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White House to Host First-Ever White House Summit on Community Colleges on October 5
Business Leaders, Experts, to Discuss Role of Community Colleges in Increasing Workforce Readiness, College Completion Rates
 The White House will host the first-ever Summit on Community Colleges next week on October 5. The Summit will provide a forum for community college administrators, business leaders, philanthropists, government officials, and students to discuss how community colleges can help the U.S. become more competitive and have the most educated workforce in the world.
In 2009, President Barack Obama announced his goal to have America lead the world in college degree completion by 2020. Participants at the Summit will discuss how community colleges can help to train our nation's workforce to reach that goal.
Donna Klein, CEO and Chief Executive of Corporate Voices, will participate in the Summit, along with Melinda Gates, Co-Chair and Trustee of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; William D. Green, Chairman and CEO of Accenture; Secretary of Education Arne Duncan; Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis; Eduardo Padron, President of Miami Dade College; Jim Jacobs, President of Macomb (Michigan) Community College; Ted Carey, President of the Student Association of Community Colleges; among others.
On the heels of the Community College Summit, Corporate Voices plans to release a report highlighting innovative partnerships between community colleges and employers that enable young people to successfully combine postsecondary education and work. The paper, titled From an 'Ill-Prepared' to a Well-Prepared Workforce: The Shared Imperatives for Employers and Community Colleges to Collaborate, will include examples of innovative partnerships, such as those with Verizon Wireless and Pima Community College, and with AOL and Year Up. These partnerships help students earn degrees and work in order to support themselves and their families. They can and do play a positive role in enhancing workforce skills and increasing college completion rates in America.
Please look out for the release of this paper!
Watch the opening and closing sessions of the White House Community College Summit live via webcast.
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You're
Invited: Business and Education Partnerships Webinar, October 7, 2010 at 2p.m.
EST (duration: 1 hour)
 Business leaders and
educators must create meaningful, successful, and long lasting partnerships to
ensure that all youth are ready for college, work and life. Collaboration
between business and education can ensure that students graduate high school
equipped with the skills necessary to thrive in the workplace, post-secondary
education and life.
The American Association for School Administrators, Corporate Voices, and members of the Ready by 21 National
Partnership will highlight the benefits of these partnerships and provide tips
for engaging educators and business leaders. Baxter Healthcare, a Corporate
Voices Member Company, will provide an overview of their partnership with
Chicago Public Schools through the Science@Work Program.
Business and education
representatives are encouraged to participate. Please feel free to forward this invite to your CSR representative who is overseeing your K-12 work and your local counterparts across the
country. To register for the webinar,
please click here.
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Special Report on
Work-Life Balance to be Released Through USA Today
Corporate Voices' Steve Wing to Contribute Introduction
  We are pleased to announce that Corporate Voices' president, Stephen M. Wing, will contribute the introduction to a special report on
"Work-Life Balance" which will appear as a stand-alone supplement in the November 5 weekend edition of USA Today. It will raise awareness of the trend over the last 25 years of increasing work pressure in
America, its impact on families and individuals, and what is being done to
promote work-life balance in the workforce. The 12-page special report will be
published by Mediaplanet Publishing in USA. It will have 450,000 copies in
circulation with a weekend readership of over 1 million.
Corporate Voices will also contribute a piece in the report
highlighting best-practice private sector initiatives to promote work-life
balance, such as Corporate Voices' National Workplace Flexibility Campaign.
It will include articles on: how to effectively deal with stress
through fitness and nutrition; good personal financial management; new entrants
to the workforce; the role of technology in finding a work-life balance; and
how innovative companies are paving the way for work-life progress.
This special report will be published on the heels of National Work and
Family Month, as well as the mid-term elections in November. As the U.S.
experiences high unemployment, increasing poverty and inequality, and
demographic changes revolutionizing the workforce, November will be a critical
time to discuss what role federal and corporate policy can play in helping
working families.
Please look out for this special report in USA Today on November
5! Partner companies interested in highlighting their work-life initiatives in
this report through an ad-spot can contact Karynn Elio at karynn.elio@mediaplanet.com. Ad discounts are available for
Corporate Voices' partner companies.
