Here’s how Bank of America is trying to improve economic opportunity in Charlotte

There’s no opportunity for young people in Rutherford County, Trinity Simpson says.

In search of a future, after high school he moved 90 minutes east of the rural county to Charlotte. He stayed with his sister and started attending Central Piedmont Community College.

Then last year, Simpson got an email about a program called Year Up. It said that in a year his life could change. He’d get specialized job training and an internship at Bank of America, all while getting paid. There also was a good chance he could get a job at the bank, too. He applied.

Charlotte has started a number of efforts to fix its lack of economic opportunity for poor residents. Some are investments in education, others are job programs, like Year Up.

The programs try to solve an intractable problem — how to increase economic mobility in, what some academics say, is the least economically mobile city in America

Over the past five months, The Observer spoke to eight students and administrators to see how one program tries to do that, and the obstacles it faces. While it only serves a little over 50 students at a time, the program tries to reverse some of the daunting systemic factors that make moving up so hard.

Chetty’s impact

The story of the email that would change Simpson’s life starts in 2014 with a Harvard economics professor named Raj Chetty.

Chetty and three other academics published a paper that found that out of the 50 biggest U.S. cities, Charlotte ranked last in economic mobility.

A child born in the bottom fifth of incomes in Charlotte had a 4.4% chance of making to the top fifth. Simply put, the worst city to be born into poverty in the United States was Charlotte. Race, segregation, schools and social capital were all cited as factors in the paper.

For some, the paper told them what they already knew: it was hard to be poor and Black in Charlotte. For others, it was a shock.

In the last generation, Charlotte developed into a global financial capital. The city got an NFL franchise, a national political convention and grew at one of the fastest rates in the country.

“I think a lot of us thought that we were making progress. And I think we were making progress,” said Charles Bowman, the longtime Charlotte market president of Bank of America.

“We probably haven’t paid enough attention to the racial divide that was growing. And the seeds of that were there from a long history. But we weren’t making enough gains.”

What to do

The publication of the paper led to a flurry of task forces and committees — and a broad shift of the philanthropic efforts in Charlotte. Bank of America, a longtime hub of giving in the city, became a chief proponent of economic opportunity.

No other company is as closely associated with Charlotte as Bank of America.

Headquartered in Charlotte, the bank employs 16,000 people in the city. The Chetty paper marked that longtime link to the growth of Charlotte with the stains of segregation and inequality. The bank had spent the past few decades building towers, and probably not enough time building community, as Bowman put it.

Year Up was a natural fit for that new focus.

Founded in 2000, the Boston-based nonprofit operates its job-training program in 35 cities. Low-to-moderate income students ages 18 to 24 are given six months of intense job training, followed by a six-month internship with a fast track to a full-time job.

In early 2019, Bank of America brought Year Up to Charlotte. Later that year, Simpson was among a small fraction of applicants who were admitted to the program’s first group of students.

“When they talk about closing the opportunity divide, that’s what Year Up provides,” Simpson said.

Students get a stipend and dedicated advisors, and in exchange are expected to treat the program like a job. They need to show up on time or their pay can be docked.

‘I’ll ping you’

The program doesn’t teach microeconomics or statistics.

Rather, the students learn a firm handshake. They learn how to use “I’ll ping you,” and “Let me piggyback on that.” They learn how to dress, how to juggle multiple projects at once and how to adjust to the culture of an office.

While all this might seem unusual, the results are remarkable.

Most job-training programs aren’t very effective. Year Up, though, is “one of if not the best examples of an evidence-based intervention in that space,” according to David Williams, policy outreach director at Opportunity Insights. Chetty founded the economic opportunity nonprofit after publishing his research.

Someone who graduates from Year Up earns in the range of 30% to 50% more immediately after the program, according to research done into its work. One study found that it had the largest positive earning impact ever reported for a workforce training program studied.

“It feels like a bootcamp,” said Charlotte resident Zaniya Epps-Graham, who is in the first local group of students. She says she’s learned deeper emotional intelligence and professionalism.

“I didn’t get it in high school,” she said.

After her six months of training, she got an internship on the operations team of Bank of America’s global banking and markets business.

Simpson was put into the anti-money laundering program. That first day, he says, was daunting. “I felt like I was a mouse staring into the face of a lion.”

Catching up

It’s daunting, in part, because Simpson and Epps-Graham aren’t archetypal Bank of America interns.

They don’t come from Ivy League schools, or with advanced degrees. They didn’t grow up around bankers. Both sides accept that there’s a learning curve on how to make the program work.

“If I’m really realistic, if I want more technologists, I can go to the open market and get them,” said Dave Matthews, the Bank of America technology executive who oversees Year Up from the bank’s side. But there’s tremendous benefits from having a diverse workforce, made up of people who don’t come from the standard four-year college degree track, he said.

Growing up in a working class family in Britain, he knows some of the struggles that the students in the program face. He doesn’t have a college degree.

“You don’t take someone from Year Up or another training organization and they’re immediately a productive member of the organization,” he said. “They are going to be, for a time, an overhead, until they can be what they can be.”

The students are mentored by employees at the bank, in addition to what they get from Year Up. That helps them catch up in both the soft and hard skills gap they have coming into the bank.

After the six-month internship is over, the bank chooses whether or not to hire the intern. The ones it does hire stay longer than similar hires, according to Bowman, the city executive. In other cities, a little less than half of the students in the program get hired at their internship.

The ones that don’t get hired still do fairly well and get help from the program.

“It’s hard to think of what would’ve happened if I didn’t take on this program,” said Lizette Gomez, a Year Up intern from Charlotte on the bank’s data team. “It will not only change you, but it will also change your career.”

The weight

For as much as the program can seem like a steal for students, some described it as a kind of burden, a tremendous amount of work without a guaranteed path to a job.

You represent what it looks like to make a better future for yourself, the embodiment of Charlotte’s efforts to make a more equal society. So when you have a bad day, it can feel like it’s not just a bad day for you, but for your community.

“It’s daunting to have that weight on you. But also it’s invigorating.” Simpson said.

“There are always going to be days when you don’t feel like you belong. There are always going to be days that you don’t feel like you can get through anything that you’re doing,” he said. “But just know that you have so many other individuals counting on you.

“Not just the people in Year Up, but the people in your community, the people that see you every day,” he said.

Despite how effective the Year Up program has been documented to be by academic studies, it’s still very small in the grand scheme of the economic problems it is trying to face. Its first group of 53 students in Charlotte last year was followed up with another group of 54 this year.

“We’ve got to do more than just this type of specific training,” said Elise Ford, the local director of Year Up. It’s going to take more businesses realizing the limitations of a four-year degree for a job, among other changes, she said.

In the meantime, “we want to help provide that runway where we can see it and make that change now,” Ford said.

After a year of training and interning, this month Simpson got the news: Bank of America was going to hire him full-time.

At 20 years old, he’ll be one of the youngest full-time employees at the bank after he graduates from Year Up Thursday. He’d gotten out of Rutherford County.

This story was originally published July 22, 2020 at 10:53 AM.