At our Charlotte graduation last week Bank of America’s chief operations and technology officer Cathy Bessant spoke to our students at Year Up about how companies need to address racial inequality: “Racial equality and economic mobility go hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other, and I think it’s very simple for our company to say, ‘We believe in equality.’ It’s another thing to live it.”
“It’s one thing to say, ‘Lives matter.’ It’s another thing to say, with clarity, ‘Black lives matter, brown lives matter,’” she added, and “to be willing, as a company, to stand up and acknowledge the past, but more importantly, acknowledge what needs to happen to change the future.”
Please click the link below for more detail on her conversation with our students. For much more detail on how Year Up and Bank of America work together to directly address the opportunity divide in our country, please see my post below from last week.
Cody (far left) shared that the $5,250 amount for reimbursement is a relic from the past that does not help an employee complete their degree. In fact, it often hinders them from degree completion. They have to pay for a course up front and then be reimbursed months later. So employees often take student loans and then get caught in a debt trap. Or they just take two or three courses a year to stay under the reimbursement amount, which puts them on a path that usually does not end with degree completion.
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