Okay, well good morning everybody.
Thank you so much for joining us.
It's a beautiful morning, if cold.
I'm Tammy Morales, Seattle City Council member from District 2. District 2 includes Georgetown and Soto, so I'm really happy to be here this morning.
I'm here because I'm announcing that my office has secured a million dollars in funding.
to sustain the Seattle Maritime Academy's operations for the 2022-2023 school year.
This will maintain critical technical maritime education in Seattle, education that serves as a pipeline for the maritime industry, whether we're talking about our Washington State Ferry System, our Coast Guard, our fishing fleet, $750,000 of the million will provide gap funding to Seattle colleges for the operation of the Seattle Maritime Academy.
The remaining will be allocated for community outreach and recruitment through the Maritime Academy's partnership with Seattle Public Schools and their Maritime Vessel Operations Program.
These programs provide the classroom instruction and the hands-on training on working vessels that really help our young people prepare for a career in the maritime industry, which we all know is really important to our region's exporters.
For example, our agricultural industry relies on our ports.
So these are really important jobs and important programs to help our young people get the training they need to participate.
And what's important is that it's also about increasing access for low-income families, for young people who don't have access to some of the other programs.
These are for folks who have the opportunity now for really high-paying, skilled union work.
And these are jobs that offer stable employment and really great career pathways.
So I'm excited to be able to offer this GAP funding, but I can't take all the credit.
This was a collaborative effort made possible by many people.
So I want to thank Governor Inslee.
I want to thank Stephanie Bowman, who is the new Maritime Industry Sector Lead at the Department of Commerce, John Persak from the Office of Economic Development, and Mayor Harrell, who supported the use of funds in this way.
And finally, I want to say thank you to Chancellor Pan and to Dan Gullisman for your work to create economic opportunities for our young people.
I want to say a special thank you to the young people of Seattle.
For the last two years, they've really struggled through so much uncertainty in their schools, in their community.
Our young people have really had to navigate some extraordinary circumstances.
So I'm hopeful that our young people will take advantage of the opportunity to attend the Maritime Academy and to train for some very high-paying jobs that really offer financial security for them.
And now I want to invite some representatives who were all part of the collaborative effort to make this happen.
Next, we will hear from Kendi Yamaguchi, Deputy Mayor from the Mayor's Office.
We'll hear from John Lederer, who's the Director of Key Industries and Workforce Development for the Office of Economic Development.
Louise Charon, who's the Chair of the Board of Trustees for Seattle Colleges.
Daniel Gollisman, who's the principal of the Seattle Skills Center with Seattle Public Schools.
Barrett Erickson, who is the Director of Workforce Development for the Sailors Union of the Pacific.
And Forrest Reese, who is a student at the Seattle Maritime Academy.
So I'm gonna hand it over to Deputy Mayor Yamaguchi.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Great.
Good morning.
And on behalf of Mayor Bruce Harrell, I am pleased to join you today as we come together to actually celebrate this investment to our local maritime industry.
And I want to acknowledge Councilmember Morales and all of the work that she has done around this issue as well.
So Seattle is known for maritime and for well over a century Ballard has served as a center of our local maritime industry and our Seattle colleges have played a key role in providing education and training pathways at the Seattle Maritime Academy.
The Academy supports workforce training for operations in our waterways, vessel operations at our fish and urns terminal, and our Washington state ferries, which you might catch a few glimpses outside.
The Academy serves a critical role in making sure new and qualified people enter our workforce and enjoy middle and high wage earning careers, and it provides the necessary job training to backfill our current staffing and crew shortages and creates career opportunities to ensure we have jobs that are accessible and inclusive for all.
Through this key partnership with the City of Seattle, the State of Washington, acknowledging the Governor as well, the Seattle Maritime Academy, Seattle Public Schools Skills Center, and others, we celebrate this milestone that addresses the immediate threat of the Maritime Academy closing and helps the industry recover from our pandemic, as well as supporting the hiring of newly trained and diverse young talent.
So we want to thank everybody for joining us today.
And we know that this is the beginning of more work to ensure sustainable support for this industry, and we again celebrate this investment to keep the doors open for our young people and our community.
Thank you.
Thank you, Deputy Mayor Yamaguchi, and good morning, everybody.
