Building Tomorrow’s Workforce

For an organization like the NC Chamber Foundation, it is important to always look at the big picture for education and workforce development. Over time, the most successful policies and programs will be employer-led.

Relate Advocacy co-founder Andrew Meehan has worked with the NC Chamber Foundation on education and workforce issues since 2014. Initially, Andrew led the Hire Standards coalition of business and education leaders to ensure that North Carolina’s math and English standards remained among the highest in the nation.

This employer driven effort took the long-term view for North Carolina. Businesses recognized that if they were going to have the right workforce in the future, it was critical to have the right academic standards today.

The NC Chamber Foundation also recognized that there were more immediate opportunities for employers to take charge of their own workforce pipelines. That is why the foundation has invested in the innovative Talent Pipeline Management program. And the Chamber Foundation turned to Relate Advocacy to help lead it.

The TPM Academy

Talent Pipeline Management is a national initiative of the US Chamber Foundation. The goal of TPM is to create employer collaboratives that conduct detailed demand planning for their collective workforce. The demand planning results in data that can be taken directly to education providers in order to ensure that workforce supply is meeting demand.

To boost this initiative in North Carolina, the Chamber Foundation created the TPM Academy. To recruit participants for this training, which ran from November 2019 to January 2020, Relate Advocacy:

  • Helped create marketing messages
  • Conducted individual outreach to potential academy participants
  • Coordinated with NC Chamber communications team on member outreach
  • Acted as liaison with the US Chamber Foundation
  • Assisted in event management for three in-person trainings
  • Coordinated ongoing communications with TPM Academy cohort

The results

Relate Advocacy helped the NC Chamber Foundation recruit seventeen academy participants. The Academy took place between November 2019 and January 2020, resulting in all seventeen participants achieving TPM certification.

Despite challenging economic times, several TPM Academy participants are actively starting the process for creating individual employer collaboratives.