- We've got a great show coming up for you on American Black Journal.

The fifth annual Detroit Future City Equity Forum, examine ways to make sure that African Americans and other minorities have fair access to good paying, high growth jobs here in Michigan.

We're gonna talk with a panel of local change makers about how to create a more inclusive workforce now and into the future.

Stay where you are.

American Black Journal starts right now.

- [Narrator] From Delta faucets to Behr Paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

Support also provided by the Cynthia and Edsel Ford Fund for journalism at Detroit PBS.

- [Narrator 2] DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit PBS.

Among the state's largest foundations committed to Michigan focused giving, we support organizations that are doing exceptional work in our state.

Learn more at dtefoundation.com.

- [Narrator] Also brought to you by Nissan Foundation, and viewers like you.

Thank you.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to American Black Journal.

I'm Stephen Henderson.

Today we're bringing you a portion of the Detroit Future City Equity Forum that took place last month on the northwest campus of Wayne County Community College District.

The conversation focused on making sure that all Detroiters have equitable access to quality jobs and careers.

Detroit PBS was a media partner for the event, and I moderated a panel featuring Dr. Brian Smith from the Detroit chapter of the Tuskegee Airmen, Kim Trent from the State of Michigan Labor and Economic Opportunity Department, Marvin Figaro of Kelly Services, and Scott Alan Davis from Solutions for Energy Efficient Logistics.

Here's part of that discussion along with opening remarks from Detroit Future City CEO, Anika Goss.

- When we think about the future of work, you know, it's mostly just such a buzzword, right?

But for us at Detroit Future City, it really means whether or not African Americans and Latino Americans and foreign born residents that make up the majority of our demographic here in Detroit have the opportunity to prosper and participate in Detroit's economic growth and prosperity.

This is an issue that I think we're all really grappling with.

There are two growing economies here in Detroit.

There's one that we all see.

There's big skyscrapers going up downtown.

There's new job announcements.

We'd talk about tech and new industries.

But then we turn to Detroiters and still see that Detroiters are making only half of what white Detroiters are making.

And that regardless of education level, we are still not seeing Detroiters, achieve the employment rates that we expected them to.

- First question to each of you, and just take a few minutes here, introduce yourselves and talk about how your work contributes to advancing economic equity, ensuring that Detroiters have access to quality employment opportunities now and in the future.

I'll start with you, Brian.

- Good afternoon everyone.

Brian Smith, also a Wayne State alum, and my second career is in aviation.

It's been a love of mine, oh, since I was 12 and heard about the Tuskegee Airmen, and I decided that I would dedicate my life to introducing young people to the world of aviation, and not just being a pilot.

You can be an aviation mechanic.

You know, they start at $88,000 a year and this is, you know, after two years of education.

But there's air traffic control at, you know, 19, 21 years old.

You can make $130,000, no college education required.

So all of these careers, the inner city of Detroit doesn't know about them.

And that's my job is to expose them to these careers and lead them into those careers so they can successfully matriculate through the training processes and become part of the middle class or upper middle class of America.

- Kim.

- I am the Deputy Director for Prosperity for the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, which is the longest title on Earth.

But it is really I something that I am very proud of the work that we've been doing in state.

I see a lot of alignment with the priorities that Governor Whitmer has and some of the things that are being talked about on the national stage, things like the fact that we don't have enough affordable housing in our state, that we have to have a strategy for childcare that will help get more women into the workforce.

I see my job as both deputy director of prosperity and the person who leads the Governor's Poverty Task Force as being a person who removes barriers.

And so I am here, I'm a former that's continuing the theme of Wayne State.

I have my own connections to Wayne State University as a double alum and former member of the Wayne State University Board of Governors.

And in that role, (audience applauding) in that role, I saw in real time, the barriers that face our children when they were trying to get a college degree.

And money is very important.

I know that's been talked about a lot, but there are a lot of barriers that money, money is just one piece of the puzzle.

And so I think if there's anything that I've learned in this position, it's that we have to be intentional.

When we identify barriers, when we identify problems, we have to be intentional about solving problems because it's a network of problems.

There's never anything that just happens in a vacuum.

And so, so much of the work that I do with Leo, it's about really figuring out those connections, figuring out how state governor government can work, collectively, in a way that we're moving forward so that we have more prosperity in our state.

