What Might You Do to Support Educational Attainment in Your Community?

A key Forum theme is that everyone has a role to play in their community when it comes to supporting educational attainment. We are asking each attendee to commit to doing something–as an individual or as an employer–over the next year.

To be helpful, below are just a few commitments you might consider. And we will update this with other ideas heard at the Forum once the event ends and send it out to all attendees.

Commitments made by Individuals:

• Volunteer with a program to support educational attainment.
• Each One, Teach One: Share your life and work experience – mentor someone. Here’s one resource to find opportunities near you.
• Encourage your employer to offer more or better work-based learning opportunities and ensure that those opportunities are accessible to employees with a broad range of life experiences (i.e., military veterans, single parents, bilingual/bicultural, low(er)-income learners, those with spotty work histories, formerly incarcerated, differently abled, etc.)
• Examine where there are educational inequities (i.e., who gets access and who doesn’t, who gets “held back” and who doesn’t) and achievement gaps in your community and name them. Support bringing new voices to the table to begin addressing them. This site offers data on K-12 schooling in each county, district and school. Be sure to check out “performance by subgroup.”
• Give financially to or fundraise for programs in your community that support educational attainment.

Commitments made by Employers:

• Offer work-based learning opportunities – Register with the Navigator, a statewide platform for reaching K-12 and higher education educators across the state. The platform allows you to choose which types of work-based experiences–virtual and in-person–you would like to offer. Teachers will contact you to engage their students.
• Explore how an apprenticeship program can strengthen your workforce pipeline.
• Participate in the NC Department of Commerce’s new Business Pulse Survey to provide real time data on business conditions in your part of the state.
• Adopt skills-based hiring practices.
• Explore joining an employer-led sector initiative in your region to address labor shortages and other challenges facing your business. Consider the Talent Pipeline Management program (exclusively focused on labor challenges) or the NC Department of Commerce’s sector strategies initiative (focused on all challenges facing a sector, including labor).