The Bold Plan to Create 1 Million Jobs for Black Americans

BY Emily Nonko | September 20, 2021

Late last year, a coalition of CEOs and organizations came together with an ambitious goal: to upskill, hire, and promote 1 million Black Americans over the next ten years into family-sustaining jobs. A few months later, Maurice Jones was tapped to figure out how to bring that goal into fruition.

“Ken Frazier and Ken Chenault brought together a group of corporate CEOs and they said, What can we do to actually help the country become a more perfect union?,” recalled Jones, referring to the former chairman and CEO of American Express (Chenault) and the executive chairman of Merck (Frazier). “They concluded that their biggest asset, their biggest lever, was jobs–quality jobs.”

It was a large undertaking that immediately found traction. OneTen, the organization overseeing the effort, launched with the support of 37 founding CEOs and companies that included AT&T, Deloitte, Nike, PepsiCo, Target, Verizon, and Walmart.

Jones, OneTen’s chief executive, brought a wealth of experience to lead the effort–and plenty of determination to accomplish it. At From Day One’s September virtual conference, “New Ideas and Tactics for Successful Diversity Recruiting,” he spoke with me about his journey to the position, the progress made so far, and the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Jones started out as a lawyer before moving to the public sector, working at the Treasury Department and engaging with community-development financial institutions. The work, he said, “gave me a chance to really focus on working with organizations that were tackling this incredible wealth disparity that we have in the country.”

Addressing the huge racial wealth gap in the U.S. would become a focus for his work in both the state and federal government. As he pointed out in our discussion, a 2015 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found the median net worth for white households in Greater Boston was nearly $250,000, compared with just $8 for Black families. “No zeroes–just eight dollars,” he said for emphasis. “It is a problem to be solved. It is an opportunity that we must conquer.” After serving as deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as Virginia's secretary of commerce and trade, he took on the role of chief executive at the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), an organization forging relationships among community-based partners to make social-impact investments.

Throughout his professional journey, one thing became clear: “You can't get at this racial wealth gap if you don't get at quality jobs for all,” Jones said. The racial disparities exposed by the pandemic, last summer’s racial-justice movement, and the realization across Corporate America of its vast inequalities, all led to the current mission under OneTen.

A conversation on creating jobs: from left, moderator Emily Nonko and Maurice Jones, CEO of the group OneTen (Image by From Day One)

For the coalition to reach its goal, Jones said, it will need to shift employer expectations away from the four-year college degree as a minimum requirement for so many jobs, a screening tactic that has left many people behind. Instead, OneTen advocates for skills-based hiring, with more employer support through apprenticeships and training. The types of jobs matter as well. “They’re jobs that must pay a living wage, that cannot require a four-year degree as a threshold of access, jobs that are not at risk of being automated out of existence, and jobs that require less than five years’ experience for one to be competitive,” Jones said.

OneTen has already assembled an impressive coalition committed to this shift, including about 60 companies that represent a variety of business sectors. “They’re teaching one another how to do skills-first hiring and how to use apprenticeships as a source of attraction and talent development,” Jones said. “They're collaborating with one another around how to make sure that they create transparent career pathways–not just hiring folks.”

OneTen also has 30 organizational partners helping with talent development, alongside other partners offering insight on such issues as coaching, child care and transportation. In addition, OneTen launched a technology platform that matches jobs, talent developers, and talent. The coalition is on track to support 10,000 hires by the end of the year, Jones told the audience. The goal is to reach 150,000 to 200,000 hires a year.

Jones stressed the challenges of prioritizing skills over the four-year degree: “It's a mindset shift, it's a culture shift, it's a bias issue.” It will require widespread, long-term coordination and advocacy work. In moving ahead, OneTen is forging partnerships with Black talent across the country through networks like HBCUs, online boot camps, regional-employment networks and faith organizations, as it also attracts new corporate partners. “Short term, we need to keep aggregating,” Jones said. “The players need to be great.”

This work, Jones believes, goes beyond addressing the urgency of the racial wealth gap. In a rapidly evolving employment market that’s emerging from the pandemic and a racial-justice reckoning, it could benefit everyone involved in the effort. He ended our discussion with a reminder: “By the way, companies, you're leaving talent, you're leaving genius on the sideline,” he noted. “Because you've got barriers that don't make sense.”

Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

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How to Create and Sustain a Growth Mindset to Nurture Talent

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He read Dweck’s book and wanted to help Microsoft become the first growth minded culture and company. Kathleen Hogan, head of talent, asked how things needed to change so they could recruit and onboard people that would help shift the company’s culture. She implemented changes, but success didn’t come right away. Some bragged they had the biggest growth mindset in the room. “She had to really talk to people about what a growth mindset actually looks like. And to bake that in to some of the incentive systems and also some of the mentoring and sponsoring and support systems so that people could take on challenges could make mistakes, and actually get points for the learning and the growth from those mistakes and the communicating of those mistakes across the company, so that the whole company can learn at the same time more rapidly.” That’s when things picked up. Slowly but surely, the culture was changing. 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Carrie Snider | March 28, 2024