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Workplace Flexibility: Ensuring
Success for the 21st Century
Allegra Integrated Marketing and Print Solutions
Becomes a Business Champion in National Campaign
Corporate
Voices would like to congratulate Allegra Integrated Marketing and Print
Solutions for joining our national workplace flexibility campaign since the
last issue of this Weekly Update. We thank Allegra Integrated Marketing for
expressing its support for workplace flexibility as a business imperative by
signing Corporate Voices' Statement
of Support for Expanding Workplace Flexibility.
Allegra Integrated Marketing is the most recent addition to a cohort of leading
Business Champions that have joined this campaign to recognize the value that
workplace flexibility holds for the success of businesses and families across America. Recent
Business Champions include: Accenture, Allstate Insurance Company,
AOL, Baxter International, Bright Horizons Family
Solutions, Childrens' Creative Learning Centers, Cisco Systems,
CVS Caremark, Ernst & Young,
George Mason University, Knowledge Universe, KPMG, LifeCare,
Marriott International, McGladreySM, Sodexo, and Workplace
Options, among others. For a full list of Business Champions, see: www.corporatevoices.org/our-work/flexcampaign.
Corporate Voices launched this national campaign at the request of the White
House after a first-ever White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility in March
2010. The goal of the campaign is to create a broader awareness of the positive
business and employee benefits of workplace flexibility. We are inviting businesses across the country to sign our Statement to express support for
a set of shared principles around workplace flexibility as a business imperative, and as a strategy to
ensure success in the 21st Century.
Business
Champions recognize that flexibility practices modernize the workplace to meet
the needs of 21st century families, so that families and businesses can be more
productive, more competitive, healthier, and happier. We welcome the diversity
of businesses represented--our expanding list of Business Champions illustrates
how flexibility can support excellence across industries of all types and
sizes.
Corporate
Voices is working in tandem with national policy groups and the Women's Bureau
of the U.S. Department of Labor to galvanize business engagement around
upcoming national flexibility forums in Dallas,
Los Angeles, Chicago,
and New York.
All Business Champions that have signed our Statement will have opportunities
to participate.
We
thank the Alfred P.
Sloan Foundation for its generous support of this campaign. For questions about
how to sign the Statement of Support or how to join the campaign, please
contact ysiu@corporatevoices.org.
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Call For Entries: Best Companies for Hourly Workers
Deadline for Applications is Quickly Approaching - October 15, 2010
 For the second year, Corporate Voices is pleased to partner with Working
Mother
Media to present the Best Companies for Hourly Workers. Best Companies
for
Hourly Workers honors companies dedicated to creating and using best
practices
to support their non-exempt employees.
Public or private
for-profit companies are invited to apply, including companies,
corporations,
and autonomous subsidiaries that offer their own benefits program and
report to
their own CEO.
Applicants must also
have a minimum of 500 employees in the U.S. with at least 50% of those
U.S.
employees being nonexempt workers.
The online survey is open to applicants until October 15, 2010 at wmmsurveys.com. There is no cost to apply.
Winning companies will
be featured in the May 2011 issue of Working Mother magazine and on
workingmother.com, and will be invited to celebrate their success at an
event
to be held in the Spring of 2011. Only winning companies will be
announced;
non-winning companies will remain confidential.
All companies that apply, including those that
do not make the Best Companies list, will receive feedback showing how
they
compare against all applicants.
In April of 2010, the
following companies were named to the inaugural list of Best Companies
for
Hourly Workers:
CCLC (Childrens' Creative Learning Centers) University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics
More
information about the Best Companies for Hourly Workers program can be
found at workingmother.com/bestcompanies. |
Quarterly Ready by 21 Working Group Call
Corporate Voices held their quarterly Ready by 21 Working Group Call on Friday, September 24, 2010. The working group was provided with an update of Corporate Voices' Ready by 21 accomplishments over the last quarter and potential opportunities to get involved in the work. They also received an overview of the Ready by 21 National Partnership and the specific role each national partner plays through this work.
This call kicked-off the idea of Peer-to-Peer Learning among the companies which will be built upon in their first in-person meeting on December 7, 2010. The participating organizations included Altria Client Services, Inc., CVS/Caremark, Ford Motor Company Fund, The TJX Companies, Inc. and the Forum for Youth Investment.
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What We're Reading
Isaac Newton: Obstacle to
Work-Life Progress, The Huffington
Post, September 29, 2010.
Where the Jobs Are, Newsweek, September 25, 2010.
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