Cecilia Holden joined High Point University President Nido Qubein in the Power List interview, a partnership for discussions with influential leaders. The interview was edited for clarity.
Cecilia Holden has been CEO of myFutureNC since the nonprofit’s creation in 2019. Its goal is to boost the quality of the state’s workforce to help North Carolina thrive in a global economy. She previously had a mix of roles in the private sector and state and local government. She was the legislative and community affairs director for the N.C. State Board of Education from 2017 to 2019 after previously serving as chief of staff for the N.C. Department of Commerce. She has also worked for a private investment firm and IBM. Holden received an undergraduate degree from UNC Wilmington and an MBA from Duke University. She grew up in Whiteville in Columbus County, near Wilmington.
What does myFutureNC do?
MyFutureNC is an organization that is laser-focused on North Carolina’s educational attainment goal. Around the 2016-2017 timeframe, UNC System President Margaret Spellings and MC Belk Pilon, who is the leader of the John Belk Endowment, had a vision that we needed to close the attainment and skills gap in North Carolina that our employers have identified.
So they brought together a commission of probably
50 different influential leaders across North Carolina. They did listening tours, looked at data and research, and after two years, in 2019, agreed on a state goal. By the year 2030, it was determined that North Carolina was going to need 2 million people between the ages of 25 to 44 to have either an industry-valued credential or a college degree.
So, the N.C. General Assembly codified that goal into state law. And then later that year, myFutureNC stood up as a nonprofit organization to move that goal into action.
Why was it important to reach for the 2 million North Carolinians between age 25 and 44 to have a post-secondary degree or industry-related credential?
We wanted to build a workforce in North Carolina to meet the demands of corporations and employers moving to the state. And also those that currently exist in the state or expanding in the state.
We started in 2019, and then COVID hit. And if anything that elevated the importance of hitting the goal.
How is the group funded?
We are funded by private philanthropy. We got two government grants in the middle of Covid. One came from Covid relief money. And then we were asked by the General Assembly to conduct a study around the opportunities to have interoperable data systems to benefit our students. And those are the only two investments that government has made in the work.
Otherwise, we’re 100% private philanthropy. We’ve got national funders, state funders, local funders. The John M. Belk Endowment was instrumental in this work being lifted off the ground. The Goodnight Educational Foundation is one of our key partners.
How is myFutureNC doing toward its 2 million goal?
We started out with a gap of 400,000 people who were lacking a degree or credential that we needed to close by the year 2030. The most recent census data from last year projected a shortage of about 55,000, so we’ve gone from a gap of 400,000 to a gap of 55,000. We’re closing the gap, thanks to institutions like yours and all of our many education partners across the state.
We’ve got 36 phenomenal private universities, 16 public universities, 58 community colleges and our workforce development boards.
We’ve got the assets, we’ve got the infrastructure, we’ve got some of the very best in the entire nation.
What are the top three assets in North Carolina besides climate and logistical, you know, access to highways and airports?
North Carolina has it all. We’ve got the natural assets, we’ve got the infrastructure, we’ve got the workforce. And at the same time, we know where we’ve got opportunities for growth. So we’ve got a basic foundation for success.
Additionally, North Carolina has a lot of good policies and a lot of good funding streams. For example, we’ve got an entire rural division in the Department of Commerce that has grants that are available to rural parts of the state. We look at it as we are one state, but we have 100 counties and we want to see all 100 thrive.
Since 2019, we’ve had an increased interest in North Carolina economically. Did the increase in companies moving to the state challenge your goals?
The answer is the 2 million by 2030 goal was a factor in the economic growth. So that’s the good news. The goal was set expecting that North Carolina would continue on the trajectory that it was on.
If anything, we are importing talent, but we are both an importer of talent and we’re a producer of talent. The percentage of population growth for our state has been five percentage points over the last five or six years. We love to see North Carolina grow. And, the people that are moving into our state do tend to be more educated than not. So, it actually helps to close the skills gap. We are also growing our own.
What are the specific steps myFutureNC is taking to move toward its goal?
You don’t know where you are and you don’t know how to improve if you don’t know what the data shows. We break it down county by county. And so every county understands how they are actually tracking toward a recommended local goal. But it’s a lot of different key performance indicators, everything from North Carolina pre-K all the way through to labor market alignment.
I will share that 79 of the 100 counties have increased in attainment. We have 21 counties that have not. That factors in population declining or growth.
Is there a correlation between the data looking better in metro areas than rural counties? If so, why?
All 21 counties that are not increasing are rural. As you know, we’ve got rural communities that are resourced very differently than our metro areas.
There are a lot of different things that factor in. Sometimes it’s a matter of people who just don’t know how to navigate the maze of higher education. They don’t think that it’s affordable. They don’t know how to even go about it.
And yet we have 58 community colleges spread all over the state.
That takes me to the next strand of our work, which is things like FAFSA completions, which leads to federal Pell Grants and state need-based grants. And we partner with the state Education Assistance Authority. Our goal is to push the word that college can be affordable.
Or perhaps, they’re virtual options today or even our private colleges have great scholarships. So there’s opportunity. Sometimes it’s a matter of telling the story.
What are some of the challenges keeping you from accomplishing your goals?
We know that there are limited fund buckets for the work that we do. Not for our purposes, but for our partners’ purposes to be able to get some of the work done, it does require some investments from the government. So I would say purse strings is one sometimes.
Politics get in the way in terms of just being able to have a budget, you know, making sure that the state is moving forward. And the third thing is personalities. In this space, different people have different perspectives on how best to go about the work.
But ultimately, everybody has rallied around the North Star of 2 million by 2030.
So 2030 comes, you’ve achieved your goals. What’s next?
We want to make sure that whatever we do is systemic change so that we leave a legacy so that future generations have higher levels of education as well. And so we will not shut down the shop. There may be a 2040 goal that we continue to rally around. We know that North Carolina is going to continue to need a workforce. It may be that we narrow our focus on a particular strand of the work.
We want to make 2 million by 2029 and then keep rolling.
You were the chief of staff in the Department of Commerce from 2015 to 2017, under Secretary John Skvarla. What was the greatest achievement you saw in Commerce in North Carolina?
We came in during the legislation that created the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina, which spun off the economic development arm from Commerce. That was a big success. ■
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