It's great to be here as a city family and with our partners as we celebrate this strategic investment that supports the future of the maritime industry.
I'm John Lederer.
I'm manager for key industries and workforce development at the Office of Economic Development and I'm glad to be here in interim director Markham McIntyre's absence this morning.
The Seattle Office of Economic Development is using economic recovery dollars to help solve a dilemma at the Seattle Maritime Academy.
This funding will support one of our local key industries that provide Seattle workers with an accessible pathway to rewarding careers in the maritime industry.
A portion of the funds will be made available to the Seattle Maritime Academy to support maritime career and technical education pathways.
They will partner with the Seattle Public Schools Skills Center to strengthen community outreach and expand youth the youth pipeline into these rewarding maritime occupations.
Now, if we're honest, Washington's maritime labor force lacks sufficient diversity at all operational levels.
It's less racially diverse than both the maritime industry in the United States overall and the rest of the Pacific Coast.
And it doesn't yet reflect, most importantly, the full diversity of our Seattle area communities.
This investment and a commitment to equitable outreach and community engagement will help us begin to address these disparities by focusing our recruitment efforts within Seattle's Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color.
We recognize that more effort is needed to sustain this training pathway going forward, and the Office of Economic Development will continue to support the Seattle Colleges, elected officials, and the governor's office to develop a plan for the long-term sustainability of the Seattle Maritime Academy and the industry as a whole.
And finally, I want to echo some of Councilmember Morales' remarks and call out the extraordinary effort of really two key people that helped get us to this point today.
John Persak, who works with me on the key industries team, is the Maritime Manufacturing and Logistics Strategic Advisor at Seattle OED, and also Stephanie Bowman, Governor Inslee's Maritime Sector Lead at the Washington Department of Commerce.
I want to thank you both for your hard work, your strategic thinking, and your commitment to this incredibly important industry that helps make Seattle who we are.
So I want to thank you all for being here today and I also want to invite Louise Chernin for her remarks.
She's the chair of the board of trustees at the Seattle Colleges.
Good morning, everybody.
Workforce development.
Interesting, I think.
We throw that word around a lot, that phrase around a lot, but it has never been more apparent since the pandemic how absolutely essential workforce development is to provide living wage jobs and address income inequality.
I'm very proud to be associated with Seattle Colleges and one of our most important programs the Seattle Maritime Academy, which was in danger of closing just recently, just this last week or two.
It really took, first of all, Stephanie Bowman.
I want to thank her so much for her tenacity, for her passion.
For Workforce Development and the Maritime Academy, I want to thank the Mayor, Deputy Mayor Yamaguchi, who's here with us today, and Council Member Tammy Morales, for understanding that if we're really going to provide living wage jobs, if we're really serious about ensuring that our students of color, that our LGBTIQ students, our immigrant students, our first-generation students, have access to good jobs, then we have to support workforce development.
We have to ensure that we have access to these programs.
And this program provides some of the best wage jobs you can have.
But what we really learned in the last two weeks is this program is loved.
It is so loved by our community.
I cannot tell you the hundreds, probably thousands of letters we have received from community members all over the country, all over the United States, saying do not close these programs.
They are unique.
We also learned they're not only just loved by the students and by the community, but they're essential for the economy.
The Seattle Maritime Academy is the only training academy in our region to provide these jobs for our maritime industry.
We're surrounded by water.
We need good, skilled maritime workers, and there's only one place that provides that.
But we have not invested appropriately in any of our workforce development, and I think we've had this wake-up call.
And I'm so proud that for the first time, I believe we really are all on the same page, that it takes community, it will take industry, private industry, and it will take government to work together to do outreach, to ensure that we have the word out about these amazing programs and that we support them.
We support them in new ways because we understand how essential they are to change the dynamic for those who are often left out of finding opportunities that they can succeed in and that provides the skilled workers.
I mean, for those of us who depend on ferries, we know the crisis we are in in the Northwest and specifically in Seattle.
This is the academy that that provides the skills and education for those workers.
So I believe we not just found today this amazing million dollars from the City of Seattle, but that we are starting to look at what does it mean to be sustainable?
