Anna Zinkel (MPP '19 Bohnett Fellow) talks about creating sustainable career pathways for Detroiters in her internship with the Workforce Development Office.
Transcript:
My name's Anna Zinkel and
I am a 2nd year masters of public policy
student here at Fort and I spent my
summer in the Detroit mayor's office of
Workforce Development and so I was driven
to this opportunity because I've had this
long term interest in growing
sustainable economic growth and
I've sort of been winding my way around
how exactly I want to do that and
before coming to foreign I worked in
economic development here locally and
I worked mostly on the business incentive
side in the program implementation side of
things and my interest in workforce
development and actually helping employees
and working on policy emerged out of that
so the mission of the mayor's office of
Workforce Development is to connect
employers with job seekers and
to create sustainable career pathways for
residents of the city of Detroit and
they do this through systems
change training and career path
mapping and through barrier elimination
and that barrier elimination piece is
where I spent my time when I specifically
looked at child care and I looked at
the unequal access to high quality
child care in the city of Detroit and
why traditionally disenfranchise
groups might not be using
the formal market at the same rate as more
affluent and well positioned groups and so
I sort of put together a memo that was my
deliverable for the summer and it broke
it has sort of 3 stood distinct parts the
looking for gaps and then the 2nd
more subsidy and part substitute
substantive parts looked at what fixes
might exist both at the municipal and
the state level and so at the state level
or at the municipal level the biggest gap
that we look to fill was that
there weren't enough teachers and
employer employees in this space and so
I put together a training plan sort of
mapped out how much that would cost for
somebody to become an entry level worker
in the city of Detroit in the child care
industry and whether it was worth
their time to do so financially and so
that was kind of exciting because within
solving a workforce development problem we
could actually start employing more people
and looking at Career planning and then.
At the state policy level which is
most where most of the subsidies
are controlled in the state of Michigan.
Ample that's most illustrative
to me was looking at
the income eligibility requirements and
so most commonly in the state of Michigan
if somebody is on child care subsidies
that means they're income eligible
which basically means you have to be
a low be below a certain threshold and
Michigan that threshold is 130 percent
of the federal poverty level and
so if you're looking at a family that's a
single parent with one child that means if
they are making had I'm not making
this up any more than $21100.00 a year
they are not eligible to enroll initially
in child care subsidies at the same time
in the state of Michigan on average
childcare costs just under $10000.00
a year per kid and so you can see a very
realistic scenario where somebody is just
above that threshold and spending a half
or a 3rd of their income on child care and
that's a problem and so this internship
inspired me to continue down this path and
to keep working in this policy area
hopefully once I graduate from the Ford
school there are some really innovative
thinkers in the space both in Detroit and
across the state of Michigan and so
I'm excited to continue the fight so
thank you.