Ashley Orr grew up in Columbiana, Ohio, just outside of Youngstown, without the resources of many of her peers.
The daughter of a single mother who is a home health care worker and had stints as a janitor and house cleaner, Orr didn’t always have access to a computer. She completed many assignments on the computer at her grandmother’s house.
When a teacher at her public high school obtained funds to buy laptops for her class, “It was life-changing,” says Orr, 29. “I could write my college admission essays at home.”
Her mother’s income was consistently below the poverty line, which qualified Orr for a federal Pell grant. She became not only a first-generation college graduate but the first Rhodes scholar to emerge from Youngstown State University.
Now a Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, Orr is drawing on her lived experience in postindustrial northeast Ohio – an area ravaged by the collapse of Big Steel – to help workers prepare or transition to jobs in a digital- and tech-based economy.
Orr is one of nine recipients of Southwest Pennsylvania Build Back Better sub-grants that support job training in advanced manufacturing and robotics.
The Southwestern Pennsylvania New Economy Collaborative – a coalition of economic development groups, labor unions, colleges, businesses and philanthropies – last year received $62.7 million in federal funds through the Biden administration’s Build Back Better Regional Challenge.
The collaborative is distributing the money through sub-grants to projects that will boost employment and long-term economic growth.
Orr’s research focuses on what she calls “growth mindset training,” in which individuals learn to adapt their skills to new tasks and overcome fears and challenges to become productive in new careers.
“It’s counter to the mindset where we think our aptitudes are fixed,” says Orr. “It’s being willing to fail and try again and learn that it’s possible to be successful in a career transition.”
Barriers for people trying to make the leap from traditional factory jobs to employment in robotics or artificial intelligence, Orr says, may be rooted in “structural inequities” such as living in a disadvantaged community where few people hold college degrees.
“Did your high school have a robotics team? Did you have access to a computer at home? Did you know someone who attended college? Those inequities can compound over time,” she says.
With a shift in mindset and by being persistent, workers can hone new skills, Orr says.
Her sub-grant of $25,755 will go toward data collection, training materials and piloting a growth mindset at regional job training programs.
She’s already sharing her research with organizations including Penn State New Kensington’s Future Readiness Academy, which trains college- and university-level faculty in how to prepare students for New Economy jobs; Catalyst Connection, a nonprofit agency that helps small manufacturers improve their productivity, revenue growth and training practices; and Mars Robotics Association, a Butler County group that provides resources for students who compete in robotics competitions and which is developing a lifelong learning program that includes adults, says Orr.
And she’s eager to collaborate with more partners.
“If there is a training program in the region that would like to try this, put your hand up and let’s meet,” she says.
Armed with a dual degree in mathematics and economics from Youngstown State, Orr envisioned herself as a researcher and “anti-poverty practitioner.”
As a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, England, she earned a master’s of philosophy in economics.
Mentors and advisers along the way “convinced me the one way forward to reducing poverty is to make sure good-paying, family-sustaining, high-quality jobs were accessible to all workers,” she says. “Employment is an anti-poverty policy.”
She applied for the Ph.D. program at CMU’s Heinz College of Information Systems – where she is a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow with a specialty in labor economics – so she could immerse herself in a region that’s experienced the transition from heavy industry to a technology focus.
“Part of my project is how to increase the success rates for people in New Economy jobs,” she says. “We don’t want people to quit. With technology, we can expand our productivity, but it’s very important that all folks are potentially included in that possibility.”
Steve Wray, executive director of the Block Center for Technology and Society at CMU – a research center that focuses on the impact of technology on society and work, and which administers the sub-grants locally – says the selection committee was “obviously looking for innovators helping to build a future workforce.”
A total of $2.1 million will be distributed in three rounds of sub-grants, he adds.