Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Amy Sheldon (Chair, House Environment Committee)]: Great. Welcome back to the House Environment Committee. We are shifting gears once again. We're going to hear about serve, learn and earn. Except for I don't have give an and in there, but I'll let you speak. Sorry. Long day.

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communication, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn, Earn coalition)]: Okay. Well, thank you so much for having us, Chair Sheldon, and for making time today. I know this is a last minute pivot, we appreciate it at the end of a Tuesday afternoon. So my name is Kate Logan, and I am the Director of Development and Communication at Vermont Works for Women. I'm wearing my Servler Nurn hat today with you, and I'm joined by my colleagues from Audubon, Vermont and Vermont Youth Conservation Corps. My role today is to share our collective impact for the Serve, Learn, Earn Workforce Development Coalition from the past year. And my colleagues will be sharing more details of the programs that really align with your concerns as the Environment Committee. So just a brief review, these are our four partners. Serve Learn Earn has received state funding through the Vermont legislature since 2021. So, we're in our fifth year and just really grateful for this committee's past support and for being an early champion of this work. So, Servo and EARN provides paid service and training opportunities across the state, and we have a continuum of programming. So, what's really unique for workforce development coalitions is that we provide programming for high school students all the way through adulthood, really serving Vermonters at every step of their career. You'll see that about 61% of our participants last year were between the ages of 15 and 24. So when we say youth, we're really talking about young adults. But we also serve adults with many barriers to employment. And when we say that, that could be living in poverty, having lack of transportation, having justice involvement. And so these are Vermonters who are often marginalized and who need support to be active in the economy and to gain economic independence. So I will, I want to leave plenty of time for my colleagues. So I'm gonna push through, but please don't hesitate to stop and ask questions. We can take questions throughout, if that's good with nutrition. So this map shows you where our participants live in this past year. So we served about five fifty participants, and you can see that we are a statewide coalition. So really serving Vermonters from our Northern Boundary region all the way South. Our programs really focus on providing the technical skills and personal professional development that will make our participants active and great employees for our Vermont employers. And so part of our focus is providing opportunities for training and earning industry recognized credentials or IRCs. And so this could be game of logging for forestry, it could be herbicide application, it could be OSHA-ten, which is for the trades, important entry level credential that allows someone to step into the workplace and be valuable. What we also have is because we are serving young people, we often have them earning high school or college credit for our programs or continuing education credits. As our name says, we're pretty transparent here. Each of our programs has a service component, right? So the three things that are common among all of our programs is that our participants are learning technical skills and developing work readiness. They're getting paid, and that's critically important because it makes it accessible to every Vermonter. We're able to pay folks really because of the state funding that you've helped us secure in the past. And then there's service opportunities. And service really we consider as a vehicle for learning skills, for developing a community, and having a positive impact on their communities. And so you can see here the map of our service projects. In the past year, we did two seventy projects, and we bucket those into eight different buckets, which you can see around the map. I think because of your committee designation, some projects that might be of interest to you is our habitat assessment and improvement. So thinking about monitoring bird habitat, monitoring sugar bushes, doing invasive species removal, timber stand management. We also did flood recovery projects, which includes both in terms of flooded housing, but also infrastructure. Worked, VICC, for example, worked at state parks to do some flood recovery work for them. We do some agriculture, sustainable agriculture and food security projects. So really this wide swath of different kinds of projects that strengthen and benefit our communities across Vermont. When you think of our return on investment, although we are a workforce development program and we're looking to improve the workforce, the impact of these projects cannot be minimized either. So, this is a full year of work done by our participants. Did you have a question?

[Amy Sheldon (Chair, House Environment Committee)]: Representative Austin, do you have

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communication, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn, Earn coalition)]: any data like how many people are involved and how many people go on to employment? Yes, I will get that just in

[Amy Sheldon (Chair, House Environment Committee)]: my next slide. But this past year we had five forty three participants.

