U.S. Economic Development Administration’s Post

Transcript

My name is Torrance Raffield. Actually turned to the program through a friend who were uncles in their previous cohort, the previous class, and he told me about it and I decided to make a change. I'm previously was having a career as a truck driver. But I decided to die that career for health reasons. It's been a challenging couple of years, but just moving forward. Keeping keeping your head up and having a plan which is good for the industry. Also with you doesn't have the plan, you have to have a blueprint. I forgot to mention blueprints. Ohh my goodness I'm working on my blueprint now and I'm literally sweating so. So today we had the extreme pleasure of having Assistant Secretary Alejandra Castillo here to be able to visit our pre apprenticeship program. So we are receiving a grant, a goods jobs grant in partnership with Workforce Central and Pierce County, Bates Technical College and South Seattle Technical College to be able to provide programs like this. What is exciting is to be able to have a funder come and be able to talk to students, to be able to see. How the taxpayer dollars are being spent to be able to increase our workforce so we become competitive and remain competitive as we build the next generation of our workforce. So we are very pleased. We want to thank our sponsors here at South Seattle College, but all of the partners from Washington STEM, Career Connect and all of the other funders and partners that are able to make this happen and especially a thank you to assisting Secretary Castillo. For coming and being able to visit the program and taking the good news back to Washington, DC So hopefully programs like ours and others that are doing great work can also receive the funding to be able to accelerate training our workforce. So thank you all and we are very pleased and happy to be able to have that visit.