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:

1. How will San Antonio's higher education institutions cultivate and maintain a highly-skilled workforce for the future? There are many schools in the area, creating a well-trained workforce. However, we need to incentivize people not only to attend these schools but also to stay in San Antonio to work afterward, thus retaining the talent we create and creating connections and success stories for local colleges and the workforce. Mike Ramsey spoke on the racial issues in San Antonio, pointing out that on a map unemployment, education rates, and racial demographics all align on a map. Studies have shown this to oftentimes be true, for example this study that examined the barriers that Black women face in the field of computer science and found it linked to education and accessibility. 
2. How can we encourage businesses to establish themselves in economically disadvantaged areas of San Antonio? It is important to uplift all parts of San Antonio without causing displacement and losing its history and culture. To uplift economically disadvantaged areas using the development of local businesses, we need to ensure that the benefits go to the community. This requires insight on how to meet people where they are to hear their voices and promote inclusion and civic engagement. To read more about the impacts of development-induced displacement specifically regarding urban infrastructure development, read this article about displacement and development in Africa. 
3. How can San Antonio leverage public-private partnerships to promote economic development in and around the city? Engaging the private sector in San Antonio in efforts to grow the workforce is essential, as they are the source of many jobs and can provide valuable insight. How can we convince them to engage in these city-wide efforts? Programs like Ready to Work offer a realistic solution by producing skilled and qualified workers. To read more about how this partnership can create smart cities using educational institutions, I recommend this article which is a case study from France. 

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:

• SA Ready to Work is funded by an existing sales tax, so people are not being charged an additional tax to support the program. This sales tax will continue to fund SA Ready to Work until December 2025, after which it will start funding VIA bus initiatives. (Ramsey)
• There is a public-private partnership to compete for a direct flight to Reagan Airport in D.C. Many military-based organizations in San Antonio support this effort, which would improve San Antonio’s air connectivity along with our direct flight to Germany. (Matta-Barrera)
• Initiatives like Alamo Fellows and other K-12 programs aim to develop and retain local talent in the city. Some K-12 programs have talent pipelines that funnel students into higher education. (All)
• There is a collaboration between industries and higher education to train participants in the SA Ready to Work program. If an industry needs specific skills, educational institutions will work with the industry to accommodate those needs and better prepare the students. (Ramsey)
• Being a large urban city can be a disadvantage when securing megasite construction investments from the state, but there are now strategies in place to help us win these investments. (Hopkins)
• The Up Partnership aims for 70% of the high school graduating class of 2030 to pursue secondary education. (Matta-Barrera)
• Mapping analytics identify gaps in the ecosystem between stakeholders and organizations, allowing the city to address potential transportation issues before they become problems for the workforce. (Hopkins & Beto Gomez)

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:

• Urban Sprawl

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. 

• Talent Retention

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. 

• Infrastructure

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.

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