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communication, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn, Earn coalition)]: Each Yeah. Year we work with over 300 employers as And you can see that they're in a diversity of sectors. These are just some of them, but we continue to make inroads in our employer partnerships. And one of the ways that we're doing that is that now many of our programs are registered pre apprenticeship programs with the State Department of Labor. And what that does is that connects our programs with an employer at the end who has an apprenticeship. And this is important because apprenticeships are such a strong vehicle for economic independence and success for young people, whether that's in the trades or in forestry or in other industries. So that was a new development this year that we're really proud of.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair, House Environment Committee)]: Say that statistic one more time. How many? The first number you just said.

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communication, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn, Earn coalition)]: 300 employers across our programs. And we interact with them in a number of ways. So not only are they hiring our participants, but they're hosting paid work experiences. So many of our programs, especially those in the trades, the last couple of weeks, one or two weeks, we will place our participants in with employers. And this is a low risk or no risk opportunity for employers to try this participant out and see if they're a good fit. And it's an incredible learning experience for our participants. And so they might hold these internships or work experiences. They might do some mentoring. VYCC has a tremendous job fair every single year where employers come. So if we're not serving our employers well, then we're not really doing our jobs as a workforce development program. And so we continue to seek out feedback from employers as well about our work and if we're training people to be job ready on day one. Okay, Representative Austin, here's what you're looking for. So let me talk We've done a lot of work in the past couple years on how we articulate our outcomes. And so I want to start with this pie chart. So we ask all of our participants, what's their intention coming into our program? What do you want to get out of this? So like I told you, we work with young adults. So some are just returning to high school after the program. It's a summer experience. Some are going or are in college or trade school. So it's part of their educational pathway is our programs. Some, about 13%, are employed but are underemployed, whether that's part time, where they're not making enough money and they need to advance, or they want to advance skills for increased income. But about 40 nine-fifty percent are unemployed, looking to get hired at the end of our programs. So just that gives you a sense of who we're working with. So this past year, in July, we surveyed all of our participants who completed programs in 2024. They had at least six months after programming ended. And what we found is that one, people don't answer surveys very much. So let me just make that note. We had, of those, about 177 didn't answer us. But we have 99 that are newly employed within the first six months. We had many who were in their education still. We had some that continued their service opportunities. So some were AmeriCorps members and they decided to do another term. And were with their employer and had seen career advancement as well. And so when we look at the calculations based on what we know, we're looking at about one in three of our unemployed seeking employment folks have found a job within the first six months. Now, we always want to do better, and that might seem low to you, but we are working with new entrants into the workforce. We're working with folks who have high barriers to employment. And so we see this as a successful metric, and it really is aligned with a lot of what hireability or the Department of Labor is seeing with their work as well. Very quickly, just to give you some historical data, we have, you you can see these are the number of participants that we've served. The gray box is the year we're currently in. That's why it looks so small. We're only halfway through. Service and training weeks. So, we continue to engage people for longer time. They're doing more service, getting more training. And then, credentials of value, those critical skill based credentials that allow them to earn higher wages when they enter the workforce. I do wanna share that we have seen a reduction in this last year, right? We're slightly lower. And in the first six months, we are seeing about a 17% reduction in the number of participants that we're able to serve. And that is because of the funding landscape. So just to end, and then I'll pass it over to Deedee. This is our public funding. Our first four years of funding through the legislature was one time appropriations. This past year, we did receive $500,000 in the base of Forest Parks and Recreation, plus an additional 250,000 of one time funding. That's a 66% decrease in funding from the previous year. And this isn't the only funding that we lost, right? We also lost many federal grants. We've seen a reduction in some of our fee for service programs, especially at Vermont Works for Women because we're serving women. So and the diversity issues from the federal landscape. So we've seen a big reduction and that is impacting us. And I think our ask for you, or I know our ask for you for this upcoming budget is we are currently at $500,000 in the base budget of FPR. We're asking you to raise that to $1,000,000 total. So an additional $500,000 That request in our budget letter, we know how tough the landscape is, remains for you. And we know that's a tough ask. But we really feel strongly about the quality of these programs. We feel like we have a high rate of return for the legislature. No one else is doing anything like this across the state. And so if we're not doing it, then it's not happening. And so we are coming here understanding the landscape and feeling like we need to make the ask anyways, too.

