JP Morgan Chase is investing over $1.7 million to help support Wilmington’s workforce ecosystem.
The money is going to four Black-led Delaware organizations actively working to help remove barriers to employment in underserved communities.
Code Differently is one of those organizations.
In partnership with the Wilmington Housing Authority, it will receive $500,000 over two years to help launch IT careers for young people aged 18 to 24 in underserved communities.
“We’re focusing on bringing software development training, in addition to financial literacy training. We’re just trying to train the entire person from all angles,” Code Differently co-founder and CEO Stephanie Eldridge explained. “We have a housing program. Many times when you go away to college it’s the life skills. So we’re focusing on bringing those life skills to students who may not want to go to university but still want to enter into a career in technology.”
The other three recipients of the grants were Delaware State University, L.E.E.P. Inc, and Zip Code Wilmington.
All of the organizations share the goal of closing the racial wealth gap in Delaware, and are helping to do so by providing opportunities for career advancement through education, training programs, and apprenticeships.
Jac Rivers is a Vice President Program Officer in the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Foundation. She says the $709,000 going to Delaware State and True Access Capital will have a huge impact on supporting child-care workers, an extremely economically vulnerable section of the workforce.
“This grant will allow Delaware State University to create a program so that child care workers will have the competencies to not only move within the system, so they can be preschool teachers, they can be child-care center administrators, but they can also open and run their own quality child-care business,” she said.
She adds the grants will also include an evaluation component to study outcomes and best practices to determine whether it can be scaled up within the state, or even nationally.
L.E.E.P. Inc plans to use their $410,000 grant to expand their Pathway to Apprenticeship program. P2A, certified by the Delaware Department of Labor, is a construction pre-apprenticeship program that leads to direct entry into union construction trades.
Zip Code Wilmington, a 12-week software coding bootcamp, will use their $160,000 grant to a Zip Code Prep program. The program aims to address inequities within STEM and allow for more Black and Latinx candidates to go through Zip Code’s coding bootcamp.
