 - Shelley Hoss
So no direction as to topic or issue, area or spectrum of the whether it's from pre-K to college. So it was this blank canvas for us to really ponder what would be the highest and best use of those resources and educational institutions in Orange County. I should clarify. So we spent the first couple of years looking across the spectrum of educational needs and happened upon in 2018 2019, really startling statistics from one of our local partners who was doing some research about workforce development needs in Orange County.
00:07:18 - Shelley Hoss
And it was the fact that we had more than 17,000 unfilled middle skills jobs in Orange County. Middle skills meaning at least high school with some additional training, perhaps some community college with apprenticeship or internship or specialized certification, but not requiring a four-year university degree. And we were both seeing the data and hearing the stories of local employers really desperate to be hiring for these positions in these growth industries and unable to find local talent, having to go beyond Orange County and being able to pair that with the data we had on those un or underemployed, sometimes in the philanthropy field, they're called opportunity youth, 18 to 25 or beyond, who are disconnected from school and from work.
00:08:09 - Shelley Hoss
And we looked at this sort of mirroring data of this ready workforce who needed to have employment that could sustain themselves and their families to live here in Orange County with basic needs met and an opportunity to thrive with these employers that had these jobs to give and couldn't find people qualified. That was the spark where we realized, wow, this endowment for educational institutions could allow us to partner with our beloved community college network that we knew had this filling this gap as part of their mission, and allowed us to start a conversation about what was missing from their side of the equation.
00:08:51 - Shelley Hoss
What did they feel could be limiting their potential for helping to address this gap, this gap between the open jobs and the prepared workforce? And we heard a lot about the difficulty partnering with employers, getting employers engaged so that folks in their programs how to place a next ready step to go. And we heard about some of their concerns about some of their curriculum maybe not being as aligned with the new and emerging jobs, and also the need for soft skills that they could provide some of the educational foundation through their programs. But there was so much more needed for folks who maybe hadn't been in a professional environment before, needed those soft skills, those interviewing skills, and the sort of bedrock of success for advancement in career.
00:09:42 - Shelley Hoss
And so this idea emerged through these conversations that we could perhaps be the instigator for a collaborative approach that would be anchored by our community college partners and involve then collaborations with local nonprofits working in the workforce development space and employers in these high growth industries. So we targeted three of the highest growth industries that we saw in this data report, which was advanced manufacturing. So that need the CAD cAm, the computer assisted design, mechanics, healthcare, and it all thriving industry sectors within Orange county. And we felt we could perhaps step into a sweet spot where community colleges already had programs that could be adapted or built upon.
00:10:33 - Shelley Hoss
And then in some cases, a new industry emerged that we did not previously imagine. And I'll give you one example, which is a program we funded at Fullerton College to certify drone pilots. Talk about industries that I could not have imagined ten years ago would be a growth industry. And another fascinating fact for everyone's next cocktail party. Southern California Edison now monitors its grid using drone pilots. Much more so than Edison employees driving around, monitoring the electrical grid in trucks and sort of at the street level.
00:11:10 - Shelley Hoss
What a game changer environmentally, and what a game changer in terms of career opportunity. But the barriers are many for being able to ultimately get employment because you need to have an FAA license as a drone pilot. You need 600 hours of flight training that's been certified, and you have to have your own drone, which costs thousands of dollars. But it's just been so thrilling to watch the success of this program in carving out a microlending. So our funding helped create a partnership that involved the employer, Southern California Edison, Fullerton College, various nonprofits, and there was a microloan program so that as the pilots, after they completed their Fullerton College sort of baseline training, could begin flying with apprenticeship program through Edison that were paid, that allowed them to pay off their loan for their drone, and they exit the program in between twelve and 18 months, fully certified as a drone pilot with their own commercial drone.
00:12:15 - Shelley Hoss
These are not the drones that people fly at the beach. These are large commercial drones. It's been a game changer. And the best part is they took a sort of seed funding grant from us that I think the first grant we made was $50,000, so not a burning amount. But they leveraged an $800,000 grant from the state because of that seed funding. That's just one micro example of stepping into a growth industry. And you know that these young pilots that are now getting these jobs, you know that they're influencing their brothers and sisters and cousins and friends and neighbors by showcasing this opportunity to leverage a community college program into a living wage, entry level career.
