Anna Zinkel: Policy Pitch Competition

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.