Posts Tagged: workforce
Good Jobs Challenge awards $21.5 million for forestry, fire-safety jobs training
Reposted from the UC ANR News Butte, Feather River, Lake Tahoe,...
Youth-run garden provides 10,000 pounds of produce for San Diego families
UC SAREP's Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems grant helps support Second Chance garden
Fifteen-year-old Xavier knows the anger within him will never leave. “I can't ever get rid of it,” he said.
“I've always wanted to just fight for no reason; I just had an anger issue, losing my temper quick with people,” added Xavier, a ninth-grader in San Diego County. “I have high expectations of myself.”
Xavier is working to keep his emotions under control, and he has found a sense of calm through his volunteer work. He was an intern – and then a peer supervisor – in the youth-run garden of Second Chance, a San Diego-based organization that works to break the cycles of poverty and incarceration by providing housing and job training to adults and young people.
Operating their garden as a small farm business, youth in the program, ages 14 to 21, offer produce to the community through their farm stand and a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) model.
“The project incorporates a ‘farm to fork' approach in which youth not only experience how to grow food, but how to cook and eat healthfully,” said Gail Feenstra, director of the University of California Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, which has a grant program that funds research and education projects – such as the youth garden – supporting sustainable food systems.
“Second Chance works primarily with youth in communities of color, providing them with training and also helping them develop confidence in themselves,” Feenstra said.
Filling a critical need for fresh produce
Caelli Wright, program manager of the Second Chance youth garden, said that grant funds from SAREP – a program of UC Agriculture and Natural Resources – have been used to purchase the supplies needed to sustain the program. The garden has filled a critical need for produce during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“After the pandemic hit, we recognized the increased need for fresh food in our neighborhoods,” Wright said. “That need was already there – southeast San Diego is considered a ‘food swamp' or ‘food apartheid', if you will – and with the onset of COVID, that need just escalated with unemployment and complications in our food production systems.”
Through a partnership with UC San Diego Center for Community Health and Encanto Elementary School (located down the block from the garden), donations enabled the program to give its CSA shares to about 25 families at Encanto. Over the course of the pandemic, the youth have grown 10,000 pounds of produce to donate.
At the same time, the program helps the young participants grow. For Xavier, being outdoors with peers empowered him to develop positive relationships. Previously, as a student in a charter school program, he was not accustomed to interacting with people and groups. Volunteering in the youth garden has given him a fresh perspective and understanding of others.
“Learning to be patient with people and [to] accept sometimes that if I don't know something, I need to ask about it, because I used to be so in my ego that I thought I knew everything,” Xavier explained. “But I don't know everything – I just learned to accept some things…that's just being part of life. And that's something that the garden has helped me with, personally.”
Opportunities for personal, social growth
Developing – and redeveloping – social skills are especially important for students, as they return from the disconnections associated with remote learning.
“Right now, with a lot of students facing the aftermath of COVID and being restricted to learning at home and not getting as much social interaction in their daily lives, it's led to a lot of challenges, mental health-wise, and social and emotional learning-wise,” Wright said. “The garden program provides that opportunity that some youth have been missing out on.”
In southeast San Diego, such crucial opportunities for personal growth and career exploration are harder to come by, and Second Chance started the garden in 2012 to give youth a unique work experience and valuable skills. About 400 young people have participated in the program.
“The youth that we serve are coming from low-income neighborhoods that are underserved with resources,” Wright said. “They just are not exposed to the same opportunities [as those in higher-income areas] to build skills or be ready for the workforce or to reach higher education – so that's where our program comes in and helps deliver those needed services.”
Xavier, who originally came to the garden because he heard that landscaping could be a lucrative career, recently finished his second stint as a peer supervisor in the youth garden. With his new skills, he and his cousin are looking to start a business of their own, cutting grass and doing yardwork in their community.
And, late last month, Xavier transferred to a more traditional high school environment.
“Being in a charter school after two, three years,” he said, “I've realized I miss being around more people.”
/h3>/h3>/h2>California Naturalist Supports Project Learning Tree
UC California Naturalist and our UC Agriculture & Natural Resources statewide program...
California Conservation Corps and the UC California Naturalist Program
Over 3,000 Corpsmembers graduate from the California Conservation Corps (CCC) every year. Some...
Latinos are America's economic salvation
At almost 58 million and growing, Hispanics make up the largest minority group in the United States.
When it comes to the economic power of this group, consider these figures:
Latinos who live and work in the U.S. were responsible for $2.13 trillion of gross domestic product in 2015, almost 12 percent of the country's $18.04 trillion GDP. And the projections for 2020 are even higher: Latino GDP will account for almost 25 percent of the nation's economic growth, according to David E. Hayes-Bautista, director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Hayes-Bautista, who spoke at the State of Hispanic Businesses Forum, hosted by Wells Fargo and the four largest Hispanic chambers of commerce in North Texas, said if the Latino GDP were representative of an independent country, it would be the world's seventh largest. It would be topped only by U.S., China, Japan, Germany, United Kingdom and France, and it would be bigger than the GDP of India, Italia, Brazil, Canada or Russia.