00:13:00 - Salvatrice Cummo
I love it. That's like, the best example.
00:13:03 - Shelley Hoss
I think I hit a few of the stepping stones along the way of your question. There might have been some parts I missed.
00:13:09 - Salvatrice Cummo
No, it was absolutely fabulous. The thought for me was the middle skills occupational gap that you recognized based on the data and then the three sectors, and there was an emerging sector that kind of popped up out of nowhere that ended up being very successful in many different fronts, as you just shared. You know, for us, there's always an accountability piece or a relevant piece. When I say us, I mean community colleges. So as a foundation, as a partner to the community colleges, and thank you, by the way, thank you for including community colleges as a thought partner and as a implementator for these occupations that are very much needed and the partnerships with Edison, I mean, gosh, you couldn't have asked for a better synergy of work. How does the foundation ensure, hold accountable. I'm not sure what word to use that community college stay responsive and adaptable to these emerging markets.
00:14:09 - Shelley Hoss
We learned so much in our early conversations with our community college partners, and for these large systems that are statewide, what we found in the leaning into the creativity and the flexibility was so encouraging. I feel that what has helped ensure the accountability has been approaching this work as full partners. So I will say that one of the original proposals, it wasn't a bad proposal, and it certainly wasn't surprising. But the initial proposals from the community college partners were, hey, why don't we use this funding to fund a position within the college that would be focusing on this topic? And while we appreciated the need, we felt that we might be more successful by having a more fluid partnership and that we could continue working together and having them be the anchor, but really fully engaging other nonprofit partners and employers through perhaps a more sort of balanced partnership versus having it embedded. And I don't know what the outcomes would have been in the other model. But what I do know is that there has been a lot of shared ownership in the model that we have used, where I believe we have absolutely showcased the strength and the relevance of our community colleges. I feel great about the fact that we've been able to put them center stage in the success, success of this program, which in many ways, because we launched fully in 2019 just before the pandemic. Of course, there was a slower roll, for obvious reasons, during the couple of years that was most impacted by the pandemic now going full strength, and we're several million, two and a half, almost two and a half million dollars into the initiative now, 23 grants, 14 different collaboratives. So we're really in the thick of the work now. And I really believe that approaching this as an ongoing, real time evolving partnership model has really been superb for holding accountability for all the partners, including for OCCF, to make sure that we are leaning into where the greatest opportunity is to meet these needs and being informed by all the partners, being informed equally by our college partners as well as our employers and our nonprofits that are dealing with many of our program participants sort of in their daily lives.
00:16:45 - Salvatrice Cummo
Right. Thank you. You hit on something that touched home for me, and that is the breadth of workforce development and all of its complexities, because there's so many areas of focus. Right? I mean, OCCF chose to focus on middle skills occupations because the data shared that there's a massive gap. At the time, you said 17,000 jobs that were available. Right? Were there other directions that OCCF considered, perhaps before choosing the path of solving the middle skills gap occupation?
00:17:24 - Shelley Hoss
I will answer that in being stewards of this endowment that was meant for educational institutions. So that I think it's helpful to understand that we came at this solution from that frame of being a steward of a donor's intention. And we, in the first couple of years after receipt of the gift, we did some local partnerships about children younger. We looked at some preschool programs and supported some of those head start type of preschool programs. We did a partnership about helping make sure kids are ready to read by third grade. That's such a crucial foundation. And we ultimately, I think, came to the conclusion that this was such a behemoth, broad based educational needs, that we would be best served to pick a focus area where we really felt we could move the needle and the filter we use when we're making those sorts of decisions. Are, is this an identified need that solves a crucial problem or issue or gap in our local community? Obviously, workforce, that was an easy. Yes. Based on the data, do we believe that there will be philanthropic interest, perhaps beyond what we're bringing to the table, so that we might inspire others to focus on this issue in their own philanthropy. We certainly saw that potential within our, we have 650 funds that we stored nearly $700 million in. Charitable assets are granting, on average, about $100 million a year. So we have a large circle of influence, and we felt that by taking some advantage of this opportunity and paving the way, perhaps we could inspire others. And then thirdly, we look at are there ready partners, people who are experts? So