Developing Wilmington’s position as a thriving and prosperous city requires excellence in workforce development.

Since 2017, the Wilmington Leaders Alliance, now The Wilmington Alliance, has made it a priority to increase the employment of Wilmington-based citizens within Wilmington-based employers.

Currently reporting an unemployment rate two times that of the state of Delaware, the City of Wilmington needs a collaborative approach to employment strategies. Operating as a public and private organization within our sector partners, the alliance provides technical assistance to facilitate the alignment of priorities, strategies and resources with workforce and economic development partners.

It is important we get this piece right because having the right pool of workers is the primary concern of businesses looking to re/locate or expand in any area. Creating a vibrant workforce landscape leads to business retention, attraction and entrepreneurship activities – all are elements of robust economic development plans.

With national organization Generation, a unique provider of solutions for the growing demand and need for workers, the alliance is working with more than 40 of Wilmington’s largest employers to launch soft skills and targeted job training programs for construction and finance.

The Generation programming in Wilmington has graduated more than 90 students from the Universal Banker as well as the Universal Construction program in 10 months, with a 92% job placement rate overall into better-paying jobs.

This partnership allows for employers to be actively involved in the development and delivery of the program, including personalized class instruction and the mentoring of students. The hiring connection brings peace of mind to employers and offers a shortcut to the interview and application process for candidates.

The employer-program connection helps employers such as large construction companies have confidence they are interviewing someone who has safety certifications, job-specific skills and awareness of the construction industry.

M&T Bank, Capital One and WSFS already have championed our job training and workforce development program in banking and customer service.

"I was most impressed with the young adults in the program who worked to overcome enormous obstacles," said Joe Westcott, Capital One’s Delaware market president.

The company is a key partner in workforce development efforts throughout the city and has hired several grads into the City-based customer service call center.

"Obstacles that would prove tough for many, but they were at the program from 9 to 5 every day for five weeks and stayed energized the whole way through it," Westcott said. "It really says something about the commitment that these folks are bringing to this work.”

Many potential employees face a variety of problems while trying to make a livable wage, from childcare to homelessness, that make it hard to start a career. But it’s possible.

Some program graduates are bolstering their resume with skills to propel them into long term plans. Others are taking a risk that they hope will keep them from turning to illegal sources of income.

The program has been described by grads as a decision that would, ultimately, change the trajectory of their life and giving them a path from unemployment or underemployment to a livable wage job.

Wilmington Alliance, Generation and area banks hope more Wilmington residents will take advantage of the Universal Banker Program.

“We at Capital One want to improve employability and to give young people opportunities that they otherwise wouldn't have to join the workforce,” Westcott said.

Hearing stories at graduation made him realize how the programs are helping to change lives. Generation’s Universal Banker Program will graduate a fifth cohort of 15 city residents in November.

"We are so happy to be helping to train and empower the innovators of tomorrow, investing in companies and partnerships with creative approaches and bringing together problem solvers to address difficult community and societal challenges,” Westcott said.

https://www.delawareonline.com/story/opinion/contributors/2019/11/20/training-wilmington-residents-banking-construction-boosts-everybody-opinion/4239088002/?fbclid=IwAR1KinwOFr30vM7qCIjZHmQhBDLiCP2FLRagy1gbOJXlGyBG6-3_yOfG554

WILMINGTON — Two business-centric downtown organizations — the Wilmington Renaissance Corp. and the Wilmington Leaders Alliance (WLA) — have consolidated into a new organization called the Wilmington Alliance that will be an “ally for the city of Wilmington (at a level) that has never existed before.”

In an Aug. 5 press conference in the heart of downtown featuring a who’s who of Wilmington political and business leaders and economic development executives, the two organizations — one that’s been around for a quarter-century and the other for four years — officially became the Wilmington Alliance.