We are all here, I would imagine.

I know my family is here because we were a state, at one time, that was a state of prosperity.

When I grew up, almost everyone I knew was a homeowner.

I mean, in fact, I lived one block away from where we sit right now on the corner of West Outer Drive and Greenview.

And that was a neighborhood and one of my former neighbors on Greenview is sitting at that table and we were a community of homeowners.

And so those things that made Detroit special, we came here because of prosperity and we just need to get back to that.

And so I'm really glad that this governor and other leaders, like Detroit Future City, are being intentional about raising solutions in a meaningful way.

- I often tease Kim that she's got the most hopeful job title in the world, director of prosperity.

I want that job.

(laughs) Marvin.

- Hi everyone.

Marvin Figueroa.

I am the director of DEI strategic partnerships at Kelly Services.

For those unfamiliar with Kelly, we're a global workforce solutions provider.

Simply put, staffing, you might be familiar with that, is one aspect of our business, but we provide a number of different solutions to our clients globally.

I didn't graduate from Wayne State, but my wife did.

Does that count?

- [Kim] That counts.

- That counts?

(audience applauding) So in my role, I lead our equity at work initiative and equity at work, simply put, is an initiative that we started about five years ago that seeks to remove barriers to employment and create equitable access.

It's that simple, right?

Barriers, we try and broaden the scope, broaden the aperture as much as possible when we think about barriers, but we consult with our client and try to nudge them into thinking, in their end-to-end process, anything that makes it difficult to access employment is a barrier, right?

So some of the things that are common that people are familiar with are things like education, right?

So does a particular role actually need a bachelor's degree to be successful in that role, right?

What are the other skills?

What are the other qualifications, right, other certifications that can be brought to bear in that role that can help someone be successful?

It's not a knock against education, but it's evaluating the need for education and who are you excluding when you put up that barrier.

And sometimes we put up that barrier 15, 20 years ago and no one has looked at that policy or that process in 15 years and it's not applicable today.

So other things like, for instance, drug panels, THC, right?

In states where recreational marijuana use is legal, why would we be drug screening for THC unless there's a federal requirement or there's truly a safety requirement in terms of the work that's being done, right?

And certainly the one that's near and dear to my heart is our second chance, fair chance hiring program, Kelly 33, right?

So the 33 is born out of 33% of adult working population in the US has some sort of justice involvement.

So again, when we think about what that means and who we're excluding from fully participating in the workforce and why we're doing that, right, again, my entire job, my entire mission is to evangelize, socialize, call it what you want, but it's to get corporations to understand that we need to reframe our thinking about what talent looks like, good talent looks like, but also what are we doing in terms of these barriers that's preventing talent from getting in the door.

- Scott wants to clap.

(laughs) Scott, you're next.

- Good afternoon everyone.

Scott Alan Davis.

I am Vice President of Inclusion and Economic development for SEEL LLC.

We are solutions for energy efficient logistics and we provide solutions in the energy management service space wherever there are gaps in the energy space.

And so what does that mean?

We started 15 years ago, our CEO and chairman and founder Louis E. James really was approached by our utilities here because that's when energy efficiency became a thing and our state from a legislative standpoint, and they knew they needed more diversity as it related to their vendors doing this work, going into these communities.

And so I love to say we started as a workforce development agency because he knew at that point, if you go back to 2009 in Detroit, when we were in bankruptcy, the big three were falling apart.

We were in a recession nationally.

He knew that we had a wealth of talent that were losing opportunities in the auto industry.

So how do I pull the blue and white collar auto workers and really take their skill sets and expose them and give them access to the green space?

And so that's how we started 15 years ago in Detroit.

We are a national company, but we are based in Detroit and we have four offices in the state as we work nationally.

My responsibility is to really push the agenda in the lily white energy space around justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

We cannot talk about this wave of energy and this opportunity that's once in a generation happening at this moment and not think that it does not need to include black and brown communities, returning citizens, women.

It needs to be inclusive of everybody.

And so my job, which is a gift from the heavens, is to challenge people in this industry to make sure that we are inclusive, we are diverse, we are just in the practices and we are equitable.

So I'm very happy to be here.

- I wanna talk next about, you know, the untapped potential of the people who have been locked out, what it means to welcome people into the workforce and get them going after decades, centuries of not having that opportunity.

