Two years ago, Joseph Hooley, Chief Executive officer of Boston’s State Street Corporation launched Boston Workforce Investment Network (Boston WINs) to strengthen the city’s workforce by teaching disadvantaged young men and women the ways of business.
Through his work with local philanthropy, particularly as an active supporter and a board member of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston, Hooley became convinced that if he could help fix just one problem in the world, it would be urban education.
“I’ve visited a lot of schools over the years,” he says, “and I’ve seen some excellent ones, but the solutions to providing good urban education tend to be spotty.”
Hooley, who joined State Street in 1986, launched WINs in June 2015 and committed to investing $20 million and hiring 1,000 graduates of urban schools over the next four years.
“So far, the results are promising,” he said. “We’ve hired more than 200 graduates, and they are proving to be an excellent fit with our culture.
The unemployment rate for high school graduates in Massachusetts is 9.5%, but for those with college degrees that number drops to 4.5%. And the six year college completion rate for Boston high school student is 4.9%
The State Street Foundation has been focused on workforce development and education over the past several years and the WIN’s program, Hooley says, “is a natural extension of what we do every day.”
The WINs program has three fundamental goals:
- Help increase college enrollment rates for Boston Public high school students
- Ensure that once a Boston Public High School student gets into college they stay there
- Enhance career pathways leading to stable employment and economic mobility
What Hooley had in mind was a joint venture.
“We wanted to bring together a handful of nonprofits with a proven record of getting and keeping students on the path from the education system to employment, give those nonprofits funding to scale up, coordinate their efforts so that they were no longer working in isolation, and then commit to hiring a large number of those students after graduation.”
To begin with, State Street held a competition among local nonprofits and chose five organizations: the Boston Private Industry Council (PIC), Bottom Line, which helps low-income and first-generation students get to and through college, College Advising Corps (CAC), UAspire and Year Up.
The WINS program connects the five nonprofits so that a student who receives assistance from College Advising Corps in searching for and applying to colleges, for example, will now also receive guidance on financing his or her education from uAspire.
In its first year, Boston WINs served more than 19,430 youths, and State Street hired 216 Boston WINs graduates.
“We’re nearly halfway through our four-year commitment to Boston WINs,” Hooley says, “and I think we’ve established a pretty good rhythm. We’re already thinking about how to scale the program beyond Boston, to other parts of the country and the world. State Street has big operations in Kansas City, Singapore, Poland, Ireland, and elsewhere, and there’s no reason we can’t make it work in those places, too.
“The grand prize at the end of one’s education is a job and a career,” Hooley notes, “and we (State Street) can provide that in a way that nonprofits can’t.
“Furthermore, our company is loaded with millenials who want to volunteer, and mentorship is a key part of helping young people run the gamut from an urban high school to college and then into a job.
“When it comes to finding someone at State Street to mentor a student, you don’t have to ask twice.”
“I believe that Boston WINs will be an important part of what State Street accomplishes during this decade,” Hooley concludes. “If we can crack the code on the problem of urban workforce development, we’ll create a diverse group of well-educated and highly motivated employees for our company while also filling a need for the entire community.
“The grand prize at the end of one’s education is a job and a career,” Hooley says, “and we can provide that in a way that nonprofits can’t.”
The bottom line, Hooley says, is that everyone benefits from Wins:
“We’ll be able to increase the supply of diverse urban talent for State Street and other Boston employers
We’re already making an impact on the community and the organizations we are partnering with.
Our commitment to employing 1000 Boston youth over the next four years will help us make an even bigger impact locally.
We are creating a pilot for corporate philanthropy and plan to mirror this approach in other locations where we operate.
And each Boston wins partner receives funding that will allow them to serve more people.”
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