Observers say the WLA brings more senior board representation and a focus on workforce development, job creation, leadership development, and community safety while the 26-year-old Wilmington Renaissance brings an infrastructure and staffing that will allow the new organization to hit the ground running and bring a focus on “creative placemaking,” including Seventh and West Park and community garden; retail recruitment, and has been involved in revitalizing the Market Street Corridor since its inception in 1993 as Wilmington 2000. The organization has driven the development of the downtown LOMA apartments, the Delaware College of Art and Design, the Creative District, and NewMarketWilm.

“I think that description is accurate but there are two additional dimensions,” said Longwood Foundation President There du Pont, who has been serving as chair of the Leaders Alliance. “Wilmington Renaissance also has a community connection and a relationship with Wilmington residents that the Leaders Alliance had not yet developed.
I also think their missions did align and it doesn’t make sense, in a very small city, to have two organizations trying to operate in parallel. And as the leader of a local foundation, I love the idea of two nonprofits merging.”

The Wilmington Alliance is being led by Renata Kowalczyk, who has served as executive director of Wilmington Renaissance for the past eight months, while du Pont will serve as chairman of the new organization through the end of 2019, when Dr. Edmondo Robinson, chief transformation officer for Christiana Care Health System — the state’s largest employer — will become chairman.

Supporting and driving economic development efforts will be a major focus of the Wilmington Alliance, which hopes to reduce the city’s unemployment rate — currently around 5.5% — to something closer to the state average of 3.2%, which would require finding jobs for 1,600 people.

“There is an opportunity for Wilmington Alliance to be the partner at the table and define what is needed in various neighborhoods to really lift
up their capacity and get to those 1,600 jobs,” Kowalczyk said.

From an economic-development standpoint, Kurt Foreman and the Delaware Prosperity Partnership are leading efforts to attract new businesses.

“Whether we are talking about a richer arts and cultural ecosystem, developing workforce or strengthening Wilmington’s downtown retail areas, every step forward is contingent on a strong economic foundation,” Foreman said. “The creation of The Wilmington Alliance is an organic and logical next step for both organizations and most importantly for Wilmington. The more we can work collaboratively and are laser-focused on the city’s economic vitality, the more successful we will be; the DPP team looks forward to the opportunity to work with the new Wilmington Alliance.”

“We’ve made tremendous progress under Mayor Purzycki and we want to continue it across administrations in the future,” says Bob Perkins, who has been serving for the past 14 months as “temporary executive director” for the Leaders Alliance and overseeing both the Delaware Business Roundtable and the statewide Ready in 6 initiative, which wants to streamline permitting processes throughout the state. “We’re seeking a sort of truthful advocacy. Let’s go after the things that are really hard and not be afraid. This is the size organization with the heft that I think is needed to help the administration pull this off.”

Discussions began last September when Colonial Parking President and Wilmington Renaissance board member Jed Hatfield approached Perkins and suggested that it might make more sense for the two organizations to combine efforts and realize some synergies, particularly in light of the departure of then-executive director Carrie Gray. An ad hoc committee of du Pont, Perkins, consultant Peggy Geisler from the Leaders Alliance side and Hatfield, Kowalczyk and chairman Glenn Moore from the Wilmington Renaissance side met to hammer out the details over the ensuing months. Both boards unanimously approved the plan and the legal documents were filed last week. All that remains are a few administrative details such as the opening of a Wilmington Alliance bank account.

“These two organizations were created in two different time periods with two different forms of dissatisfaction with the situation at the time,” du Pont said. WLC was formed by real estate developer Paul McConnell in 2017 when Dennis Williams was Wilmington’s mayor.

The Wilmington Leaders Alliance has specifically been focused on workforce development and placed more than 90 individuals in the past year with a 92% placement rate and significant compensation increases for those individuals.

While there will be efficiencies by bringing the two organizations together, du Pont says there’s a lot of work left to be done. In fact, some organizations have already “stepped up and increased their contributions. We can be a lot more effective with the dollars we have. And then we need to invest more,” he said.

When asked to describe the current state of economic development for the city of Wilmington, du Pont responded, “Opportunistic. I don’t think there’s a great engine driving the economic development of the city. I think there’s a gap that needs to be filled and we intend to fill that gap.”