How do we fund the programs that are needed to provide opportunity and address worker shortage and ensure everyone gets living wage jobs?
So I believe it's a new day.
We have a lot of work to make sure this program is sustainable.
I think we're ready to roll up our sleeves, and I think we're ready to work together as one, as industry, government, and community comes together.
And on behalf of Seattle Colleges, I think it's a great start today, and I cannot be more proud to be with a group of people committed to our students' education and to this important industry.
So, thank you all so much.
Today is a hopeful day for the Seattle Maritime Academy.
Thank you.
Good morning.
I'm Dan Golisman principal of the Seattle Skills Center.
On behalf of Seattle Public Schools I want to thank council member council member Morales Stephanie Bowman from Governor Inslee's team and John Persak from the Office of Economic Development of the city of Seattle for their work to help raise awareness about the maritime college and career opportunities for the youth of Seattle.
The Seattle Skills Center has a wide range of amazing career and technical education programs for Seattle's high school students, including our Maritime Vessel Operations program.
This funding will help us spread the word to students and families about the high-wage, high-demand career opportunities in maritime, and will be especially helpful in recruiting women and students of color furthest from educational justice who have historically been underrepresented in this career pathway.
When I think about the kind of engagement work we want to do with these funds and the type of recruitment, I think of students like Manny.
I remember in the first couple of weeks of our Maritime Vessel Operations class, while the students were learning to sail, he was hesitant to go out solo in the boat.
This was a new experience for Manny.
This was a couple of years ago.
He was one of our students about two years ago.
He handled the lines and watched and learned and eventually steered and worked his way to sailing solo and taking the helm.
He graduated a couple of years ago from the Skills Center and is now a confident young man attending the Seattle Maritime Academy, ready to start out his career in the maritime industry.
This funding will help me be able to tell more stories like Manny's.
Students who join us at the Skills Center will be well prepared for the Seattle Maritime Academy.
And by using the Seattle Promise Scholarship, they will complete the program and start their careers debt free.
We look forward to continuing to work with our partners at the Seattle Maritime Academy, as well as our many other partners, like the Port of Seattle, Washington State Ferries, Youth Maritime Collaborative, Sound Experience, Center for Wooden Boats, the Manufacturing Industrial Council, our labor partners, and many more.
Thank you again on behalf of the Seattle Skills Center and Seattle Public Schools.
Good morning.
My name is Barrett Erickson.
I'm the Sailors Union of the Pacific Workforce Development Director, and I want to thank Councilwoman Morales and Stephanie Bowman and John Persak for bringing this together here today for something really, really important.
I'm a merchant marine by trade.
I'm an able seaman.
And also in my capacity as the Sailors Union of the Pacific's Workforce Development Director, I serve on a national advisory committee to the Coast Guard on Manning, as well as being an advisory committee member to the Seattle Maritime Academy.
That being said, That has exposed me to the fact that there's a national maritime mariner shortage in the whole country, not just here in Seattle.
And for us to be able to keep and work with the Seattle Maritime Academy is really vitally important to this part of the country, to the Pacific Northwest.
I can't emphasize that enough.
All the towboats, the ferries, our deep sea ships all have Academy graduates on them.
Also I'd like to thank all the high school programs that we have here in Western Washington.
There's at least 15 that have something called Core Plus Maritime approved OSPI approved curriculum and they are excellent feeders to these programs.
So I really want to thank Tori Gehrig also for promoting that and working with providing that pipeline to the Seattle Maritime Academy so we can be successful.
I'm not a very good public speaker so I just want to thank everybody again for being here.
Thank you.
My name is Forrest Reese.
I'm a student at Seattle Maritime Academy in the tech technology program.
I was born in Seattle and in high school I participated in the vessel operations program that Dan runs with Seattle Skills Center and I really think that maritime is a great opportunity for people my age to get a stable job and be able to help the local area.
Thank you.
That's all we have folks unless there are some questions.
This is one-time funding and we are hopeful that this is an opportunity to give folks a little bit of breathing room to figure out how we're going to make sure that these programs are sustained.
Can you be a little more specific about which programs were?
So this was for the Seattle Maritime Academy and the Skills Center program around the vessel operations.
So those are the two programs that will be supported here.
Thank you.
Thanks, everybody.