Vivek Varma

Dear Friends,

In the six months since I assumed leadership of the Schultz Family Foundation, our team has been hard at work clarifying how we will partner across sectors to make an enduring contribution that strengthens our country. As we embark on 2024, I am writing to update you on our vision and strategy that will guide our work in the years to come.

The Problem We Aspire to Tackle

In our view there is no issue of greater importance to the country than creating opportunity accessible to all. Today, more than half of Americans think it’s unlikely young people will be better off than their parents. In an economy where 70 percent of workers feel unprepared for the future of work and 74 percent of Millennial and Gen Z workers plan to leave their current employer due to a lack of development opportunities, there is clearly a mismatch between demand and accessible supply for training and re-skilling programs.

Our focus is on young people transitioning to adulthood. There are so many young people who want to take the next positive step but are unsure of how or whom to turn to for support. With new platforms and networks, more young adults can better understand their options and access concrete pathways to develop skills, relationships, and connections to pursue their dreams. All of this is premised on the belief that talent lies in every person and that one positive step leads to another. We know that continuous improvement and hard work go hand in hand with human development.

In our history as a country, access to opportunity has not been equal for all citizens. We have a responsibility to do more to create a nation with liberty for all. That will be our design principle, recognizing the magnitude of the challenge in building a new and better system that serves young people in an evolving marketplace and society.

Creating more opportunities for advancement and economic mobility must be a national priority, both for workers who want to grow their careers, employers who struggle to find the talent they need to grow, and young people just starting out seeking to understand their options. If we fail to invest in pathways for young people now, we will face a generation of Americans that lack the financial means to live healthy, productive lives. Adding to the challenge is the seismic disruption that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have on the current and future job market. The urgency is real and we all need to do our part.

We will only succeed by adopting a multi-sector approach that harnesses the resources, infrastructure, networks, knowledge, and innovative thinking of employers, entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and governments working together to seed and scale solutions that work. In that spirit, we will commit funding, ideas, and learnings in support of a better future that allows everyone to access the full promise of America.

Building Better Navigation Systems, Tools, and Pathways for the Next Generation

Navigation will be the throughline that animates our work. What do we mean by navigation? Let me give you some context. The U.S. economy has never been more dynamic: new jobs are being created while some existing jobs are being sidelined. Effective training programs are as likely to be found in a local nonprofit as a community college or four-year institution. Securing financial aid or other support is often a byzantine process. Yet most young adults have only limited access to fragmented and inconsistent forms of support to guide their career choices. In fact, once a young person leaves high school, it is nearly impossible to find services that can help them navigate the labor market and make informed choices about a career path aligned with both their interests and opportunities.

While siloed navigation solutions exist (often within an institution or sector), most young people do not have access to a comprehensive career navigation ecosystem – bridging skill development, supportive services, and employment – that empowers them with information they need to make the right decisions at the right time to maximize economic opportunity. This vacuum prevents many young adults from connecting with high-quality training and educational opportunities, wrap-around services, and employers committed to developing and nurturing talent. The career planning process is simply too confusing and chaotic for most Americans, especially economically-vulnerable young adults. We seek to address the information gap by matching more young people to careers that are in high demand but that lack skilled workers, creating outsized income gains for workers who gain the appropriate skills.

Our Portfolio: Where We Will Invest and Partner

Understanding the Lived Experience of Young People Through Rigorous Research. To ground our work in the lived experience of young people, we are commissioning a comprehensive research study designed to gather data that will help us better understand young adults’ challenges and aspirations. We know that every young person is unique and there is not one right path. In our research, we hope to uncover the richness and diversity of the young adult experience in America and ensure we understand the various friction points as they seek to carve out a pathway that leads to greater economic success than their parents’ generation. Listening to young adults, gathering their insights and suggestions, probing solutions, and revealing their varied, unique lived experience will be a critical foundational set of learnings for new and better systems. It will enable us to identify solutions to give young people greater agency to discover their purpose and pursue their dreams.

Piloting Navigation Solutions in Washington and Expanding Nationally. Developing navigation systems and tools, and new opportunity pathways, is a burgeoning area of innovation. We aspire to work with a multi-disciplinary set of companies, organizations, and government agencies. We will pilot, incubate, nurture, and learn about solutions that work first in Seattle, King County, and our home state of Washington. When we gather enough data and evidence to justify a proof of concept, we will work to scale promising solutions to other communities across the country through multi-sector partners. As we craft and evolve our approach in partnership with others, we will pay special attention to the unique needs and barriers facing young adults experiencing homelessness, as well as young people exiting state systems such as foster care and the justice system.

Leveraging Ten Years of Learnings Connecting Veterans to Employment. Our confidence in attacking this problem stems in part from our decade-long journey prototyping and scaling solutions to connect our nation’s military service members to civilian careers. Our more than $60 million investment – combined with additional support from other funders such as The Heinz Endowments and The Call of Duty Endowment – has connected nearly 100,000 veterans, with a focus on junior enlisted, with opportunities when they leave the military. The approach, led by a handful of best-in-class Veterans Service Organizations (VSOs) and leading employers, has been proven to be more cost-effective than traditional government programs, and can now be sustained and scaled by our government as a better way to honor and tap the talent and values of our nation’s military. We are actively working with policymakers and VSOs on federal policy to sustain this successful approach over the long-term. This work offers a valuable blueprint for how philanthropy can convene and catalyze multi-sector approaches to connect untapped talent to opportunity.