you were very kind in your introduction. I personally would shrug off any sense that I, or even we as an organization, have particular expertise in this subject area, but we do have expertise in assembling highly effective collaborative efforts and marshaling both relationships, resources, knowledge toward an effective end. So I feel that was the expertise that we brought was more around the process and leveraging our network of relationships and the trust that the foundation is held in by our many partners in the nonprofit community and donors. And so when we were coming at this responsibility as stewards of this endowment and needing to find a space within education and saw this data, it was, honestly, it was like a big bang moment. It wasn't. Let's think of 100 different ways we could do this or 100 different ways to do workforce. We had sort of a program model in mind already because, frankly, of the requirements of this endowment. So we thought, well, educational institutions, we know that community college colleges are right in this intersection of need. So we know thats going to be our anchor partner. And we built out from there, which tends to be our process for building community initiatives that you mentioned, our veterans work. Weve done work around immigration and embracing and integrating our immigrant communities for their extraordinary contributions to the economy and civic and cultural life of Orange county. We did a project in Anaheim at the request of Disneyland, the Angels, and the Ducks, who needed some help making wise charitable investments to help older youth. That was one of the first places we got exposure to these disconnected youth. And we saw that many of the problems being experienced were because there were high high school dropout rates, low college attendance rates, and really high unemployment in this age range. And of course, that's going to lead to outcomes that are not healthy for anyone, the individuals, or the community. So I would say we do have a very embedded practice here of trying to integrate all of the knowledge that we acquire through the different aspects of our work and having that guide our next adventures. I think that was really how the process came together for what we now call the future is working.
00:21:38 - Salvatrice Cummo
I love that it's such a beautiful formula that you just pulled together and the anchor, the institutions being the anchor, and youre a expertise and the team's collective expertise around network and collaborations and starting with that is like the main ingredient to these initiatives. Because to your point, it's all of us bring something and expertise to the table. We can't be masters of everything, right?
00:22:08 - Shelley Hoss
We're no entity, and no individual is good at everything, nor should we even hope to be. That means that we might not be bringing the highest and best value to what we know our expertise is. And as we've grown dramatically, both just in our reach but also our offerings and the ways we're engaging with donors and in our community, we have found it really important to continue refining where we do add the highest value and frankly, where in a life cycle we belong. So we now have had several of our early initiatives that have now transitioned to other partners. That's always our dream, that we build something that can live on far beyond our active engagement. We're still early on in the workforce work, so we're not contemplating that moment of transition yet. But in our veterans work, we found beautiful partners in UC Irvine who is tending a large collaborative of military and veteran families. And our goodwill, which has a very robust commitment to veterans and agreed to anchor sort of a one stop experience for veterans. We were able to really invest resources and empowerment in these two partners that could carry the work forward. We had a similar plan and partnership with our opportunity initiative, which was our immigrant integration initiative, as well as our act. Anaheim Work, which is now being stewarded by the Anaheim Community foundation, which we helped to stand up and seed their reinvigoration. We wanted there to be a home for ongoing focus for philanthropy and focus on the needs of the Anaheim community. That's always our joy is when we get to put sort of the sweat equity. I was being filmed for a documentary film this morning about some of the challenges of the nonprofit sector and operating in the nonprofit environment and responding to some of Dan Pilotta's work through his TED talk, then book now maybe uncharitable. And I do think that we sometimes put on the shoulders of nonprofits that they're supposed to be the one solution to all of our society's biggest problems and just somehow find ways to keep solving them forever. And there's very little R and D and capital for experimentation, for trying out new ideas in the nonprofit space. So we like to try to bring that to the equation and say, let's put some of our own resources in as the R and D, the seed capital, to try to work out a sustainable solution. And then ultimately let's see if we can either help stand up or find a partner that can keep the work perpetuating, because then we can go and find the next issue that might need some love and attention.
00:24:58 - Salvatrice Cummo
What I really appreciate about what you said was that, and this might actually be the answer to my next question, but I don't know. I don't know, is that it's about the continuum and the life. Would you call it lifespan?