[Brett North (Vermont Youth Conservation Corps)]: If

[Amy Sheldon (Chair, House Environment Committee)]: I may ask a clarifying on this slide, this is all your funding, not just what you got from the state last year?

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communication, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn, Earn coalition)]: No, this is just our public funding. Yep. So our programs collectively across the four organizations cost about $10,000,000 a year. And so we are raising that through a number of ways, each of our organizations is different. I do wanna share though that last year, we had a real success in Serve, Learn, Earn connecting with national level funder called Ascendium Foundation and then making a $1,800,000 multi year investment in Serve, Learn, Earn. And we know that that happened because the state funding was there too, and that we sort of had the state's check of approval about this programming. They were very interested that we are both funded publicly as well as privately.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair, House Environment Committee)]: I gotta just reask, though. This is Vermont State, though.

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communication, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn, Earn coalition)]: Yes. This is this is the only Vermont State Legislature money we received. Is that the question? Does it include federal funding?

[Amy Sheldon (Chair, House Environment Committee)]: No. No. I'm just trying to get tilted. Yes. Great. Other questions for Kate? Did you have a question? Oh, Representative Wass.

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communication, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn, Earn coalition)]: Oh, yeah. How is this different than VSAC? Yeah, so VSAC doesn't do direct programming with participants. They provide scholarships and grants for Vermonters to either go to college, that might be a four year institution, could be a two year institution or the technical school, but they aren't on the ground with participants. What is interesting about VSAC that you brought that up is that they are federally thinking about something called the Workforce Pell, where people may be able to use a Pell Grant, which is typically used for higher education in workforce development training. That hasn't happened yet, but that is something of interest. And I think that's something that the Department of Labor could tell you a whole lot more about than than I could. Yeah.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair, House Environment Committee)]: Great. Thank you.

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communication, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn, Earn coalition)]: Yeah. I'll pass it over to Jeanne from Ottawa.

[Jamie Fidel (Vice President, Audubon Vermont)]: Thanks, Kate. Good afternoon. Thanks for having us in. Jamie Fidel, vice president with Audubon Vermont. And I'm going to be fairly brief, just give you a flavor of some of the work that this is helping to fund in Vermont and and the way it's being leveraged and playing out on the ground to help on with the issues that I think are are critically important, especially for your jurisdiction. So just in a nutshell, our youth conservation leadership programs are nested under serve, learn, earn. Not all of these are currently funded based on some of the reductions, but historically, the kind of work that this has supported are AmeriCorps members that are full time positions that are working as environmental educators, community science, and outreach engagement, conservation field specialists. I'll talk about what that work looks like. Interns that are working in environmental education, conservation and policy. Seasonal educators that are doing educational programs, educating children, summer camp programs, junior conservation technicians and counselors and training that are working on conservation and education projects, including work that happens at Center, which is a two fifty five acre center with a lot of education and outdoor recreation opportunities. I'd like to highlight is, you know, what does how this work is translating on the ground is working with landowners on helping them with forest and habitat management assessments, forest resilience assessments, working with sugarbush operators, helping them to actually maintain the economic investment that they have in managing their land as as sugar bushes, but actually creating what would be considered to be more diverse and more complex forests that are able to withstand climate change disturbances. So instead of managing a sugarbush as a monoculture, managing it as a more diverse forest that actually brings up the bird species that are interacting in the forest, makes them more resilient to kind of changes that we're seeing on the landscape. So we're working directly with landowners on climate change resilience strategies, ecological forestry techniques, forester endorsement programs, working with foresters to really try and really push the envelope on what does really ecological forestry look like on the ground and how do we interact and how do we integrate that in with helping to help birds that are in decline in Vermont. Flood resiliency projects. And so just a couple of examples would be monitoring peregrine falcons in Bristol, nesting sites there and learning skills and managing and monitoring for birds, working on bird and bee friendly farming assessments for habitat improvements down in Bennington, helping one of Audubon's chapters actually pull off the Herrick's Cove Wildlife Festival, which is the largest wildlife and educational festival in Vermont.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair, House Environment Committee)]: The what festival?

