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At the depth of the recession in late 2009, state economic and workforce officials faced a tough challenge – job loss that was already bad and showed signs of getting worse. They turned to the UNC System’s Small Business Technology Development Center for a solution.
Working in partnership with the NC Commission on Workforce Development, state and regional economic developers and other partners, the SBTDC developed a unique solution – work with businesses before the layoffs come – to lessen the chance that layoffs would come.
Now in its second year, BizBoost is a very different sort of University booster club, and it is showing big results. Over the past two years, the latest report shows that BizBoost has built off of SBTDC’s 16-campus network (each affiliated with a UNC system campus) to serve 1587 businesses. In the process, the businesses report retaining 3,277 jobs, creating another 4,458. But there’s more to the program than that
“The margin of error for small to mid-sized companies is really quite small. A huge company like Dell can make a big mistake and survive; for a small company, one big mistake and they’re gone, “ says Scott Daugherty, Executive Director of the SBTDC.
Restructuring responsibilities and debt, reimagining business plans, finding new markets all matter, but so do more nuts-and-bolts services. SBTDC’s BizBoost counselors work with businesses to help them obtain loans – since January 2010, 113 businesses have gotten loans through their work with SBTDC – and to get government contracts -- BizBoost clients have received 1439 government contracts for a total of more than $428 million.
BizBoost helps high tech businesses and lower tech businesses. One client is Brushy Mountain Bee Farm, which employs 70 people in Moravian Falls. BizBoost counselors helped Brushy Mountain with everything from inventory management to warehouse layout to demand projection, and the company has been able to keep growing as a result: they anticipate growing employees by 5 to 10% this year. Count owner Steve Forrest among the fans of help from Appalachian State University and NC State’s Industrial Extension Service, and BizBoost: “The SBTDC’s expert analysis made decision-making so much easier for us.”
The SBTDC is based out of NC State University (Daugherty is an associate vice chancellor there), with offices on 16 campuses. The relationship between SBTDC and the University is critical: in addition to the work of professional staff, the SBTDC is able to connect businesses with students, faculty and other university resources.
Another key connection: Daugherty is also the state’s Small Business Commissioner, based out of the NC Department of Commerce, which coordinates the state’s economic and workforce functions. Working alongside assistant Small Business Commissioner George Millsaps, the head of the NC Community College System’s Small Business Center Network, Daugherty has a valuable perspective to identify which companies need what help at what timel, and how to get it to them before they have to lay off workers or close up shop:
“The real value of the upfront services in tough times is that you are able to keep the business going forward, as opposed to waiting till it is too late. BizBoost demonstrates the impact that is achievable with highly targeted set of services for a relatively selective group of companies.”
Businesses have a big problem these days: the world keeps changing under their feet; their employees need to constantly renew their skills; and there’s no time to send them back to a traditional college class.
UNC campuses have their own challenges: how to fulfill their constitutional mission of providing “all useful learning” to a workforce that needs their help well beyond the traditional college years. How does a university respond to community demand? At UNCW, one solution for a key set of North Carolina employers is online, through its innovative Corporate MS in Chemistry Program.
The program was featured in the October issue of Nature (http://www.nature.com/), as part of a larger examination of online degree programs.
The article features Lauren McBryde Gray, a chemist at a biopharmaceutical company, who wanted to upgrade her skills, but couldn’t afford the time or expense of returning to college full-time. She told the magazine: “It was important I bring in an income for my family, but I wanted to get my master’s to give me an edge in terms of my career. I needed another option, a better option.”
The UNCW program allows students working at partner companies like PPD, Pfizer, BASF, Roche, Metrics the US Air Force and others to learn online, while completing the required labs at their workplace, while being observed and evaluated by university faculty members and Ph.D’s inside their company.
To date, twelve students have graduated from the program; another 49 students are currently enrolled.
There’s room for growth in online learning. In the most recent reporting year, some 20% of all US undergraduates took at least one distance-learning course. Besides UNCW, other system members are well-positioned with courses: UNC Online (http://online.northcarolina.edu/), now offers 240 online programs in 22 fields of study, and UNC Chapel Hill’s recently launched MBA@UNC program (http://onlinemba.unc.edu/) should identify whether the highly successful executive business education programs can translate to a mostly-online market.
For Lauren Gray, the verdict is in already. She got the new skills she needed on the schedule she wanted: “It really turned out to be win-win.”
What can college students do to fight poverty? Western Carolina is finding out this fall, with a year-long Poverty Project.
This year students are learning what poverty looks like across the world and in their own backyards, finding ways to address poverty issues through public policy, giving time and clothing and developing opinions about what they can do: “I hope that students take away from this yearlong experience that they should think critically but deeply about global issues today,” says Ted Coyle, head of the anthropology and sociology department.
WCU’s year-long Poverty Project kicked off in September, when faculty, staff and community members filled the performance hall of the John W. Bardo Fine and Performing Arts Center during back-to-back presentations by Hugh Evans, co-founder and CEO of the Global Poverty Project. Jennifer Cooper, interim director of service learning and co-chair of the WCU Poverty Project, estimated that attendance was around 1,900 for the presentations.
Hugh Evans, co-founder and CEO of the Global Poverty Project, presented "1.4 Billion Reasons," a presentation designed to engage participants to help the 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty, at Western Carolina University.
