Why?
We strive for a Colorado, and a nation, where innovation and economic mobility is driven by talent and interest, regardless of parental wealth, race, gender, or zip code.
We believe the answer to the challenges of both individual economic mobility and Colorado business success resides in connecting and supporting homegrown talent into regional career pathways.
The Colorado Paradox
Statewide inequities continue to magnify the “Colorado Paradox,” as too few Colorado youth are accessing the increasing economic opportunity of the state. The paradox is the reality of a highly educated state-wide population, but the majority of those residents are originally from out of state. More than half of Colorado’s residents have a postsecondary degree (the 2nd highest average in the nation), yet only 22% graduated from Colorado’s K-12 public schools. Meanwhile, according to the Colorado Talent Pipeline Report, 97% of Colorado’s top in-demand jobs require some level of postsecondary education or certification, but only about one in five Colorado high school graduates will obtain that credential.
As Colorado’s economy, including our rural economies, continue to expand and diversify, the significant disconnect between economic growth and Colorado K-12 student pathways will only expand, further eroding community, culture, and even public safety, and in turn the long-term viability of that economy. For example, Montrose, Gunnison, and Ouray Counties have all experienced over 120+% increases in median single-family home sales prices over the last 5 years. In the absence of a pathway to a family wage career, the majority of rural students will not be able to stay, or return, to their home community.
Regional
Workforce Development
“Talent” and “workforce” are continually identified as the #1 challenge to the success of Colorado businesses. Research from the Common Sense Institute finds there are an estimated 2.7 jobs for every unemployed person in Colorado, which is leading to an annual $46 billion loss in state GDP. There are dynamic and growing companies, large and small, in many rural communities but too few homegrown talent is being connected to quality careers within these companies. Nationally, there are similar shortages in talent across a variety of critical sectors including the skilled trades and healthcare. Industry partnership is central to the Homegrown Pathways’ model and regional industry directly informs the Innovation Experiences we implement and information and resources we provide to young people in that region. Our bottom line is supporting direct pathways into quality, local jobs.
Social mobility
As a nation, we have been experiencing continually declining social mobility over the last two decades to the point where the majority of young people will now be economically worse off than their parents, as measured by lifetime earnings. This is not simply an issue of economic equity and opportunity. These unprecedented realities are a primary driving force behind our increasing socio-economic, geographic and racial tensions and divisions, the continuation of which poses existential threats, not only to the American Dream, but general societal stability and our way of life.
The Lost Edisons
Entrepreneurship & Intrapreneurship
Research by economists Raj Chetty and Alex Bell, among others, reveals that parental wealth is more important than interest and skill in determining who becomes an inventor. Children born into the richest 1 percent are 10 times more likely to be inventors than those born into the bottom 50 percent. A student with parents in the upper quintile in parental wealth that performs below average in math is still more likely to become an inventor than a student who performs in the top quintile in math but whose parents are in the bottom in parental wealth. Simply put performance and potential is not the primary driver of the innovation talent pipeline in the United States; parental wealth is the lead driver.
Meanwhile, economists estimate that if women, people of color, and children from rural and low-income families became inventors at the same rate as men from high-income families, innovation in the United States would quadruple. If innovation in the United States quadrupled, driven by the ideas and solutions of most marginalized and underrepresented voices, it would fundamentally change the direction across everything from not only economic mobility, geographic, gender and racial equity but also environmental and even national security.
Homegrown Pathways aims to not only build pathways into existing businesses, but to foster entrepreneurship and community-driven innovation through intrapreneurship.
What is Intrapreneurship?
Intrapreneurship is using entrepreneurial skills and approaches within an established company to create new products, services, processes, or business models. Intrapreneurship is essential to the success of existing businesses across all sectors and through our model and through connections to partners’ models, we aim to build Colorado’s pipeline of innovators with the entrepreneurial mindset, self-efficacy and confidence to create new solutions within existing local businesses.
Importance of Entrepreneurship in Rural and Underinvested Urban Communities
Entrepreneurship is an essential pathway to economic mobility especially in rural and underinvested urban communities. In partnership and support of organizations like StartUp Colorado, local chambers of commerce and workforce development centers, we aim to directly support building the state’s entrepreneurial pipeline by creating the experiences, resource information and connections, and social capital necessary to drive new business creation and community-innovation at scale.