In an interview, Hayes-Bautista explained his methodology and his projections.
Explain the concept of Latino GDP and how you came to that number.
For decades, I've researched the Latino contributions to the American society, and I had always noticed the high participation rate on the workforce — the highest of any (demographic) group in 75 years.
I have followed Latino businesses (and their) tremendous growth rate. The number almost doubles every five years.
As the figure most widely understood by people worldwide is GDP because of the size and growth rate, we decided to estimate the Latino GDP, the total value of products and services produced by Latinos.
Then we used the same methods employed by the Department of Commerce, the same databases, so everything matched.
It took us almost a year and a half to finally understand the amount we (Latinos) contribute to the U.S. GDP: $2.13 trillion, which would be the seventh largest GDP in the world.
It was surprising to me. I thought we would be like the 30th economy. But our growth rate is an annual 2.95 percent, 70 percent higher than the non-Latino GDP. We contribute a lot to this country.
Why the difference with the non-Latino GDP?
We keep growing, while the non-Latino GDP often barely grows. Sometimes it doesn't. We're basically the economic salvation to the U.S.
We're a younger population, we're entering the labor force, while baby boomers and whites retire and die.
Each year, half a million white workers leave the workforce after turning 65 years old, while each year one million Latinos turn 18 years old and enter it. We are the future of the nation's GDP.
What are the variables prompting Latinos to become the world's seventh GDP?
One is the work ethic. Not only the workforce participation rate is high we also work more hours per week, and we work more in the private sector, which is the one sector that generates wealth. Government doesn't create wealth, and you see fewer Latinos in the public sector.
We have a good sense of family, and we tend (more than other groups) to form couples with children units, almost doubling the rate for whites. And we don't use welfare that much.
We are very healthy. We live three and a half years longer than whites, we suffer 30 percent fewer heart attacks, 35 percent less cancer, 10 percent fewer strokes. And finally, we are very patriotic.
How much does Texas contribute to Latino GDP?
Here we have about 10 million Latinos, so we can safely say they contribute more than 20 percent of that GDP.
If this is a calculation based on official figures, why hasn't the government done the math before?
I ask myself the same question every week. In California, we Latinos make up 40 percent of the population, the same as here in Texas. However, there are only a few Latino researchers, so research is limited.
But sometimes diversity is not enough for a research group in a lab. That diversity needs to find a voice. I'm a Chicano from the 1960s, and I found my voice. I make my voice heard when I see something wrong.
I was originally educated as an engineer, so I relay a lot to data. And if someone says something off-kilter, I show them the figures.
Your most recent book is La Nueva California: Latinos from Pioneers to Post-Millennials. How much the new generations contribute to that GDP?
The post-millennials are people born in 1997. They're just entering the workforce; they're still studying. The GDP estimate was made with a population with just eight years of schooling, very low-income, and nevertheless they lifted the world's seventh largest GDP.
Their U.S.-born children graduate from high school, they're going to college, they have a lot more human capital than their immigrant parents. So now let's imagine how much more they will be able to do with their investment in education.
There's this view of millennials as a generation born in a digital world, with little political commitment and less urge to work than previous generations.
Latino millennials and post-millennials are very different from whites.
To Anglo post-millennials, their parents gave them a good cultural baggage, they know the arts, they travel to Europe, etc. But parents of Latino post-millennials, almost 70 percent of whom are immigrants, instill in their children values of work, family and honesty.
Post-millennials are said to be somewhat lazy, they don't want to get direction, they're not diligent. I see that among the resident doctors I teach, and faculty members my age complain about that.
I tell them they should select Latino resident doctors because since they were 5, they made the doctor's appointments for their parents, they helped them pay their bills, to get a mortgage, they know about responsibility since they were children.
Latino millennials have fled the anti-immigrant rhetoric all their lives. White millennials aren't bothered by anything.
Why doesn't the private sector invest as much in Latino businesses?
At least half of Latino businesses lack employees. They're very small, almost micro-businesses. And an additional 20 or 30 percent employ just one worker or family members.
For me, the key is not persuading Latinos to start something, but to make its growth easier.
What would be your pitch to persuade the anglo business sector to invest in Hispanic entrepreneurs?
I would tell them their investment is not philanthropy, nor charity. It's an investment. They will get a return from that investment.
This Q&A was conducted, edited and condensed by Jenny Manrique, a reporter with Al Dia, a Spanish-language publication of The Dallas Morning News.
CORRECTION, 11:27 a.m., January 16, 2019: An earlier version of this story incorrectly translated GDP amounts as billions. Latinos who live and work in the U.S. were actually responsible for $2.13 trillion of gross domestic product in 2015, almost 12 percent of the country's $18.04 trillion GDP.
Source: Published originally on Dallas News, Latinos are America's economic salvation, by Jenny Manrique, January 10th, 2019.