Empowering Rural America - A New Model Emerges                        

By Michael Sotire

10/2009

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Department of Labor is charged with the allocation of approximately 4 billion dollars of Recovery Act funding to be used for training and employment services. ETA strongly encourages the workforce investment boards that receive the revenue, along with their education partners, to take an expansive view of how the funds can be integrated into efforts to improve the effectiveness of the public workforce investment system, which serves several millions of citizens, many of whom are the personification of trapped potential and latent talent. ETA believes that Recovery Act funding presents an extraordinary and unique opportunity to advance its transformational efforts and demonstrate its full capacity to innovate and implement effective One-Stop service delivery strategies.

This ETA conviction provides an opportunity to apply Service Science to a transformative process that is already underway, and thereby position this academic cross-discipline as an agent of social innovation through an applied classroom approach. Recovery Act legislation also strongly encourages socially innovative and entrepreneurial approaches to systemic, large-scale and sustainable transformation. When diverse technologies are aligned for social impact purposes and deployed in conjunction with efficient spectrum utilization and management, they represent significant community "assets" capable of making major contributions to efficient, systemic, large-scale and sustainable social change. ETA's Access Points program, which seeks to serve remote citizens with training and employment services, is a primary target for expansion.

A rural entrepreneurship initiative entitled "Helping Communities Work" (HCW) has been formed to house, align, mobilize and support the education, workforce and small business development components of the WISP model. HCW defines rural entrepreneurship as a perpetual process that, 1) uncovers a societal imbalance that limits individual upward mobility and collective economic equity in rural America, 2) identifies an opportunity to change the status quo, 3) engages and integrates the vision, resources and action of collaborative entrepreneurship among the business, civic, social and philanthropic sectors and, 4) creates and mobilizes a series of solutions that unleash and empower the latent talent being suppressed by the imbalance.

The solution should be innovative, systemic, large-scale and sustainable. HCW operates on the premise that each new connection enables entry into the realm of enhanced economic opportunity if a structure is in place to encourage and focus the individual in a way that adds value. A strong employer voice is an important component of the HCW strategy, and consequently a business coalition of high-growth industries and employers, which includes the information and communications technology sectors, has been established to provide insight and support to the HCW rural entrepreneurship initiative.

All human resource and workforce development services provided by HCW community anchor participants are focused on the rapidly growing needs of the service economy, which now employs greater than 75% of the civilian workforce. Other than HCW, there is no public or private labor exchange system that specifically addresses this need for Service Science leadership, which directly impacts global competitiveness.

HCW fosters the funding and growth of distance learning while bringing new employment opportunities in telemedicine, telecommuting and remote work to the area of deployment. The resulting "brain gain" enhances the corporate site-selection potential of a community while providing its citizens with opportunities to work locally for companies located outside the region. Overall, the strategy enables the integration, advancement and sustainability of jobs creation, business growth, broadband adoption and social impact throughout rural America. Also, non-profit Recovery Act stakeholders gain sustainability enhancements through significant earned-income opportunities and improved positioning to attract new grants.

Model Attracts Growing Interest

Stakeholders in Washington and Allegheny Counties are currently forming the strategic business alliance required to ensure a successful launch of the WISP strategy in rural western Pennsylvania.

Chris Brussalis, President and CEO of The Hill Group, Inc, a Pittsburgh-based management consulting firm, emphasized the potential of wireless broadband to deliver education, workforce development and other innovative social applications when he said, "Pittsburgh's culture of

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