Defining “The Power of Us” through collaboration, shared purpose, and tough questions
The 2024 Horizons summit began with a call for bravery in these challenging times and concluded with inspiration to meet the moment.
Jobs for the Future CEO Maria Flynn opened by urging the 2,000 attendees to be braver in their approaches to solving the systemic barriers that block millions of people from quality jobs. In the closing session, astronaut José Hernández, who grew up working as a migrant laborer in California, personified that bravery. He said he achieved his dream of flying in space despite receiving an inequitable education as a child. As an adult, he persevered through years of NASA rejections until he learned the skills the space agency valued most.
Throughout the two-day event in Washington, DC, the message was clear: The dreams of all our nation’s learners and workers will be within reach if stakeholders can be bold, audacious, and even vulnerable enough to embrace what works and change what doesn’t.
From left to right: Maria Flynn and José Hernández
“I grew up a migrant farm worker, and not in spite of that, but because of that, I became an astronaut,” Hernández said. He noted that he was rejected from NASA’s astronaut training program 11 times before earning a spot. With each rejection, he said, he gave himself a few days to mourn and then set about identifying what skills he still needed to put himself in the top candidate pool. After becoming a pilot, earning a SCUBA certification, and learning Russian, he was selected for the Space Shuttle Discovery’s mission to the International Space Station in 2009.
Hernández’s story was one of many shared at Horizons, where leaders in education, workforce development, business, philanthropy, activism, investment, and innovation considered how to create quality education and workforce systems for all.
Both the theme—The Power of Us—and the location nodded to the need for bipartisan collaboration in an election year and the partnerships required to reach JFF’s North Star: By 2033, 75 million people facing systemic barriers to advancement will work in quality jobs. Elected officials from both parties at the local, state, and federal levels were well-represented, including Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, and Rep. Lloyd Smucker, a Republican from Pennsylvania, in a conversation about bipartisan policies that support economic opportunity.
Participants took up the challenge, sharing brave, innovative, and controversial ideas in main-stage dialogues, small-scale conversations, and podcasts recorded before a live studio audience on site. The learners, workers, and leaders who took the stage didn’t shy away from naming the failures of our education and workforce systems and the obstacles they see ahead. But they also highlighted opportunities to bridge divides and focus on their shared purpose. In a sign of JFF’s commitment to prison education programs and fair-chance hiring, many sessions were live-streamed to 20 prisons and jails in 10 states.
The event also featured several exciting announcements of new partnerships. American Student Assistance® (ASA) and JFF are deepening their longtime collaboration with $25 million dedicated to JFF—including $15 million for the launch of the ASA Center for Career Navigation at JFF, designed to empower young people ages 16-24 to better understand and navigate quality education and career pathways after high school. The award from ASA also includes $10 million to support JFF’s North Star goal. 
JFF also announced the launch of the 75 Million Network, a coalition committed to expanding access to quality jobs and reaching JFF’s North Star goal, whose founding members include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Opportunity@Work, REDF, Jobcase, Mohawk Valley Community College, and ETS. JFF also announced a national job quality survey with Gallup and the Families and Workers Fund to help JFF measure field-wide progress toward the North Star.
In addition, Flynn, accompanied by Earl Lewis, the ETS board chair, and David Steward, the founder of World Wide Technology, announced a new initiative that brings AstrumU, ETS Solutions, and JFF together to build tools for skills verification that will ultimately lead to career advancement.
From left to right: Maria Flynn, David Steward, and Earl Lewis
Horizons drew national media attention when Maryland Governor Wes Moore shared his endorsement—live on stage—of the Democratic Party’s new presumptive nominee for president, Vice President Kamala Harris. Moore also spoke about his state’s service program, inviting every high school graduate to participate in a year of service to the state. Citing his military service, he noted that “service will save us” because when people serve together and get to know each other, partisanship fades into the background; they are more likely to work together toward shared goals.
A bold solution for education and work: harness the power of the old and new
The need for better education and training, from the K-12 system to upskilling options for experienced workers, was a common theme. U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and former education secretaries Arne Duncan and Margaret Spellings took up the issue from a bipartisan policy perspective, with Duncan strongly advocating for voters on both sides of the aisle to demand more of their elected officials in K-12 education. “None of this should be about left and right,” he said. “It has to be about a better outcome for our kids.”
From left to right: Miguel Cardona, Margaret Spellings, Arne Duncan
While Duncan and Spellings advocated for collaboration to improve high school graduation rates and increase the literacy of elementary school students, Cardona spoke about the profound need for policy and narrative shifts toward a range of postsecondary options for learners. The system needs to move away from the “four-year college or bust” mentality, he said, and policymakers need to collaborate to provide opportunities in training and career and technical education that are “meaningful and within [financial] reach for our students.”
“I don’t like to use the word reform because reforms come and go, there’s an evolution in education that’s needed.”
— U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona
Leaders in postsecondary education also emphasized the need for transformation. Scott Pulsipher, president of Western Governors University and a new member of JFF’s board of directors, spoke candidly about how old systems are delaying a more effective transition to skills-based training and hiring. “The biggest challenge is, I would argue, a cultural one—meaning that all of us sitting in this room are also some of the biggest barriers to shifting away from the credit hour and degree base within traditional higher education. Because we're the ones who had that experience, and we value that experience more than something new.”
David Wilson, president of Morgan State University, an HBCU in Baltimore, offered strong evidence of the power of transformation in a session that framed postsecondary education’s choices as “Evolve or Risk Extinction.” At a time of declining postsecondary enrollment, Wilson and the Morgan State faculty took action and reassessed the curriculum, held conversations with employers, and brought in some degree programs that “spoke to the work of the future, and the future of work,” he said. Ultimately, Morgan State created Maryland’s first bachelor’s degree program in cloud computing, and in 2022, the 155-year-old institution set records for its first-year and total student enrollment.
