News & Media

Expect expansive coverage of the U.N. climate conference (COP26) in the coming days, even though the real news is decades old. The reality of global climate change is all around us, yet many national governments and big polluters lack the courage, the will—sometimes even the desire—to curb greenhouse emissions. Colleges and universities have an essential role to play in helping us reverse course.

Jamie Merisotis has spent most of his 30-plus-year career at the intersection of philanthropy, education, and work. He’s the president and CEO of the Lumina Foundation, a funder with over $1 billion in assets and a mission to increase the proportion of Americans with degrees, certificates, and other high-quality credentials to 60% by 2025.

Think about caregiving less as a bundle of services and more as a web of relationships that encourage human flourishing.

Care work has long been indispensable and invaluable. Indispensable: It is the work that makes all other work possible. Invaluable, quite literally: Our society is incapable of valuing it properly.

Change takes time - except when you do not have time. If you have been following the latest news about our nation’s drastic shortage of skills and talent, you know what I mean. We pivoted quickly in education and remote work to respond to the pandemic. Now, we need that sense of urgency around shorter-term workforce training - and, once more, there is no time to wait.

Workers who lost jobs amid the pandemic see the tides of economic change quite clearly. Will we be able to deliver better vessels to ride out the waves?

Patience. Urgency. How to balance the two is perhaps one of the biggest challenges as we climb out of an economic shock spawned by a pandemic.

In this episode of “Hardly Working”, I was joined by Jamie Merisotis, president and CEO of the Lumina Foundation to discuss what automation means for work. We discussed his most recent book Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines, the connection between education and employment, the value of human abilities, and what the future workforce may look like and require of us.

The work of the future is Human Work.

Download the slide deck to present the concepts from Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines.

As America continues to emerge from the pandemic’s grip, several economists — including Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell — anticipate a wave of job creation in the second half of the year, and some expect the U.S. economy to achieve a level of growth we haven’t seen in 30 years.

It’s Global Skills Day 2021, a worldwide virtual gathering of hundreds of speakers from 25 countries—from nonprofits, educators, nonprofits, jobseekers, and more—all focused on creating strategies for learning crucial 21st Century skills in a post-pandemic world.