00:25:12 - Shelley Hoss
Yeah, I might have said life cycle. Life cycle, remember? But every effort has a life cycle. And I think that so often we start things in philanthropy, and it could be through an institution like a community college or another educational institution or a foundation, and we're full of good ideas and energy, and we want to shine a light on something. But then inevitably, you know, time can take its toll, something external can happen, a recession, a global pandemic that shifts focus. And so much of what is invested in early stages can often be lost to the long term because there isn't a self perpetuating mechanism. And we've really tried to focus on how do we find a sustainable plan for things that we've started, and then when it's the right time for us to. And we've done this very gradually in a very slow walk. If any of your listeners have children, I remember the, like, you know, moving the chair back an inch at a time when you're trying to work yourself out of your infants, trying to get them to sleep. We don't make any sudden moves, but we really do try to invest continued power and voice, leadership and authority in those who are closest to the community being served. So we're not trying to constantly be the conduit or the hub or the gatekeeper that everything has to come through. But we're willing to bear some of the risk capital in the beginning to try to sort out what is the best model.
00:26:38 - Salvatrice Cummo
Right, and test out to see what's possible. I think it also kind of lends itself to the accountability of the partners and holding our partners accountable for their promises or their contributions. There's nothing wrong with that. Oftentimes we hear about start implementation, but rarely do we talk about continuum and where that it's going to sustain itself, which presents itself with challenges, too. I mean, I'm sure there were challenges and obstacles in the upfront, but even in the scaling of programming, you and I both know that we face sometimes significant resistance on the continuum and the scaling. And I'm kind of curious about, you know, have you encountered any of those? And if so, how have you kind of worked around or overcome those.
00:27:26 - Shelley Hoss
Well, you raised something so important, and I really want to put an exclamation point to it. And I truly put a lot of the responsibility on the shoulders of my own field that I represent, which is sort of, you know, organized philanthropy that is very excited about the new idea. What's something new? We want to fund a new program. We want to see what the next best thing is. And there's a lot of excitement around that. But, you know, God forbid that you continue to excel at something for five or six or ten or twelve years. Unfortunately, some of that philanthropic capital moves to the next big idea. And coming from 14 years running nonprofits, before I came to the community foundation and then also wore the hat of a grant maker, I was very aware of that dangerous dynamic and the extraordinary burden it puts on nonprofits to have to keep raising. You know, they're, in a sense, almost punished for their success because now they have to continue every year to find the resources to sustain this work. And we really have tried to be attentive to that. Time will tell, and other people would have to be the judges of how well we've done that. But it's something very important to us, and we're still new, as I said, in this workforce space, and so we're still just using our own resources. We haven't yet begun the phase of saying, let's try to broaden. We certainly will be more than thrilled for others to join us in the work, but we've wanted in the first few years to really assume the risk ourselves and work on fine tuning the model. Ultimately, I hope that the life cycle includes other partners joining and picking up some of the responsibility for the work and then ultimately finding if there is a natural home for this to continue. And it could be forming its own collaborative that is anchored at an aligned entity. So stay tuned. I'll have to come back in a couple of years and see how well it worked.
00:29:36 - Salvatrice Cummo
Absolutely. You're always welcome back. And speaking of the future, you know, future conversations or the thought of the future of work, I'm going to shift gears just a little bit and talk about what we are all noticing and the rapid changes of technology. And in your network and with the thought leaders that are around you, how do you and your colleagues and your network really envision the future of work evolving within the next ten years, and how are we kind of preparing our employer communities with it? Any ideas or thoughts around that?
00:30:14 - Shelley Hoss
Well, I have a lot of observations. I don't know if I can be so bold as to say, I have ideas. I remember being asked to speak to a local independent high school on this topic of preparing for a future of work and looking at some of the data. And I think the data, this was six or seven years ago, so this number could be higher now, was that 65% of children in elementary school now will ultimately have jobs that don't exist yet. 65%.
00:30:46 - Salvatrice Cummo
That sounds about right.
00:30:46 - Shelley Hoss
So you might have better data. I was so truly astonished by that. It does feel true, right? It seems that this is, you know, what are we on a 24 hours news cycle? It seems like maybe even a shorter cycle for job creation and development. And we've watched this happen with AI over the last year, which is something that we thought was for the robot army of the future.
00:31:10 - Shelley Hoss
And now is just everywhere in our workplaces and in our schools, and everyone's trying to either leverage it and capitalize on it or figure out how to mitigate, I'm sure, in the education space. This is a frequent topic with your colleagues, as you know. How do we leverage this for a force for good and make sure that we are looking out for where the dangers may lie? My only idea is to pay attention.