Perkins agrees: “You can’t just take things as they come in over the transom. There needs to be an engine, there needs to be a focus, there needs to be somebody pushing. We’ve got to get out of our [economic development] training wheels and ramp up dramatically, but that’s clearly on the agenda. Workforce development, I would argue, is a subset of that.”

During the press conference, Kowalczyk recalled a 2017 meeting she had with Sheila Bravo of Delaware Alliance for Nonprofit Advancement (DANA) as she considered moving from JPMorgan Chase into the social impact (nonprofit) space.

“Sheila asked me to make her a promise,” Kowalczyk said. “She said, ‘promise me that no matter what, you will not create another nonprofit.’ I feel very proud that not only are we not creating a nonprofit, we’re actually merging two, and being more efficient about it. I have this dream that one day we’ll have this one-stop central economic development center.”

Kowalczyk says she will be bringing a metrics-driven perspective to the new organization, focusing on what measures are needed to determine whether they’re moving the needle and what economic development really looks like in a city.

The group agrees that there could be opportunities to bring other organizations under the Wilmington Alliance umbrella. At the very least, they anticipate bringing groups with similar goals to the table and discussing how they can be part of a larger plan.

“We have lots of community organizations and they all have plans,” Kowalczyk said. “They all have challenges and lack of capacity, in many cases, to implement them. Let’s take West Center City where we do work through creative district. There was a very, very good plan that was developed with the community’s input in 2010. When you look at that plan, it barely has been implemented. Some organizations drive that agenda and others are struggling.”

“Take our violence reduction work as an example,” du Pont said. “There are more than a dozen small organizations around the city with different theories of change about how we can assist the social side of violence reduction. We can get them in a room — maybe not all in the same room at the same time — and figure out how we turn a dozen interesting ideas into two to three great ideas infused with national best practice that are of sufficient scale.”

Kowalczyk said she’s been talking to (REACH Riverside CEO) Logan Herring about how to engage downtown businesses in support of jobs creation for the teenagers that will be in the Warehouse. She said potential programs could include creation of a vertical farm for East Side residents, who already have a thriving community garden.

The group also expects to finish a park at Seventh and West streets and make two to three significant investments that the community can make on the social side of violence reduction. In addition, Kowalczyk says she’s working on a pilot with Grace Church in West Center City to create a pilot for a Kitchen Incubator by using an existing commercial kitchen to actually start growing food-related businesses.

Now that the Market Street project is nearing completion, the new organization will likely turn its attention elsewhere.

“The West Side is very, very active,” Kowalczyk said. “We [WRC] did a pilot marketing campaign for the downtown merchants in June called Made on Market. It was 10 days and 22 merchants participated and we got good feedback so we’ll be doing something in November called West Side Made that will include Union, Lincoln, and Fourth streets. If you ask me, “Where is the next prime one that really hopping?” it’s the West Side.

“It took 20 years to revitalize Market Street,” du Pont said. “That’s more than one mayoral administration. We need an entity that’s going to carry projects like that over the next five, six years, focused on West Center City and on other parts of the city.” 

https://www.delawarebusinesstimes.com/wilmington-renaissance-leaders-alliance-come-together/

The tidal wave that is the Opioid Epidemic in our rural, suburban and metro regions has been so overwhelming that often the disparate work to address this problem is primarily well-meaning, reactionary and siloed. This often translates into limited resources being deployed in ways that could not possibly address such a large-scale social epidemic.

Communities need ways in which they can operationalize around this serious issue that are targeted and employ strategies that align partnerships, resources, and activities to prevent, intervene and support the community.

These strategies often involve collaboratives, awareness campaigns, and community planning!