A powerful shift: New thinking about skills and how people build them
The call for a cultural shift in mindset about what constitutes a quality job and how to prepare people for quality jobs echoed in conversations throughout the summit. New York Times columnist and podcast host Ezra Klein noted the state of economic dissatisfaction across the country and linked it to a decline in what he called “in-house resources to know how to do technical work” in the government.
“We’ve outsourced a huge amount of the government, we just got both culturally and institutionally out of the habit of building.”
— Ezra Klein, New York Times Columnist, Host of The Ezra Klein Show, and Author of "Why We're Polarized"
However, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo took an optimistic view, identifying the current moment as a potential “turning point in U.S. competitiveness” thanks to broad federal investments in manufacturing, particularly semiconductor technology. Her goal, she said, is to create 1 million new jobs by boosting domestic semiconductor chip manufacturing—jobs, she noted, that require training but not a college degree.
“America will outcompete if everyone has a chance—not a handout, a chance, and a chance means good job training, with wraparound services to get to the end of the training, and a job at the end of the tunnel.”
- U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo
Speakers debated whether skills-based hiring is “a moment or a movement,” with Byron Auguste, CEO of Opportunity@Work, saying the debate itself about degrees vs. skills can have a negative impact, often exacerbating the stigma that people who have achieved career success without academic credentials may feel. “What is helpful is, ‘How do we value learning, wherever you get it?’” Auguste said.
An innovative outlook on the AI-powered future: Be ‘bullish’ on humans
At last year’s Horizons, Flynn correctly predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) was in the process of transforming the world of work as we know it. This year, LinkedIn Chief Economic Opportunity Officer Aneesh Raman and neuroscientist Vivienne Ming said they’re now “bullish” on the potential for humans to succeed by harnessing AI without being replaced by it.
They cautioned that it’s time to change our thinking around AI and work. “We need to think about human capability with the same excitement we’re thinking about AI capability,” Raman said. “And we need to ask what’s possible for humans in the age of AI, not what’s left.”
From left to right: Vivienne Ming and Aneesh Raman
Raman called on attendees to recognize their power at this moment—specifically around their knowledge and data on populations that are often overlooked or excluded from major data collection initiatives. “AI is not a thing that is going to determine what it does on its own. It's how we build it; the data that goes in is the data that comes out,” Raman added. “A lot of you in this room don't realize that you are critical in this because when you think about historically marginalized groups and the nonprofits that serve them, you have data on people at the margins that the big data sets don't represent. So you have the data to build the tools, with personalized support, personalized teaching, personalized training for your communities.”
Ming, who began working with artificial intelligence models as an undergraduate more than two decades ago, gave a blunt assessment of the AI debate: “I think we’re talking about it all wrong.”
Instead of asking what skills people need, she said, the opportunity AI presents is to consider what kind of problem-solving is required. A “well-posed” problem with correct and incorrect answers is the domain of AI, while a problem with many potential answers is the domain of humans. That’s where huge opportunities in education and training lie. “[If we] train children for an unknown future, full of uncertainty in which they celebrate that—what an amazing opportunity,” she said. “I get to change the world in a way no one else has ever done before.”
A brave proposal for the future of the country: Build connection and partnership
In a profound conversation with JFF board member Tyra Mariani about race, power, and discomfort, keynote speaker and author Ta-Nehisi Coates said divisions have been exacerbated by the loss of personal connection that has emerged with social media. “Things we used to say while we were having coffee with our partners, we now need to scream out to millions of people,” he said. “I don’t know why we decided that was true, but we did.”
From left to right: Tyra Mariani and Ta-Nehisi Coates
His observation followed several sessions examining the relationship between connections and economic mobility, most notably in a conversation between JFF board member and author Richard Reeves, economics researcher Raj Chetty, and the Brookings Institution’s Camille Busette about demographic trends in economic advancement. Chetty, who uses large-scale data sets such as tax records and the Census to determine what factors affect mobility and opportunity in the United States, shared a stark truth about race and advancement: Black men, even if they are born high on the income distribution spectrum, have an equal chance of falling to the bottom as remaining on top throughout their lifetime. Chetty calls understanding this downward mobility “fundamental to addressing racial disparities in America.”
Bussette, who has researched networks and social capital, identified Black men’s smaller social capital networks as a key factor. One part of the solution, she said, relies on the power of our educational, work, and social institutions as places where connections are formed, and intentional efforts to create social capital networks can have a major impact. It’s also critical, both panelists noted, for people to examine their own “friending bias” and determine whether their relationships and networks are formed with people of the same race or income level.
From left to right: Raj Chetty, Camille Busette, and Richard Reeves
Maryland Governor Moore celebrated the power of those relationships in a conversation with Forbes Chief Content Officer Randall Lane about leadership in times of crisis. Moore shared his own story of his campaign for governor, when people who had served in the Army with him came to canvass for him. “Many of them were not Marylanders; many of them were not Democrats,” he said. “But they just came to come door-knock on my behalf.”
That same instinct to build connection, Moore said, is what has led to the passage of 26 bipartisan bills in Maryland during his tenure as governor. And it’s what he believes will carry the country through a tumultuous time.
“We are much closer than sometimes we're told that we are, and if we can really be a society that gets to know each other, again, if we can be a society that serves together, then we’re going to be a society that’s going to be unstoppable.”
— Maryland Governor Wes Moore