00:31:35 - Shelley Hoss
This sounds like a very simple mantra, but it also might be the most valuable thing I have to add to this, which is just really not trusting what we knew was true yesterday or even this morning, and knowing that we must be paying attention to these global trends. We must be investing in research. We must pay attention to the research that others are doing and figure out where there might be gaps.
00:31:59 - Shelley Hoss
And maybe, as philanthropies, we need to invest in filling in the research gaps. I think that an attitude of sort of nimbleness, you know, knees bent, ready position, and really maintaining curiosity and interest in what's coming. I will say, as a person who entered her 60th decade in the past year, when you've been around a while, you're increasingly comfortable with the world that you knew and things that you believed were true. And I think all of us at all stages of our own life cycles need to really sharpen our attention to what's coming in our. And even if we're not comfortable, at least cultivate curiosity about what's coming and what that could mean, and try to at least have sort of a value neutral perspective about how our economy and how our jobs might be not just evolving, I mean, could be revolutionizing in very short cycles.
00:33:01 - Shelley Hoss
We're working on our next five year plan, and we're sort of internally calling it building a foundation for the future. And we're thinking about, yes, we're a community foundation that's rooted in 35 years of history, and we have, half of our assets are endowed, so they have a permanent base for the future. But how are we really positioning ourselves and building ourselves to be responsive to the needs of our community? That is changing rapidly. So that is my only best idea, is to stay really attuned to the trends as best as we can and to recognize that we cannot have the past as our reference point.
00:33:41 - Shelley Hoss
We have to be looking to this future horizon. We're only going to see what's coming if our eyes are trained on that horizon and we have that right, sort of. I don't know if you remember, you're probably too young to remember, but there was a fad, oh, oh, gosh, I don't know, several decades ago, of these posters, basically, or visuals that just looked like a random pattern, but if you shifted, like your focal point, they popped out as a 3d image.
00:34:06 - Shelley Hoss
They were like all the rage. I don't even remember what they were called. And you'd walk into a doctor's office or something, they would be there. And I often think about that analogy about where is our focal point trained? If we're just looking at the image that easily presents it self in front of us, that's this two dimensional. Okay, I recognize that. I see what that is. It's a graphical pattern of colors or shapes. Are we willing to take the time? And you remember it was a skill you had to practice. It would take a little bit to actually let that image. And some people just couldn't master it. They just couldn't.
00:34:41 - Shelley Hoss
But it was this idea of like sort of relaxing your gaze and letting your focal point shift to the point that you could actually see this image emerge. I think about that as a great analogy for trying to position, for the future of work, to try to train our gaze at that farther out sort of aperture and so that we might be able to begin to see these trends as they're coming and not be taken by surprise.
00:35:07 - Salvatrice Cummo
Absolutely. I echo your sentiments. I also would add that you and I are so close to our communities and the communities that we serve that. Would you agree that this is really the first time in history just thinking about the evolution of industries, the evolution of work, etcetera, where the workforce is shaping the future occupations, whereas in the past it was industry shaping the occupations, it's no longer the case. Our workforce is much more vocal about the direction of those occupations and the environments by which those occupations exist.
00:35:49 - Shelley Hoss
And so much is coming out of the innovation economy. So, yes, and so there's a demand coming into the workplace for the types of experiences that workers want. And, you know, so there's innovation happening within organizations and then there is just an explosion of entrepreneurial activity, app development. I've never seen so many micro industries be ubiquitous. They're all around us. And I do think that there is a fervent desire for these generations to be the architects of their own life journey. They want a balance of meaning and purpose. Everybody wants to be able to pay their rent and eat. But, you know, I find less focus on acquiring and amassing wealth that just doesn't seem to be as prevalent as this amassing wealth of sort of life experience and enriched life experience. And it's fueling so much innovation and entrepreneurship that's really exciting and I think is great for our economic life. It's great for our country, it's great for our economic engine. And of course, I think California is a beautiful place to be because we have such an incredible network of, especially public universities, from the community colleges to the state to the UC's, that are just these laboratories for innovation and critical thinking that are both vocational as well as academic. And I think it's a really exciting time to be here especially.