During the presentation, Evans asked attendees at the WCU presentations to consider taking actions such as signing a petition for The End of Polio, a campaign in which every signature on the petition will be matched with funding for one vaccine to help end polio. He also invited them to consider taking part in the Live Below the Line awareness and fundraising campaign in which they commit to live on less than $1.50 a day for five days.
WCU students said they left inspired, and the event sparked some critical discussion about extreme poverty and the best ways to address it, and that was the goal, said John Whitmire, co-chair of the WCU Poverty Project steering committee.
“What we really hoped this presentation would do is get a conversation started this year in which we look seriously at the causes and consequences of poverty and related issues, and what we might be able to do about them,” said Whitmire.
Katie Hopkins, a freshman Honors College student from Boone majoring in nursing, said it was the personal stories of real people living in poverty that touched her the most, including a video of a woman who felt that her life was saved because of increased measures to care for women preparing for childbirth. Hopkins said the maternal health portion of the presentation left her thinking about the possibility of pursuing a specialty within nurse anesthesia that would enable her to work with expectant mothers. “For a long time, I’ve wanted to do mission work, and now I definitely know I’d like to do more with women and childbirth,” said Hopkins.
Faculty members such as Ted Coyle, head of the anthropology and sociology department and director of the ethnography laboratory, said he also hoped the event would open the door to critical discussion on the topic of extreme poverty.
Other WCU Poverty Project events include:
Constitution Day:
Western Carolina University’s Public Policy Institute events from Thursday, Sept. 15, to Tuesday, Sept. 20, in honor of Constitution Day. A panel and participants in an essay contest explored the question “Is there or should there be a constitutional right to a minimum level of subsistence?” Contest essays explored such questions as whether the Constitution guarantees a right to food, water, shelter and other necessities by way of food stamps, public housing or homeless shelters, and a voter registration drive was held on the lawn of A.K. Hinds University Center.
Film Series
A series of four documentary films about the various causes of poverty, its impact and possible solutions to issues such as corruption, gender inequality and access to resources will include a screenings of “Inside Job,” “Born Into Brothels,” “Waste Land,” and “Fahrenheit 2010.”
Stop Hunger Now
WCU’s Center for Service Learning joined the campus Wesley Foundation to sponsor a Stop Hunger Now food packing event October 1.
Stop Hunger Now is an international hunger relief organization that coordinates the distribution of food and other life-saving aid around the world. At food-packing events, volunteers package dehydrated, high-protein and highly nutritious meals that are used in crisis situations and in school feeding programs for schools and orphanages in developing countries around the world.
House Party
WCU’s Leadership Institute and Office of Leadership and Student Involvement is sponsoring, for the third year in a row, a “house party” of a different kind. Students will build houses out of cardboard boxes on the lawn of A.K. Hinds University Center and sleep outside overnight. Proceeds also benefit organizations that serve people in need of shelter.
“We hope that through this event, students will have a better understanding of local poverty issues, discuss amongst themselves the feelings and emotions around the issue at hand, and begin to dialogue together on how they can work together to address this issue and assist in the effort,” said Mike Corelli, associate director for leadership programs.
WCU hosted a shoe drive for Soles4Souls during the month of October.
Students in Western Carolina University’s Criminal Justice Club hosted the shoe donation drive to benefit people in need during the month of October as part of the WCU Poverty Project.
Shoes of all types – athletic, running, dress, sandals, heels, work boots, cleats, flip-flops or others – will be collected for the Nashville-based charity Soles4Souls, which distributes donated shoes in the United States and abroad.
Cyndy Caravelis Hughes, assistant professor of criminal justice, began thinking about hosting a shoe drive on campus while serving on the steering committee for the WCU Poverty Project. The project is a yearlong, multidisciplinary learning initiative at WCU featuring engaged teaching, learning, service and creative and scholarly opportunities centered on poverty, both in local communities and global society.
“I know that money is tight for everyone right now, so I thought that a shoe drive would be perfect because everyone has a spare pair or two lying around,” said Hughes.
She shared the idea with several students, and Tamara Davis Blatt, vice president of the criminal justice club, said members became excited about the possibility of being able to work on an initiative to give back to the community in a domestic and international capacity.
“In this tough economy, it is not always easy for students to give monetarily, but it is easy to share and give that which we are no longer in need of, like the shoes that are cluttering our closets,” said Blatt, a senior majoring in criminal justice and minoring in psychology from Orange County, California. “Like many females, I have quite a vast shoe collection, including sandals, casual, dressy and tennis shoes, and I plan to clean out my closet and give about a dozen shoes of different styles.”
After the donation drive in October, the shoes were delivered to a Soles4Souls distribution center, said Blatt.
From there, they will be processed and graded, with new and high-grade shoes sent for distribution and lower-grade shoes sent to microenterprise programs in developing countries such as Haiti, Tanzania and Honduras to be cleaned, reconditioned and sold locally, according to information from Soles4Souls. Donated shoes in conditions unfit for the microenterprise programs are sent to recyclers in Pakistan who salvage usable materials from the shoes.
Learn more, earn more: In its recent "State of the North Carolina Workforce 2011-2020" report, the NC Department of Commerce projects that 27% of the new jobs created over the next decade (more than 150,000) will require workers to have either a four-year college degree or a graduate degree. Jobs requiring a bachelor's degree pay, in average, more than twice what those requiring only a high school degree pay. Jobs requiring a graduate degree pay three times what those requiring a high school degree pay. Over the course of a career, someone with a four-year college degree can expect to make $1.5 million more than someone with a high school degree.
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