Economic Development Panel with Mike Ramsey, Shea Hopkins, and Romanita Matta-Barrera
Introduction
This week, The Civic Tech Scholars met with three individuals working in workforce development in San Antonio. As part of our conversation series, it is crucial to learn about the workforce, an essential piece in all of the city's efforts. We spoke with Mike Ramsey, Shea Hopkins, and Romanita Matta-Barrera to delve into this topic.
Background on Experts
Romanita Matta-Barrera is the Chief Business Advancement Officer at Greater: SATX, which helps regional startups, recruits companies to come to San Antonio, and more, with the intention of building the workforce in San Antonio.
Shea Hopkins is an economic developer for the City of San Antonio, serving as the Assistant Director of Economic Development. She has dedicated her career to economic development, focusing on uplifting communities through recruitment and outreach.
Mike Ramsey works as the Executive Director of Workforce Development for the City of San Antonio. He is in charge of the city’s Ready to Work program, which trains people from disenfranchised communities to be part of the workforce in San Antonio by doing specific outreach to people in the most unemployed areas and demographics.
Key Insights and Takeaways
From the conversation, we have taken away several key points and organized them into different categories. As an overview, we recognized several themes, including talent retention, accessibility, socioeconomic segregation, and more.
Key Themes & Opportunities for Further Exploration
Our search for further exploration led to three key questions:
Promising Practices
This session was especially filled with optimism, as there are several successful programs and initiatives in place to help the San Antonio workforce. We have pinpointed a few examples:
Critical Challenges
While this was the most optimistic conversation, focusing largely on promising practices, we identified a few consistent challenges, most of which appear in many of our sessions:
The vastness of San Antonio causes many issues in accessibility. Socioeconomic segregation exacerbates the problem, as areas are increasingly spread out with limited sustainable and accessible transportation between them. To read more about the effects of urban sprawl, I recommend these articles that display the negative impacts it has had on obesity, public health, and climate change.
San Antonio faces the issue of losing much of the talent it produces to other cities. Many working to improve San Antonio are concerned about the number of young, talented people moving to bigger cities instead of staying in San Antonio. Little research has been done on talent retention on the city level, and a lot has been done on the corporate level. So, it is an area that needs attention, however some existing research could be applicable. For example, this article finds that the ways to create talent retention in a company are workplace culture, training, and opportunities, so the same could be assumed for a city.
The lack of quality public transportation throughout greater San Antonio creates significant accessibility issues regarding education, work, and employment programs. To learn more about how transportation infrastructure impacts accessibility, and therefore socioeconomic and racial equality, I recommend this article on how planned public transport helped accessibility in Scotland.
Conclusion
Our panelists have many reasons to feel optimistic, but they also experience the same overarching struggles as those in other panels. Urban sprawl causes issues in transportation, accessibility, environmental concerns, and employment, touching on every conversation we’ve had. If you are interested in collaborating or participating in further developing this research with us, sign up below to learn more about how you can contribute and benefit from this ongoing research.