00:37:23 - Salvatrice Cummo
Absolutely. I think that's a beautiful objective and focus area for practitioners in this space, leaders in this space like you and I and even our employers, to really think about the entrepreneurial approach and solutions and mindset and everything involved in this entrepreneurial ecosystem that allows for that fluidness within our workforce, but also helps us to really identify where the problems are and solutions to accompany those problems and.
00:37:57 - Shelley Hoss
Just to lean into that entrepreneurship, something that is really exciting that we sometimes don't include in workforce, but I believe that we should, is small business ownership. So 45% of our country's gdp is produced by small businesses. And I mentioned our work with immigrant communities. The incredible hustle and entrepreneurship that's happening in communities of color and immigrant communities is staggering and so inspiring. And the opportunities that we can invest in to help small business owners. We have a partner nonprofit called Cielo that operates primarily here in Orange county. Its mission is to support minority owned small business owners, entrepreneurs to become successful. Theyre an incubation hub and they provide some back office support and coaching and mentoring and micro loans. It is so exciting to see this ecosystem because not everyone is going to get trained to go to a Southern California Edison or a big employer. One of our programs on the other end of this sort of technology system is equipping folks to become bus drivers. Coach operators they are officially known as. But there was a big wave of retirements over the pandemic, and our transportation authority, OCTA, was in dire need of a new generation of bus drivers. They offer fabulous starting and continuing salaries. They're a public agency, so you have retirement, full benefits. It's a wonderfully secure and sustainable income. It just takes the training, the getting the class C license and the hours behind the wheel. So there are so many opportunities across the spectrum, and I think it's important to think of workforce broadly. So with large employers. Yes. And with small businesses. And how are we creating an ecosystem that allows small businesses to be successful as well.
00:39:57 - Salvatrice Cummo
Right. And that ecosystem includes training them on the workforce demands.
00:40:05 - Shelley Hoss
That's right. Right. And those skills and folks who. I was so distressing how our small businesses lost out on the PPP funding that business. Right. Some of them are unbanked or underbanked. If they're in families with mixed documentation status, they may have barriers of interacting to financial institutions, and they're imperiled as a result of lack of access to capital that others get through friends and family networks. But our economy thrives when small businesses thrive. And what they earn is going back into their communities because they're shopping at their, you know, neighborhood stores and they're helping fuel and plumb sales tax back into the cities where they live and helping other businesses thrive. They're hiring the bookkeeper because they need a bookkeeper for their business. So that's another part of workforce that I think is sometimes given short shrift in terms of their. But it's an economic powerhouse and an engine of incredible uplift for our communities.
00:41:08 - Salvatrice Cummo
Yes. Thank you. What a beautiful way to just, you know, like, sunset this conversation. I mean, honestly, it's just, I thank you so much for being a thought leader with me in this space to unpack a few things and also to share the initiatives and the work being done by OCCF. And we are so thankful and please do any time, if we could be of service to the foundation, to your community, count us in. This has been absolutely wonderful, Shelly. And for our listener who would like to get involved with your workforce initiatives or the foundation, what's the best way that they can reach?
00:41:46 - Shelley Hoss
Well, the way we do everything these days online. Right. So just our website is easy to find. You can type in Orange County Community foundation. Make sure you're in California. There are a couple of other orange counties in the country, it turns out. But we are OC like communityfoundation.org and there's information about the future is working right on our homepage or there's an info at email. We're very easy to find. My email is on the website. You can just shoot me an email and I'll be happy to help. We're very accessible. We'd love to hear from folks who want to join as partners. You might have listeners representing employers that have touch or reach in Orange county and would want to be a part of this. Other educational institutions, nonprofits. We welcome all comers.
00:42:34 - Salvatrice Cummo
Excellent. We'll be sure to enter that into the show notes. But in the meantime, I look forward to working with you in the future and having further conversations because the theme of future of work never goes away.
00:42:47 - Shelley Hoss
Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Appreciate your shining a light on this really important topic and happy to help any way I can.
00:42:55 - Salvatrice Cummo
Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Future of Work podcast. Make sure you're subscribed on your favorite listening platform so you can easily get new episodes every Tuesday. You can reach out to us by clicking on the website link below in the show notes to collaborate partner or just chat about all things future of work. We'd love to connect with you. All of us here at the future teacher of work and passing a city college wish you safety and wellness.