10,000 Career Opportunities By 2025

“You have to do something that scares the sh*t out of you!”

This was Afdhel. A friend of mine that runs a very cool company called ‘Good Is The New Cool’, a global purpose agency called ‘Conspiracy Of Love’ and is a writer for Forbes.

He continued.

“Set a goal that may seem outrageous at first but becomes more attainable when you just realize you need to dig that little deeper to make it happen”.

“Make it scary, make it exciting but just make it happen”

I sat there and thought to myself, “What is our BFO (you’ll need to use your imagination to what this stands for) goal?”.

For the past few years we’ve been running cohorts of 10 Fellows in Los Angeles, people that have grit, creativity and brilliance but lacked opportunity because of the way the system had failed them. We knew that if we wanted to unearth the next generation of creative leaders from disenfranchised backgrounds and help them break cycles of systemic inequality, we had to find a way to get deeper into these communities and find a way to enable more people to become change makers.

We set a small goal.

“Let’s jump from 10 to 100 Fellows in our Spring 2021 cohort!” — Done.

“Let’s jump from 100 to 200 Fellows in our Fall 2021 cohort!” — Cool, but not scary enough.

“Alright, by 2025 lets commit to creating 10,000 employment opportunities in the creative industries for system impacted individuals from disenfranchised communities!” — Ok, that works.

Covid provided us an opportunity to take our entire program online, including the guaranteed paid Futureships.

(Futureship is our word for internships because many of our Fellows don’t qualify for 99% of corporate America’s internship programs, as they’re not enrolled in college, a discriminatory practice that excludes a large number of talented people from low income communities from gaining meaningful work experience and feeds into the 1.6 trillion dollar student debt epidemic that’s only furthering the wealth divide in this country… but I digress).

This then provided us an opportunity to enter into new communities, such as Chicago, Atlanta and New York but also to be able to partner with Orenda Tribe and the Dine` people of Navajo Nation so that we can have creative and driven First Nation’s talent doing internships remotely from the reservation at creative companies located in cities such as LA and New York — removing the outrageous cost of living expenses, that again excludes people from low income communities from taking on low paying but much coveted internships in expensive cities.

So all of this is to basically say, Afdhel, we heard you, we scared ourselves and we are committing to creating 10,000 employment opportunities by the end of 2025.

We then worked out if we helped 10,000 people get full time employment, that would put an estimated $300 million dollars back into the economy, and with equitable government policy, that money could be invested into improving public schools, health systems and communities.

So If you have or work for a company that wants to help us reach this goal, let’s chat. jai AT creativefuturescollective.com