[Jamie Fidel (Vice President, Audubon Vermont)]: Cove.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair, House Environment Committee)]: Herrick's Cove. Yep. Where's Herrick's Cove?

[Jamie Fidel (Vice President, Audubon Vermont)]: That's in Rockingham. Yeah. And so those are just a couple of examples. I wanna kinda give you a a story, and then I'll end with a couple other snapshots of some of the work. I went to a meeting this morning. It was with Audubon, and I at was the North Branch Nature Center. It was with the educational teams. We were talking about sort of sharing resources and where we're seeing traction and best management practices right now in education. And we're going around in the horn, and folks were introducing themselves. And there was a young woman there named Annie, and she's a full time educator at North Branch. And she said, I went through the program I went through this program and was at Audubon, and that's parlayed into now full time environmental educator position. Another position through us, serve, learn, earn, David Hewitt, who did science and community outreach, learned those skills, is now full time employed with the community sailing center working on promoting lake access and recreation. So these are just examples, real life examples of how this experience helps young adults translate into staying in Vermont, working in Vermont, and helping helping our workforce. I guess what I'll end with is just that, this work is diverse and across sort of the conservation spectrum, there's a lot of interest in learning skills that can help with the issues that we're struggling with right now in Vermont. So flood resilience, doing riparian plantings, learning helping landowners with that kind of work, partnering with doing native plants along Lewis Creek with UVM Society of Ecological Restoration, looking for the partnerships that can really leverage on the ground results. Forest conservation interns doing assessments for maple sugarbush and breeding bird habitat, as I mentioned before, or young adults learning actually how to ban birds and be technicians that would actually go on and find employment for various agencies that are doing bird species population sort of monitoring. So these are just practical skills. Just wanted to give you a flavor of the kind of investment with the legislature's help that we're able to provide for young adults who are moving into the workforce. So just want to end with really sincere appreciation for the legislature's support of this program. And, you know, just really, really feel it's critical work and appreciate the time you've given us today. With that, I'm gonna hand it over to Braque who can elaborate a little bit more on some of the the work that's happening.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair, House Environment Committee)]: Thanks, Jamie.

