This is a guest post by Reggie Isaac, director of the Microsoft Charlotte Campus, Microsoft Corporation.
Next week, our Microsoft CityNext team and colleagues at LinkedIn are excited to sponsor the largest national conference for all city leaders—elected, appointed and staff. We’re looking forward to meeting with these leaders and sharing how our cloud-powered solutions are helping cities transform and become more sustainable, prosperous and inclusive.
Microsoft at City Summit
Our team has been planning for #CitySummit17 for about a year and we can’t wait to be part of the NLC’s prestigious annual gathering. Microsoft is proud to serve as a Gold Sponsor of the Summit and contribute in several ways:
- With youth employment a big concern for local and national leaders, Microsoft is joining with the Brookings Institution to sponsor a salon event focused on workforce development from a national perspective. Titled, Youth Employment Programs: A Tool for Workforce and Economic Development, attendees will explore youth workforce development through an economic development lens and learn a holistic approach to addressing employment needs for youth. Brookings also will reveal findings from its study identifying key drivers of youth employment challenges and Microsoft will discuss some of our programs that help deliver technical skills, such as the Imagine Academy, various Microsoft Philanthropies initiatives, the Microsoft Software & Systems Academy and more.
- We’ll host a YouthSpark Live event for 250 national youth delegates, representing more than 40 U.S. cities. This is a significant opportunity to deliver our YouthSpark curriculum, including hands-on training in coding and robotics and even building in a “makerspace,” which involves applied computing. We hope to spark an interest among attendees in future technology careers—and that they’ll share the YouthSpark message among their friends back home.
- Microsoft is happy to join NLC University in hosting the Shared Wisdom Luncheon, an awards program that will feature inspirational “shared wisdom” from local and national leaders, and recognize certificate recipients for their achievements.
- Our Charlotte team is especially looking forward to staffing our NLC booth, which will feature some of our innovative CityNext solutions that help drive smarter cities. We’ll demonstrate some real-world examples of how our Internet of Things, Power BI, Azure and Azure Government platforms are helping to better serve cities and address their biggest priorities.
NLC-LinkedIn summer road trip
LinkedIn’s presence at the City Summit will build on its partnership with the NLC and the Kresge Foundation to discover how six cities are Building Equitable Pathways to Postsecondary and Workforce Success. My LinkedIn colleague Nick DePorter will serve on a panel with representatives from some of the six cities they toured last summer, including Austin, Texas, Charleston, S.C., Corpus Christi and Houston, Texas, Jacksonville, Fla., and Nashville, Tenn.
The July 27-Aug. 18 road trip was a key milestone in the two-year partnership to promote equity, education and employment, and create a model that all cities can use to boost economic opportunities for their residents. “Our labor-market data is helping city leaders implement innovative and sustainable education and workforce strategies that address major equity issues,” Nick explained, noting that each city has different needs, but the LinkedIn data is aimed at helping them achieve their specific workforce goals.
Join us!
On behalf of our 15-member Microsoft planning team, the 35 or so Charlotte volunteers who’ll be staffing our booth and our LinkedIn associates, I’m thrilled to invite the estimated 3,500 leaders to join us at the City Summit. Until we meet, please visit the sites below to learn more about how Microsoft has been working with cities for some 30 years and helping empower communities across the nation since 2013 through our CityNext initiative. See you at the Summit!
About the Author: A veteran of Microsoft for over 26 years, Reggie Isaac holds the position of director for the Microsoft Charlotte Campus. In his role as campus director, Isaac supports Microsoft’s local citizenship/community engagements, employee morale events, executive visits and campus operations.