It seems to me that there are two things that people primarily need to do that.

One is of course preparation, the other is connection.

And so I want all of you to talk just a little about those two things and how in your work, you're trying to get people more prepared.

How do you make sure people have the connections they need to access the opportunities that you're trying to open up?

Marvin, you're up first this time.

- So I start with, again, from an employer's perspective, I start with us, right?

Because, and if I misquote this, I apologize.

I heard there was a number, I think it was 60,000 or was it 600,000 available jobs in the state of Michigan right now, that's a lot of opportunity.

So I start with us.

When we think about, again, how we evaluate, how we assess, how we judge talent, when we think about how we get talent from that initial engagement, whether they apply, they found out about it, we reach out to them all the way through that process.

We've been the same thing for decades and it's very one size fits all.

And again, I'm not saying that that doesn't have application, but there are other things we need to be doing when we look at talent, right?

So there's this trend now and I call it a trend because, you know, I hear about it but I don't see a lot of employers applying it.

We talk about skills based, right?

As a substitute for things like education, which is a barrier, let's be honest.

Education for a lot of black and brown individuals is a barrier.

But that doesn't mean they don't have the capacity to learn.

They just don't learn or have not learned in the same formal way that many others have, right?

So again, what can we do to look at that hiring, that talent, that end-to-end talent process in a different way that opens up opportunity for more people?

Because I tell you what, again, I go back to this 30-year-old war on talent and nothing has changed.

And if we're gonna go into the future and companies are gonna be able to compete globally and thrive and innovate and be successful, we can't take the same approaches that we've been taking for 30 years.

- Scott, or yeah, no, Scott's next.

- I wanna reference the comment that was made earlier about getting the policy job and not having the Lansing experience.

And so when you made that comment at our table, I shared, I've been in energy 11 years now.

I had no energy experience, but most sectors and careers are very similar to that.

What was noticed was the skillset that I had that could transfer over to something else.

I'm also reminded earlier in my career, Anika Goss was at LISC and they had a program that got people prepared in real estate development.

I dunno if you remember this.

And I wasn't a real estate developer.

I didn't know anything about that.

But my boss at the time, the brilliant Donna Davidson was like, "Hey, I think you have the skills to go through this training and you can run our real estate stuff."

And it completely changed my career.

And so that is what we need to be looking at and what we need to do is identifying skills, as you said, and really understanding how to take people and nurture and grow them because that's the only way we're going to be able to do it.

What we do at SEEL really being, you know, a black-owned energy company in a space where people don't want us to be there is we have to bring our own people in because when we bring other people in, they're sabotaging us 'cause they don't want us to be there.

So we have to bring our own people in and we have to train our own people.

So we have an amazing training institute.

We have a learning management tool, we have trainings that we do that I'm able to do and other staff, some are in the room today.

We're able to go out and train people on this.

But the other things that we do in our workforce development, which has been really solidified at this point, is bringing in partners because when we talk about changing the workforce and how it looks, we're gonna have other issues.

People are gonna need other things.

We are gonna be hiring people who may have never seen people go to work before.

So they're not gonna come to work the way you think they should come to work.

They're not going to do it.

I used to say when they were trying to get me to go to a utility, I would be a bull in a China shop.

I'm loud, I don't want to conform, you don't want me there.

But a lot of people don't know that about themselves.

So they would go there and they would last a short amount of time, feel like they failed and then they would spiral out.

So what do we do to make sure that those things don't happen?

One is about training.

So we offer training and we believe in training, not just for career seekers.

And that's one thing we've changed.

It's not job seekers.

We're looking for careers.

Career seekers, they need training and the things that we can't provide training for, we work with partners like folks in this room that provide other services that can wrap around and support the other things that they need.

- One of the most powerful things I heard today was from Kimberly actually.

And she said, "We are not just workers, we're talent."

Ooh, that is powerful.

Just think about that.

(audience applauding) We keep talking about reframing.

Can we just start there?

We are talent.

We've always had talent.

I'm thinking about in Boston when a person who enslaved Africans, there was some kind of plague, 'cause you know, plagues were really popular then, right?

So I can't remember which one it was, but whatever it was, it killed a whole bunch of folks, right?

But there was an enslaved person who tried to introduce the idea of inoculation, which had been happening in Africa forever.