[Brett North (Vermont Youth Conservation Corps)]: Hi, folks. Good to see everyone. I'm Brett North. I'm with the Mont Youth Conservation Corps, and it's nice to follow Kate's overview of both data and kind of big picture as well as Jamie's window into some of the work that Audubon Vermont is doing. Providing an overview of VYCC in eight minutes or less is a bit of an impossible task. So I think what I wanna do is actually start with two stories and use those stories as a way to explain the importance, the relevance, the impact, of the work that we're having. And the the first story is actually comes from a crew visit that I had where we were partnering with Audubon Vermont, and BYCC is really fantastic at putting crews on the ground, field operations, project management, risk management, making sure projects are done on time, high quality, that there's a lot of learning that happens here. Audubon is really skilled at being both scientists as well as educators. And while we have some of that knowledge, they're better at that than we are. And so to have Audubon and BYCC leaders being working alongside a crew at the same time, it really enhances the learning environment for our participants. And so it was early in the early days of our forestry program, there was a young woman, Marade, who had gone to college and then said, you know, college really isn't for me. And so she had gone back to her tech tech center adviser and said, you know, I'm I'm I've left college. Do you have any ideas of what I could do? And he said, yeah. You know, there's this program, BYCC. I don't have any experience. Well, it's okay. You don't need experience. You can apply. So she applied. And then a week later, she found herself standing next to me in the woods. And she had gotten some training. But I always started to ask people, How did you find us? So she told me a little bit of what I just shared with you. In the first few days of working and learning with BYCC, she had gotten some really great training, game of logging training. People are familiar with that. If you aren't familiar with that, it's essentially a course to learn how to use a chainsaw really safely. There's different levels, and she had taken the first two levels of the course. And so one of the things that you try to do when you're filling a tree is to have it go exactly where you want it to go. And so we were in the woods with Audubon and our crew, and the crew leader said, does anyone want to volunteer to fell this tree? So, Marie stepped forward and I instantly felt like I was standing next to a celebrity. So, she got up there and she sized up the tree and she made her cuts and it went exactly where she wanted it to go. And it was this moment of someone who a month earlier was really feeling like she was adrift, had reached out to a mentor in her life, someone from a tech center, came to VYCC, gotten training, and now is working alongside like minded people and had a sense of community and was really learning an enormous amount of skills in the process and incredibly empowering. So that's the first story. The second story that I'd share is maybe a little bit more mundane, where I was on a call, a Zoom call with folks from Forest Parks and Rec. And it was that awkward moment at the start of the Zoom meeting before the meeting actually starts, but urologist kind of on the call waiting for the meeting to start. It was in that window of time when four people who were different leaders of different regions within FBR all realized that they were VYCC alumni from different chapters in the organization's history. And so I share that because you have you know, the first story is a story of someone who's, like, their first week at VYCC and what they're learning and how we welcome them into the organization, how we make sure that it's empowering. And then you have the second story, which is these longer term impacts, and the way that that helps the state manage its land, manage its natural resources. And that is the arc of the VYCC impact over time. And the other thing that I would share here is that, you know, a key takeaway for me is that investing in serve, learn, earn isn't just investing in people. It's also investing in projects that get done. So we have a former colleague at VYCC who really like to spend time on trampolines, and he called that the double bounce effect. When you invest in serve, learn, earn, you're not just investing in people. You're also investing in infrastructure that gets done. You know, to illustrate that point a little more clearly, we're doing thirty seven weeks of forestry work. A lot of that is happening with forest parks and rec. A lot of that happening with US Forest Service. That work takes on different forms. In some cases, it's hazardous tree removal. So if there's a a snag that's near campground, Nate McKean and his team will ask us to actually have a crew come in and take out that tree. You know, that all their work also looks like invasive species removal. It looks like crop tree release. So there's a lot of places where a more sophisticated professional logger won't wanna go in and do work because it just doesn't the return isn't there for them. Doesn't make sense to have a skidder go into this section of the woods. Whereas if you have a VYCC crew that goes in there, we can do a lot of that work in a way that's not competitive with the loggers, but it's still really important for climate resilience, climate health. And then the last point that I would make here is that one of the strengths of Sertland and BYCC is that we partner with so many different entities that I'm sure you all are familiar with. So we partner with state government, the Green Mountain National Forest, but we also partner with different nonprofits. So the land trust, the nature conservancy, the Trust for Public Land. These are all entities who own swaths of land that need management, and you're gonna have a VYCC crew be on there and do that project in a way that gets the project done, but a lot of learning that hap happens in that milieu. And then they go on to be regional director for FBR and other things of that sort. So I guess I would close by reiterating our budget request. And, you know, we're holding multiple things here. We're we're holding a recognition that this is an exceptionally tight budget year. We're also feeling like the way that the state has invested in in years past, there's really been a a measurable return on that investment. And we're seeing the cost of, investing less. So Kate mentioned how there's essentially been a 66% reduction in in state funding. We're seeing that translate to a 17% reduction in participant numbers. That 17% is gonna increase in the coming year if the funding isn't restored or get, you know, moderately increased in a way that is in line with our request. So we know that these are hard decisions. Your job is to make those decisions. Our job is to make the case and present you with the information. If you would include us in your budget letter as a priority, we'd be grateful and continue to make the case.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair, House Environment Committee)]: Thank you. Thanks for your work. Questions? Other topics?

[Brett North (Vermont Youth Conservation Corps)]: Alright. Nice to see everyone.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair, House Environment Committee)]: Okay. Thank you. You. With that, we will adjourn for the afternoon.