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The idea came about indirectly, as good ideas often do. Six years ago, our organisation, the Global Business Coalition, crafted a Youth Skills Commission report to find out what’s needed as we train the next generation of workers in the U.S.. We quickly realised that we wanted to do something more ambitious and lasting than writing a report.

Fast forward to 2022. We joined with Dell Technologies and Deloitte to launch the Big Ideas, Bright Cities Challenge. We hold a competition across the United States to find nonprofits working on innovative youth skills projects with local government agencies and higher education institutions. 

Thanks to these two corporate sponsors, we sweetened the Challenge pot with grants for 15 winners, including a USD100,000 grand prize, and we set up an incubator programme to offer nearly a year of mentoring and fellowship to the winning groups.  

 The result: a robust competition, with more than 100 entries. Many of them impressed our judges, and more importantly, we found programmes to celebrate, programmes to learn from, and programmes to inspire others.  

The top winner: Action Greensboro, in North Carolina. Its “Campus Greensboro” initiative connects young people, including low-income and first-generation college students, with paid internships. It also provides stipends for young people to work in minority- and women-owned businesses. Action Greensboro, which received media coverage and attention from the local chamber of commerce and other groups, thanked us for the “amazing recognition.”  

And so, we’re doing it over again, with a new round of applicants and renewed energy.  

This year, World Skills Day – July 15 – came at a propitious time. It was just six days before the deadline for our second Big Ideas, Bright Cities Challenge. We put it this way: We’re calling on these organisations to come together to develop bold ideas that equip young people with the skills they need for tomorrow’s workforce.  

 A few days ago, our staff organised a Zoom session to share information about this Challenge. We got questions from Texas, Maryland, from Massachusetts—all from nonprofit groups working with local governments and others to offer training for residents from adolescence to the late 20s. 

One question we often hear is: Why emphasise cities? Because, in short, a city is a unit of action, where a mayor or another executive can drive policies and affect millions; cities are places where specific industries have specific needs; cities have community organisations that serve youth and oversee job training projects. By the way, when we say “city,” we mean anything from a town to a suburban government to a vast metropolis. 

One of the most important questions came from a woman who asked, with doubt in her voice, “Are we eligible if we work with students who decide not to pursue college after high school?” Our answer was a resounding Yes.  

What makes a skills-friendly city? We enumerate 10 standards. They range from engaging employers in creating opportunity pipelines to focusing on underserved youth. 

We appreciate the value of a four-year education after high school, and we know that can lead to higher lifetime earnings in the U.S. But in this fast-changing economy, we are seeing that young people (along with not-so-young people) can hone their skills in so many ways. They can go to vocational schools or community colleges. They can do certification programmes. They can apprentice with a professional. They can even learn the basics of a trade, or coding, without leaving their homes—by studying online.  

What makes a skills-friendly city? We enumerate 10 standards. They range from engaging employers in creating opportunity pipelines to focusing on underserved youth. 

As we look at the feedback from our first winners, we are heartened by the way they took advantage of the network they developed during our incubator sessions. Consider what we heard from one of our runners-up, NE Basecamp, which supports educators in Rhode Island. 

“I found inspiration,” said Shayna Fox-Norwitz, the group’s executive director. “We’re all working in youth development, dealing with similar challenges, such as helping young people who feel dislocated after nearly three years of a pandemic.” 

Specifically, Fox-Norwitz enjoyed a discussion with the founder and executive director of Sidekick Education, which was another runner-up. That’s a career advisory service in Madison, Wisconsin that uses artificial intelligence — a chatbot — to answer students’ questions about job fields. When the chatbot can’t answer a question, it connects the student to a counsellor or other professional.  

Fox-Norwitz also learned from talks with Philadelphia Works, a workforce development group, about how they decide which software programmes are more efficient for exchanging data with schools, ensuring the information stays secure.  

“In my job, I simply don't have the chance to talk about that issue,” Fox-Norwitz said. 

We don’t have grand claims about these programs. We’re not reversing the fortunes of America’s cities. But we sense that the publicity and the peer relationships help some hard-working groups that are doing their best to work with cities, big and small, and that makes us consider expanding to a global Challenge in the future. 

We shared stories from our winner and runners-up on World Skills Day. What if we committed to making the other 264 days in the year amount to World Skills Year, then World Skills Decade? In these next 10 years, we all can change lives.