Flisram: BNY Mellon is involved in Year Up where they’re getting cohorts of people and tracking them into their system to try to career path them within the bank. And PNC Foundation awarded the URA a $10 million non-revolving line of credit to support equitable economic recovery initiatives citywide.
Walker: Partner4Work has had their thumb on the pulse of the workforce and what can be done there. I think Google began to offer online certificate programs to give folks ramps onto jobs that need technical skills in general. I think it’s become a moral and an economic imperative to rescale and upskill our workforce as we face this apocalyptic event — a lot of baby boomers are going to be retiring, and we’ve not skilled the younger workforce quickly enough to take on those jobs. Or technology has changed so much, where it’s become a very niche specialized thing, and so there’s a lot that can be done.
I hope to see some of our bigger corporations begin to take a more thoughtful role in training the workforce to do the job that they have available, versus looking at training in a more nebulous sort of universal way — getting our corporations out there and training folks for the entry-level positions that are already available.
As we wrap this up, is there anything else you would like to add?
Walker: I would like to really give a clarion call for corporate social responsibility; I mean no one public agency, the government, nonprofits, can’t do this alone. We need other actors with more resources than what we have available to us to really get in the trenches and figure out how we can create strong public-private partnerships to be even more imaginative and creative than what we’ve already done. I’d like to thank a few of our corporate partners that have already stepped up and come to the table, but we certainly need more.
Flisram: I think Pittsburgh is going to emerge from this a lot better than most cities, if there’s one note of optimism there. I think the city’s economy has diversified so much over the past couple of decades. We’re not just a metal-bending city that people unfortunately still see us as being sometimes on the national stage, but the fact that our economy is so diverse now, and it’s more of an innovation-driven economy than in the past, I think we’re probably better poised to come out of this than a lot of other cities, some similarly-sized cities.