Expanding National Service as a Pathway to Opportunity. Our work in national service provides another promising approach. Since 2020, the Schultz Family Foundation has invested $7.5 million and unlocked am additional $7.5 million in funding from public and private partners – including the Ballmer Group – to collectively make service a more accessible launching pad for young adults to explore career options and develop skills. Recently, we began a partnership with the National Governors Association to scale this work to more states. This year, we will launch a Youth Mental Health Corps in partnership with Pinterest , AmeriCorps , and America Forward, LLC to address our nation’s alarming youth mental health crisis while allowing young adults interested in the mental health field to earn a career credential.

Scaling Cash Assistance for Young Adults in Unexpected Emergencies and Moments of Crisis. Our role pioneering the use of cash assistance to prevent and divert young people from homelessness provides an illustrative case study of how we will invest first locally and extend our impact nationally. Over the past four years, we have seen incredible early success, first in King County with Africatown Community Land Trust and Building Changes, and then in Washington state in partnership with A Way Home WA, demonstrating that one-time direct cash payments can be a powerful solution to prevent young people from experiencing homelessness. To date, the program has housed more young people than any other housing program in each county where it is operational. After receiving the one-time payments ranging from $1,000 to $2,000, 93 percent of these young people did not return to homelessness after 12 months. In Washington State, with our partner the Raikes Foundation, the program has proven effective in addressing the needs of young people exiting state systems of care. In partnership with Point Source Youth, we are now scaling this work to seven additional cities across the country to build a convincing case for more public funding of cash assistance as a cost-effective tool to prevent youth homelessness.

Changing Employer Practice with the American Opportunity Index. Recognizing the role companies play in creating opportunity and upward mobility, we launched the American Opportunity Index in partnership with The Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School. The groundbreaking ranking reveals how well America’s largest companies are investing in their most valuable asset – their employees – to drive business performance and advance individuals'' careers. By arming boardrooms and c-suites with data about what is actually happening to their employees, our hope is to change corporate practice so that more American workers, especially those without college degrees, can rise into jobs that provide financial security and the ability to realize one’s full potential. We will continue to invest in this important project and launch a tool to allow job seekers to easily understand the data behind the rankings to make informed decisions about the best places to launch and advance their careers.

Backing Entrepreneurs Building Brighter Futures for All. We believe entrepreneurship, which is core to our DNA as an organization, is a critical force multiplier to realizing our mission of achieving greater opportunity accessible to all. The fire for innovation, creation, and solving societal problems burns brightly within the communities and young people we seek to uplift. We see founders and young people from historically underserved communities as uniquely positioned to both understand and address the persistent structural inequities and barriers in the systems around them. As such, we will look to invest in those founders creating market-based solutions that increase the economic and social mobility of working Americans at scale.

Investing in Narrative Power Storytelling to Change Hearts and Minds. To counter the enormous amount of pessimism, dissension, misinformation, and the fracturing of trust that has eroded our country’s confidence in traditional institutions and each other, we will invest in compelling storytelling projects – across scripted and documentary films and series, podcasts, books and other formats – that have the power to reveal hidden narratives, nurture our common bonds and shared humanity, and raise awareness about promising solutions.

How We Will Partner Across Sectors to Seed Innovation and Scale Solutions

As Americans, we must take on systems differently, recognizing that the work to repair and recover cannot be handled by government alone. We fear no third rails: We will work with people with whom we disagree, we will take bets on early-stage innovations, and we will invest in political leaders willing to rise above party. Those willing to act with courage and conviction need to know we have their backs.

We shall be unafraid to take risks. We will undoubtedly make mistakes, but we will learn from them. We will be assiduous in measuring the impact of our efforts. We will be transparent about what works and what doesn’t. And the Foundation will work in close partnership with the emes project LLC, the Schultz family’s private office and public policy arm, to advocate and scale solutions that work.

When talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not, it’s up to us to bridge the gap not only for our communities but for the young people who make them stronger. Our focus is clear. Our work will evolve. It will be grounded in learning and innovation. In entrepreneurship. In partnership. In ambition. In humility.

As Sheri reminds me often: Over the course of the 25-year history of the Foundation, what has been revealed to us is there are no easy answers. Solving these enormous challenges is an iterative process that requires a learning and partnership mindset. As humans, we all make mistakes and deserve a second chance. Yet there are too many young people who don't get one for a multitude of reasons: Either because they do not have a supporting adult to guide them to the next step, or because they get caught in a system that makes them feel they are not worth it, or, at worst, punishes them rather than helps them learn and grow. We aim to meet young people where they are, so they discover their voice, pursue their passion, and realize their potential.

In the next chapter of the Foundation, we seek to harness our platform, network, and knowledge to accelerate our impact – bending the curve as much as we can in partnership with employers, entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and governments to connect young people with pathways to opportunity and to improve systems to better meet their needs. We are humble and clear-eyed about the problem we hope to address but know we must start somewhere and that we can make a difference by working in partnership together.

Onward,

Vivek Varma

chief executive officer, emes project LLC

vice chair, Schultz Family Foundation