Good PR for Davis

UC-Davis has a story in the Sacramento Bee about job creation at its under-construction health care campus in Sacramento. The article is something of a puff piece. (Congratulations to the PR folks at Davis!) Nonetheless, the good PR can't hurt, particularly in the newspaper of the state capital. 

A jobs mecca? How UC Davis is recruiting employees for its Sacramento campus

Cathie Anderson, 2-8-23

The sounds of a tectonic shift in the local labor market are echoing across UC Davis’ Sacramento campus and into Elmhurst, North Oak Park and other nearby neighborhoods. You hear it at a once-sleepy entryway to campus on 2nd Avenue at Stockton Boulevard when an air horn pierces through not only the clanging metal of construction but also the beep, beep, beep of heavy equipment backing into position and the periodic rumbling of 18-wheelers ferrying materials to multiple worksites...

Business and economic consultant Sanjay Varshney said in a phone interview that the metamorphosis will more than reshape the look of the campus and nearby neighborhoods. It will bring jobs, with good salaries. “Medical centers typically have higher-paying jobs,” said Varshney, the founder and chief economist for the Sacramento Business Review. “We are a region that has been challenged for high-paying jobs from the technology or other private sectors. Health care has been a bright spot for us.” ...

Gary May, the chancellor of the University of California, Davis, said his team still expects 25,000 new jobs to be added on the Sacramento campus as a result of the first phase of building at Aggie Square. As many as 5,000 construction jobs will be needed to accomplish this expansion, he said. Lubarsky said the health system now employs roughly 17,000 people, 13,000 of them on the Sacramento campus. When the current build-out is complete in 2030, Lubarsky estimated that about 20,000 people will be working for UCDH on the Sacramento campus.

As May, Lubarsky and other university leaders began discussing the sheer size of their expansion, they realized that the university and health system, anchored as they were in the community, could serve as something of a buffer or stabilizing force when misfortune or economic downturns hit, said Hendry Ton, associate vice chancellor for health equity, diversity and inclusion. Those talks led them to develop an anchor institution mission, which they called AIM for Health, that put the emphasis on employment or recruiting as a way to foster community resilience, Ton said.

“We’ve been thinking over the past number of years, ‘What can we do to really improve workforce?”” Ton said. “We know that the pathway to the best health has to do with having a stable job. When you have a stable job, you’re less stressed out. We see in studies that, when people have less economic distress, their health improves.”

Hiring residents in the neighborhood

When Aggie Square was announced, however, some residents of Oak Park, Tahoe Park and other neighborhoods near the medical center questioned whether people in their communities would get any of the new jobs. And, if they did, would they be paid enough to ensure they could maintain their homes in the face of anticipated gentrification? The city and the university set up a fund to help community members ward off displacement, and the university and its general contractor agreed to place a priority on hiring residents living near the Sacramento campus. 

"As part of our anchor institution mission, we’ve identified 10 community ZIP codes that have a significantly high rate of poverty that are within a 30-minute commute of UC Davis,” Ton said. “We want to make sure that whatever we do, that these communities that are traditionally again under-served in education, in food, in health (care), in economic benefit, that we’re not forgetting them. In fact, we’re prioritizing them with these jobs.”

Roughly 17% of the UC Davis Health workforce now live in those 10 areas, Ton said, and they plan to increase that percentage. Working to improve economic well-being is exactly what the university and its health system were built to do, Ton said. UCD and its general contractors have been working closely with Sacramento-area nonprofits, labor organizations and the state’s Employment Development Department to identify potential candidates. Lyndon Huling, who supervises talent acquisition for all UCD campuses , said the university isn’t sitting back and waiting for candidates to show up. Rather, he said, people on his team and others in Ton’s department are reaching out to find the unemployed or underemployed who are looking for new and better opportunities...

To make the application process less intimidating and confusing, Huling’s team has explained the ins and outs to workforce development experts at Asian Resources, the Fruitridge Career Center, Greater Sacramento Urban League, La Familia Counseling Center and the California Employment Development Department, Huling said...

Full story at https://www.sacbee.com/article267178166.html.