And because he was a black slave, people in Boston said, "No, we'd rather just die 'cause we don't believe that you bring that kind of expertise to the table."

How many times have we done that throughout the history of our country?

People who could have brought solutions to the table get ignored because people make assumptions about them.

And so one of the things that we're doing, you asked about how we are applying this to our work, one of the things that I'm doing with my team, we have a pilot that we're gonna be launching this year for justice involved individuals to help to get landlords, 'cause there are people who are coming out.

We have some great programs in prison so that when people come out, they're trained for good jobs, but they can't get housing because landlords don't wanna rent to them.

So we're going to incentivize landlords to, you know, take tenants who have, you know, some kind of history with justice involvement, and we see it as a case building exercise.

So much of what I do is about case building, showing people that the lies and stereotypes and tropes that we have all been taught about people who live in poverty, about black people, about whomever can be disproven, and that they are not accurate and that when we invest in people in a meaningful way, all of society benefits, just like Boston could have benefited from the enslaved person who brought expertise but was discounted.

And so we have I think a mandate to make sure that that never happens again.

What are we doing in our own personal space to make sure that people who are coming to the table, like I love when you said you were an engineer, you just needed someone to give you the training, but you weren't a born engineer.

So many of us have those kind of talents, but we don't have opportunity and access.

So we have to make sure that people are getting those kind of opportunities.

And so I'm so proud to be affiliated with Wayne State because that's in the university's mission to give, is a university of opportunity.

- Yeah.

You said you were a double, Brian.

Go ahead.

- I was triple from Wayne State.

The hardest part for the Tuskegee Airman National Museum is, getting young people interested in these careers in aviation.

And that requires repeated touching of the children, not only the children, but when you talk about youth and young adults, you know, if it's before your 31st birthday, I can introduce you to the air traffic control career and by the time you're 55, you would have to retire with full retirement.

It's a very lucrative career that you could just stop what you're doing with three, four years of training.

You could be, you know, making six figures, and we're talking 130 to 150 annually.

So breaking down the one, barrier, they don't know about any of these jobs is the hardest part.

The second part is getting them to believe in themselves that they can actually do these careers, 'cause they don't see anybody like them doing these careers.

So we have to bring in people even from afar, they travel into Detroit, we open up the hangar, bring in 200 kids a day and introduce them to African Americans, brown, and even Caucasian people who are doing these careers.

They get to tell about the pros and cons and that starts to interest the young people.

They're interested in money and that's an attraction is the money you can make.

But we have to also instill in them, a love for what they're doing.

And that's what I had in both of my careers.

I loved the engineering and I love aviation.

I don't know if you all have seen the air show during River Days on the Detroit River, that's your Tuskegee Airmen Museum.

The only African American organization in the United States, doing air shows today, is Tuskegee Airmen National Museum.

And we do it with historic aircraft.

And these are the kinds of things we want our young people to see.

I took two young men who were training with us to Oshkosh, the largest air show in the United States.

You know, 10,000 airplanes, a million people over seven days.

And they were just awed at what was going on.

And these are the kinds of things that we raise money for to break down the barrier so we can take them and show them these careers.

Once we do that, we've gotta work on the public school system.

So I've contacted DPSCD and said, I would like to develop a professional development for teachers and take them through some of the same programs we take the kids through.

So we're taking to Selfridge International Guard base, Detroit Metro Airport, that they see the radar tower, they get on an airplane, they see the air marshals, they learn about aviation mechanics.

Now these teachers, with that education, can talk on a daily basis to their students about these careers and that'll start producing more young people to roll into this workforce development that we're talking about.

- And you can see that entire Detroit Future City Equity, forum conversation live streamed on the Detroit PBS Facebook page on Thursday, November 21st at 7:00 PM as part of the station's Future of Work Initiative.

That's gonna do it for us this week.

You can find out more about our guests at americanblackjournal.org and you can connect with us anytime on social media.

Take care and we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] From Delta Faucets to Behr Paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

Support also provided by the Cynthia and Edsel Ford Fund for journalism at Detroit PBS.

- [Narrator 2] DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit PBS.

Among the state's largest foundations committed to Michigan focused giving, we support organizations that are doing exceptional work in our state.

Learn more at dtefoundation.com.

- [Narrator] Also brought to you by Nissan Foundation, and viewers like you.

Thank you.

(bright music)