How do we keep St. Louis in business?
Doug Devitre
Advancing the future of civilizations while empowering the workforce for tomorrow.
The question asked by the Executive Director of the St. Louis Development corporation, Neal Richardson, hit a nerve because I have served as a community-oriented business leader in St. Louis and have also wanted to move away for lack of support. I recommend you take the economic justice survey to provide your own feedback.
I am #stlmade and for more than a decade working with more companies outside of the region than in my own.
Today I am truly excited for the city of St. Louis. I am in total alignment with where our city is going to advance economically except for how we are going to get there. Please let me explain.
Strategic alignment on objectives produces fewer tactics when we learn to work together.
Strategic objectives such as workforce development, business empowerment, neighborhood transformation, and equitable, inclusive development require an intensely symbiotic relationship with one another for them each to work collectively. One must not only feed the other, each one must feed the other three at the same time. This requires a simplistic approach rather than calculating the factorial amount of tactics and money drained by each one. The St. Louis community must come together as one community of communities and adopt innovative learning solutions where our students become our greatest teachers to prepare the workforce for the future on a minimal budget. In other words, work with the talent and technology you already have, smarter.
To define this process further, there needs to be a collective agreement on what these terms mean as action and commitment by its active stakeholders. Here is my first shot.
Workforce development
To analyze and assess the age-appropriate knowledge and skill gaps students need to acquire for on-the-job performance, which when applied, can immediately have an impact on the community where they live.
Business empowerment
To empower entrepreneurship by connecting the right resources, connections, and business opportunities to those who are committed to practicing community-oriented objectives.
Neighborhood transformation
To reimagine communities in a way where each person takes ownership in the regular habit of its revitalization and earnest support of one another’s mutual goals to make each neighborhood a safer and more enjoyable place to live.
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Equitable and inclusive development
To eliminate gender, race, zip code, personal handicap, where you went to high school, what floor you are on, or who is your corporate sponsor as an indicator when bringing people together in the community towards a common purpose.
To each interest group, it’s important to be sensitive to each one while maintaining consensus around a shared vision and commitment. Without a shared, consistently reinforced vision through action by community leaders, this plan fails before you finish reading the rest of this post.
If you chose one tactic to help the city prepare the workforce of the future, you might advance one of these options.
Accelerated empowerment is the concept of transferring usable knowledge and skills aimed towards a common purpose at a faster rate with an emphasis on using technology to support learning performance. There isn’t just one pathway. Students become the best teachers. A jungle gym of age-appropriate learning exercises is equally available to those who have special learning needs and facilitated by adults who serve as coaches and mentors. When students are assessed based upon their implementation and how they teach others, students absorb knowledge and skills faster with areas of expertise they are likely to apply in real-life work situations.
The learning standards for grades K-12 are listed on the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education website. Few schools have reverse engineered their lessons to account for the current and future workforce needs leaving many students without specialized knowledge they will need on the job. I applaud the DESE for recognizing computer science objectives brought forth by the Computer Science Teachers Association in 2019. It’s one step closer.
In my opinion, if you want to keep St. Louis in business, keep local talent from moving away post-graduation, and build a thriving city that attracts companies and families from around the world, the implementation of accelerated empowerment is critical.
If you want the playbook for accelerated empowerment, we are designing it out of TREX Downtown. It’s called Build Buddy. It is a platform to support students, parents, and teachers. Even if the city of St. Louis didn’t use the platform, the implementation of the playbook would produce a dramatic ROI across every category for each of its diverse group of equitable stakeholders.
Imagine a future where students have been empowered to build a future you never witnessed before because of how technology has changed and the new skills they can immediately apply to make a difference in their community.
That’s the future of St. Louis where I want to live, work, and play.
When we build together, we learn together.