January 19, 2021
By JB Holston, CEO of the Greater Washington Partnership
Happy Inauguration Day from battened-down DC!
Here at the Partnership, we are encouraged by the Biden Administration’s introduction of their new Science team last week, and by the elevation of the Chief Science Advisor to a Cabinet position. These moves will help recover some of America’s waning international competitiveness. The new Science advisor has, among other things, overseen the Broad Institute — which you’ll recall has been masterful attacking the national COVID testing shortage when no one else would address it. I highly recommend that you take the…
December 14, 2020
By JB Holston, CEO of the Greater Washington Partnership
In sum…
- Vaccines will take 6–12 months to roll out to cover bulk of U.S. population. Healthy kids, including college age, will be toward/at the end of that roll-out. The timeframe could be longer depending on mRNA manufacturing scaling, and Astra Zeneca and Sanofi vaccine progress.
- We’ll need social distancing, mask-wearing, and most critically, scaled #FFAST testing throughout 2021.
- School reopen → businesses reopening, pre ubiquitous vaccine. …
December 4, 2020
By JB Holston, CEO of the Greater Washington Partnership
Hi friends: another busy week as GWP’s continues to use its convening power and voice to catalyze solutions to scale that can help the Region re-open more quickly and safely, and accelerate back toward inclusive growth.
A number of GWP’s peer regional business organizations have been working in parallel on reopening and in particular on testing for their regions, in the absence of Federal leadership. Read about that work in this article published on Thanksgiving that also alludes to our behind-the-scenes efforts with the outgoing and incoming Federal…
The Capital Region is crisscrossed by a series of social, economic, and geographic boundaries. While its footprint — stretching from Richmond, through Washington, DC, and over to Baltimore — has the third-largest economy in the United States and the high aggregate education attainment rates and income levels you might expect, you don’t have to look very deep to see the inequalities that also exist. They appear along the traditional cracks in our social fabric that we have come to recognize: race, income, education level, and gender.
The Greater Washington Partnership (“the Partnership”), a civic alliance of leading CEOs from the…
November 20, 2020
By JB Holston, CEO of the Greater Washington Partnership
Closing to Re-opening to Inclusive Recovery to Inclusive Growth
Before we start — support a frontline healthcare worker this week.
This week’s context feels like last week’s, only more so: continued political chaos and division at the national level combined with the worst health conditions in America since the Pandemic hit. While the Greater Capital Region continues to do a better job managing the virus, both Governors and D.C.’s Mayor have signaled we’re in for more rollbacks for some time.
November 13, 2020
By JB Holston, CEO of the Greater Washington Partnership
This is the first in what will be a weekly snapshot of what we’ve learned this week related to the Capital Region’s inclusive recovery and growth.
Pandemic
What a terrible, extraordinary week to launch our FFAST Forward update! Case counts are rising exponentially in parts of the country– eight days after 100,000 US cases were found in one day for the first time; the number topped 150,000 on Thursday. The Capital Region isn’t spared. While most extreme case growth is outside the immediate region around the Capital — in…
While employers, by-and-large, remain uncertain about the percent of their workforce that will continue to permanently telework, the Snapshot shows full-time telework positions are likely to increase which could have big impacts on our region’s economy and future growth.
On September 14, 2020, the Greater Washington Partnership released the Capital COVID-19 Snapshot (“Snapshot”), capturing insights from more than 430 unique employers taking part throughout the Capital Region of Baltimore, Washington, and Richmond that collectively employ over 275,000 residents. The Snapshot found that, on average, close to 20 percent of all employer respondents have all staff teleworking full-time in September and only half of the workforce is expected back at worksites in early 2021. Not all that surprising, telework ‘commutes’ for the survey respondents grew exponentially since March 2020, with the Snapshot showing growth in telework use by more than…
In February 2020, the Capital CoLAB, an initiative of the Greater Washington Partnership, partnered with McKinsey & Company on a tech talent market diagnostic of the Capital Region. The findings are hard to ignore: without expanding learners’ and workers’ access to the tech talent pipeline, close to 60,000 tech related positions may go unfilled annually by 2025.
The Partnership’s early labor market research defined “digital tech” using a list of 20 occupations. As we consider a growing body of research on automation and its implications for the workforce (e.g., work from McKinsey & Company and Brookings Institution), as well as…
The world feels like it is on fire. Between a pandemic ravaging our economy and the boiling-over fury of centuries of systemic racial injustice that have devastated our communities of color, sources of hope and inspiration can be hard to find.
As we look at the hard work that lies ahead, we are grateful for the higher education institutions in the Greater Washington region and motivated by the bravery and the action exhibited by their leaders.
In the Greater Washington Partnership’s footprint from Baltimore to Richmond, institutions of higher education are some of the largest employers. They enroll over half…
The background for this article was collected from an interview with Thomas Levine on May 20th, 2020
Like many college students across the Capital Region, Thomas Levine was forced to move back home before summer started, completed his spring semester online, and saw his friends graduate without having a chance to say goodbye. This has been his reality since March, and he doesn’t quite know when it will end. As a rising senior at VCU, Levine hears talk of the precautions the school is taking but is uncertain of what the fall will bring. …
Greater Washington Partnership
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