Irma L. Olguin Jr. How to turn around a city TED
Has anyone here been to Fresno?
OK, good, good.
That’s where I’m from,
where I was born
and where I live today.
For those of you less familiar,
Fresno and the entire
Central Valley of California
is a place that’s built by agriculture:
miles and miles of farmland
for as far as the eye can see
with a couple of large, poor cities
dotting the landscape.
My family, like much
of the local population,
is a family of immigrant farm laborers:
those toiling away in the fields
hoping for a ¢25-an-hour raise.
I didn’t see myself destined
for the glamour of Silicon Valley,
but I did find my way to college,
and something miraculous happened.
I got a job in tech.
And I remember the first time
I didn’t have to count the change
when trying to figure out
how much to tip for pizza delivery,
when I realized that this industry,
the technology industry,
was going to change my life forever.
And I remember thinking to myself,
if it can happen to me,
a poor, queer Brown woman from nowhere,
why can’t it happen
to entire cities of people like me?
And so for the last eight years,
that’s what I’ve been
working on in Fresno:
building a business that could expose
what it takes to cause an entire city –
and not just a select few people in it –
to thrive.
It turns out we only need
three pretty simple ingredients.
Training, proof and community.
So the cornerstone of everything
that we do is job training.
The communities that we work with
are often from very poor populations,
maybe folks who are learning English
as a second language,
maybe they were unhoused,
the formerly incarcerated,
veterans,
folks who are very often
from retail or factory work.
These folks, their issue is not
their ability to learn technical things.
Their problems center on things
that are a lot less obvious.
Things like childcare,
transportation,
hunger,
money.
So those are the things that we focus on.
It can be especially hard on families.
How do you justify learning
to do something like write code
when there are bills to pay?
Wouldn’t it be better for the family
if you just got a job at McDonald’s
and put in as many hours as you can?
Because that’s a check,
and who’s going to watch
your little brother?
That’s what we do as a family;
we pitch in.
But how do you justify
to the people around you
when it looks to them like you’re just
playing around on the computer?
We didn’t invent a new way
to teach JavaScript.
We just focus a lot more
on the things that actually prevent
people from learning it.
In addition to connecting our students
to things like bus tokens
and free regional transit options,
we also just deploy a fleet of vehicles
whose only job is to pick these folks up
before their study groups
and drop them back off after class.
If they need food, we get them food.
We work with food cupboards and pantries,
making sure that boxes of food
are delivered to these students’ homes
with enough for a family
of three to five people.
We connect them to childcare options
that make sense for their schedules
and their budgets.
But most importantly,
because cash is such a center
of energy and decision-making
for these families,
through our apprenticeship program,
we literally pay them to learn.
So not only do they get to earn a wage
and are exposed to real-world work,
but now they also have
that first line on the resume.
The one that’s so hard to get
and the one that builds confidence
in the rest of the world
that you might know
what you’re talking about.
And so you might be thinking to yourself,
“OK, Irma, this sounds great,
but it sounds really expensive.”
So how do you pay for it?
We’ve turned a long-held idea on its head.
We have to stop putting the burden –
the financial burden –
on the student and the families
who are already struggling
and start putting it on the people
and the entities that benefit most
from their untapped potential.
Entities like government,
corporations,
philanthropy.
These are the entities that benefit
from the development of that talent,
and so that’s who we get to pay for it.
Let’s throw back the curtain
on what I’m trying to say here.
Let’s take the government.
The US spends a trillion dollars
scaling up a workforce for this country.
Many of those programs have mixed results,
and while some folks who come out of them
do in fact earn higher wages at the end,
while they’re still learning,
when they’re still in training,
many of these folks can’t also work,
which means that they’re not
bringing home a check,
which means that they’re still
in survival mode,
which means that the people
who would benefit most can’t participate
to begin with.
That’s where a system
like ours makes some sense.
We apply for allocations
of that same kind of money,
and use it to pay people to learn.
We also work with corporations.
QA testing, for example,
is a job that can be taught
and a role that companies
desperately need.
Training up a batch of QA engineers
is low-hanging fruit
and has almost instant
results for companies.
For the companies to invest
in the development of that talent,
it breeds them a local and eager
technology workforce from which to choose.
Companies that are in a growth mode
or who are experiencing
a digital transformation,
they know that the key to their future
is their ability to find,
hire and retain talent.
We can train up entire cohorts
or a generation of junior-level
and apprentice-level technologists
trained directly to their systems,
ready to be hired on day one.