The process often needed to get there is coalescing key stakeholders through the following steps and can be scaled to small and large geographic footprints:

Organize a Collective Impact Framework (Collaborative)
Assess the Prevention-Intervention-Support Landscape Benchmark Data
Develop a Community Plan and goals for each component
Create an Awareness Campaign (“Go Purple”) as an alignment and communication mechanism
Synergize resources and target to key drivers
Study impact
Some of these steps are implemented simultaneously. The Awareness Campaign can be used to drive the process and a launching point in which a community can coalesce, stakeholders, inform the community on the issue, garner resources to support the process and gain activity alignment.

The “Go Purple Awareness Campaign” as an example of a community awareness campaign is an expansion of the Herren Purple Project and a more global approach to the opioid epidemic. PMG Consulting brought this Campaign to Delaware and was able to start small and rapidly scale a citywide campaign to one that emerged into a Statewide grassroots movement. The movement was able to promote large scale awareness, anti-stigma messaging and alignment through messages of the dangers of prescription medication misuse and messages of hope while promoting treatment access.

The initiative brought public, foundational and private partners to the table with resources in a unified way. The messaging platform permeated all arenas and included: Media, Business, Faith-Based, Government, Non-Profit, Treatment and Individuals and provided a catalyst in which to frame our work around this common social cause. It brought financial and in-kind resources to bare and foster ROI 3-fold for the state.

Sample of Social Impact Outcomes:

Statewide Opioid Awareness Campaign initiated and launched
$200,000 of direct funding and in-kind to support the comprehensive approach
Facilitated and mobilized local and statewide partnership
Developed pathway funding for aligned Youth Prevention Education
Developed pipeline for information to those seeking access to treatment or support
Reduction of stigma associated with the opioid epidemic.
The key is initial dollars for this work and social momentum. It was the grassroots swell that attracted funders and partners to bring and align efforts and monies in an increased, targeted way. This process allowed and encouraged everyone in the state who was concerned or wanted to be involved a pathway they were comfortable with to be involved and empowered to be part of a greater social impact.

If you or your community are interested in setting up a similar process or project, we can help! PMG Consulting and our partner TAPP Network can help you design a social impact process and offer templates, community planning guidance, and implementation coaching. Specialized assessment services developed and approved by the CDC are available.

http://www.pmgconsulting.net/social-impact/

Community Capacity Building (CCB) is a conceptual approach to social-behavioral change and addresses systems level needs to lay a foundation for community health improvements. It is a method to understand the barriers that people, governments, organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) need to overcome to allow them to achieve community health goals.

Community Capacity Building is a long-term process. For CCB to work, the planning needs to be inclusive of stakeholders; ministries, local authorities, non-governmental organizations, professionals, community members, academics and more. The capacity building uses a community’s human, scientific, technological, organizational, institutional and resource capabilities to tackle community problems. Those problems can be related to policy, systems, programs, and agencies.

This method of development takes into consideration the potential, limits, and needs of the people of the city, town, county or state concerned. CCB can happen in three levels but is the most impactful in my professional opinion, when the three levels are aligned with common purpose.

Individual-level : Community capacity-building on an individual level requires the development of conditions that allow individual participants to build and enhance knowledge and skills. It also calls for the establishment of conditions that will allow individuals to engage in the “process of learning and adapting to change.”

Institutional level: Community capacity building on an institutional level should involve aiding institutions in modernizing existing systems and supporting them in forming sound policies, organizational structures, and effective methods of management and outcomes.

Societal level: Community capacity building at the societal level should support the establishment of a more interactive public administration that learns equally from its actions and from feedback it receives from the population at large. Community capacity building must be used to develop public administrators that are responsive and accountable. The Sussex County Health Coalition exists quite simply to help the community identify its greatest health concerns and help the community develop its capacity to address those concerns.

SCHC sees its role in fostering collaboration, providing education, driving community planning that helps build individuals, organizations and community capacity to address complex social issues. For far too long this community, through band-aid approaches and in siloed formats with fragmented plans and fragmented funding, tried to address complex health and social problems. We build solutions on outdated and crumbling foundations, implement best practices in systems that are not working and shovel programs onto communities not ready to receive, implement or sustain them.