In our final episode of State of Our Workforce in 2024 we close out our series on the Anthropology of Work. We are joined by National Fund Chief Program Officer Michelle Rafferty to reflect on a year filled with milestones and progress. Michelle recounts key achievements from 2024 and shares an inspiring vision for the future of workforce equity.

On this episode of State of Our Workforce we continue our series on the Anthropology of Work. In honor of Native American Heritage Month, we explore the systemic barriers Native American workers face and the strategies needed to build a more inclusive workforce.

We are excited to be joined by Natasha Hale, Project Lead for Workforce Grantmaking in Native Nations and Communities at Workforce Matters, who will share insights into the cultural, economic, and historical contexts shaping Native workforce inclusion today. Explore what it means to close the equity gap, creating pathways to opportunity and resilience for Indigenous communities across the nation.

Supporting Native Workforce Development: A Guide for Funders

This is the third of three conversations we hosted LIVE from the National Fund's premier, biennial convening, SHIFT Toward an Equitable Future.

A large part of our work at the National Fund is identifying ways in which we use our national platform to drive regional change on issues such as occupational segregation.

As part of that work, we identified career navigation as one such lever. We believe that it must be addressed at a systems level because the impact of occupational segregation goes beyond the worker. It impacts every facet of the workforce ecosystem from companies, education, human welfare, generational wealth opportunities, cities, towns and states because we know that inequities in our systems costs us in a myriad ways. So, we decided to take a deep dive into career navigation to identify opportunities to better support equitable opportunities for all. Today we'll be talking with some of our amazing collaborators who participated in this work.

In this conversation, Michelle Wilson and special guest host Juvilee Hernandez talk to a couple of employers and an educator. They occupy a really unique space in the workforce ecosystem and were also named as mentors by our participants during our research. We were excited to be joined by: Clifton Phelps, co-owner of JCP Construction, a Black-owned construction company in Milwaukee; Anita Andrews-Hutchinson, the co-founder of a network of Black-led early learning centers in Chicago; and Dave Mullins, the Director of the Business and Industry Institute at Hutchinson Community College, who also works in a very unique space as a community college educator who dedicates time with justice-involved individuals.