We’ve worked with all kinds of companies,
getting them to pay
for things like tuition
and money for students
to accomplish exactly this goal.
Philanthropy’s interests here
may be even easier to describe.
Foundations and nonprofits,
they want to see their money
put to good use.
Take the Quality Jobs Fund, for example.
It’s a collaborative effort
between the Federal
Home Loan Bank of San Francisco
and the New World Foundation,
and their express mission
is to address inequality
through quality jobs expansion
and skills development.
We apply for allocations or grants
from philanthropies like those,
work with the government dollars
that we just described,
and companies in the way
that we just talked about,
put it all together
to use it to pay people to learn.
So that’s how you pay for it.
Now, what is it that these folks
should learn on?
In our view, it’s real-world
software projects,
because that is the proof.
You see,
all of the software that the world
needs built has to get made.
And so we can leverage talent
from these underrepresented communities
to deliver on that need,
build a training ground for green talent
and also build a really robust business.
We’ll take OnwardUS
as just one example.
It was a rapid-response initiative
in response to COVID
where we partnered with the Kapor Center.
It was adopted by the state of California
and then 10 other states.
The idea was to take displaced workers –
folks who are affected by COVID –
connect them to money
and services and new jobs.
We took a high-level
senior software engineer
who could architect the full platform
and then apprentices
who could execute on that roadmap,
and in 11 days,
we had a functioning prototype.
You see, the local mom-and-pop,
the school district,
the regional manufacturer,
they all have software needs,
and they’re going to pay someone to do it.
With this model,
they can have their solutions
delivered back to them,
but also participate
in the creation of high-growth,
high-wage jobs in their area.
The last ingredient
in our recipe is community.
We need vibrant spaces
that meet the aspirations
of technologists and entrepreneurs,
so we build castles for the underdogs.
We buy blighted buildings in our downtowns
for pennies on the dollar,
improve them,
lease them back out to ourselves
and others in the technology industry.
This creates community around the idea
of leveling up entry-level humans
and builds a shared understanding
and value around what it means
to have access to unlimited talent.
The first project that we did
was a building that had stood empty
for 40 years before we took it over.
We showed up with our tenant list
and our ability to do work.
Our partner showed up with a building
that was empty and decaying.
We painted the walls,
we built a bunch of desks,
we hung a lot of TVs,
and when the coffee shop opened
at the front of that building,
it was like someone had flipped a switch
on that corner of downtown.
Suddenly, there were a thousand
students and tenants
and community members visiting
that building each day.
These ingredients,
when you take them all together,
they produce real impact
driven by real change
that affect real people
who have names and faces
and families and pets.
Just one quick example.
Our pal, Miguel,
who was once incarcerated,
he didn’t have any prospects
for his future,
his professional life
or really, his family.
He was scholarshiped
through our pre-apprenticeship program
using government dollars.
Miguel veered just to the left
of computer programming,
landed neck-deep in analytics
and website funnels.
He apprenticed for our digital
marketing program.
Eighteen months later,
Miguel has a full-time job,
a great salary,
benefits and a matching 401(k).
We’ve worked with over 5,000 students,
and of those entering our career programs,
over 80 percent earn technical employment.
And in Fresno, this means
that the new technology workforce
is greater than 50 percent female
or gender nonconforming,
greater than 50 percent minority or Latinx
and 20 percent first-generation.
And those demographics mirror
the demographics of our county.
These are folks leaving restaurant,
retail, factory and field labor,
earning on average
less than 20,000 dollars a year,
exiting the programs
earning 60-80,0000 dollars a year.
That’s gas in the tank
and rent paid on time.
And when you do that enough times,
you see more sandwiches being purchased
at the local panini shop;
newer, more reliable cars
taking these folks to work;
the tax base improving,
which invests in schools
and rebuilds roads;
homes in those communities
that are being built or bought
by the people who are actually
going to live in them;
dilapidated buildings
that once stood empty
now full of energized underdogs
sipping coffee and writing code
and, most importantly,
bringing with them the next
generation of human
that didn’t see themselves
leaving the packing house
until they saw their pal make it work.
And we can do this.
You know, it’s not at all a mystery,
especially now that we’ve spent
10 minutes talking about it.
But we do have to do three very specific
and deliberate things.
Invite the underdog in the front door;
pay them to learn like it’s their job;
and then build them castles
in their hometowns.
It’s worked in Fresno,
it’s working in Bakersfield
and Toledo, Ohio
and it can work in underestimated
cities all over the world.
Thank you so much for your attention.
(Applause)