Like many Detroiters, Tawana Holley arrived at the nonprofit Focus: HOPE looking for a better job—and a better life.
In her 54 years, all lived in the city, she had grieved the passing of multiple relatives and spent most of her adulthood in low-wage jobs, whether as a cemetery groundskeeper, a parking enforcement officer, or a van driver for hospital patients.
Then, in 2023, she had an epiphany.
“It’s not that they were bad jobs,” Holley says. “They weren’t bad at all, but they were things I knew I didn’t want to do. That’s when it hit me that I needed to do something different.”
She chose to enroll in the Detroit-based nonprofit’s 15-week information technology pathway program, which instructs students in the Python programming language and technical support.
“I was just looking for a computer class to learn how to work on computers, and I ended up signing up for it, not knowing what I had signed up for,” she says. “I felt bad for so long because I’m not computer savvy. I don’t even know how to post on Facebook, so I just scroll up the page and stalk people.”
The Big Idea: As word spreads of the city’s burgeoning tech ecosystem, Detroiters from all walks of life have pursued traditional and alternative pathways to upskill or reskill. Many residents, like Holley, have to start at square one with basic digital skills.
For more than a quarter of a century, Focus: HOPE has been there to meet them with job training that offers wraparound support, digital literacy, and technical assistance. It served about 150 locals last year in its IT pathway.
Much work remains to be done. But the city has been hyper-focused on broadband access and digital literacy over the past decade. In 2015, Detroit was among the least connected cities in the United States, with almost two-fifths of residents living without internet access. Through a massive citywide effort, that number dropped to 9% as of 2023.
Keonda Buford, senior data and projects manager for the city’s Department of Innovation & Technology, told Work Shift that access challenges still concern city officials. They are committed to bringing residents up to speed, she says, so that they can access online education pathways, jobs, and entrepreneurial opportunities.
“The city of Detroit is growing at an exponential rate, and our whole job is to make sure the residents are keeping up,” Buford says. “Tech not only brings an educated workforce, but it also brings economic stability as well.”
Deep Roots
Growing up, Tiffany Graydon remembers strolling the halls of Focus: HOPE, marveling at the building’s futuristic architecture, modeled after the U.S.S. Enterprise spacecraft from Star Trek lore.
Both her parents worked at the nonprofit, making the community hub a home away from home for her. Catering to the city’s largely poor and working-class Black population, Focus: HOPE originated in the wake of the Uprising of 1967, when the city’s Black residents took to the streets to protest police brutality, squalid living conditions, and job discrimination.
In the immediate aftermath of the ’67 rebellion, tens of thousands of white residents left Detroit.
The Details: The nonprofit expanded in 1981 to include workforce development, aiming to break racial and gender barriers in the automotive industry. Then in 1999, as metro Detroit welcomed companies such as Microsoft and Cisco, Focus: HOPE launched its information technology center, training Detroiters to become help desk technicians and system administrators. These are not the software engineering or coding jobs that can crack six figures, but they can get people on the ladder to the middle class.
Of the 147 students who enrolled last year, 125 graduated, and 58% landed new jobs. Starting wages averaged just under $20 an hour, which is well above minimum wage and just below the living wage for a single adult in Detroit. The wages for the IT pathway are comparable to other programs, such as those in construction and industrial manufacturing, but the placement rate is lower.
24-Hour Support: And getting it as high as it is requires considerable support. Almost immediately, leaders at Focus: HOPE recognized that their IT pathway program would need to offer around-the-clock support for its students as many developed even basic digital skills.
“The digital divide remains one of the things in Detroit causing so many issues—lack of access to food, lack of access to transportation, lack of access just to be able to check bus schedules,” says Graydon, now director of workforce development and education at Focus: HOPE.
“People take for granted how many things you could find on paper that in the early 2000s transitioned to online.”
To address the problem, Focus: HOPE created an in-house “electronic library,” providing IT program participants with access to a computer and the internet to do homework, practice, and apply concepts they learned during the day.
The challenge is larger than any one nonprofit can solve. In recent years, the City of Detroit used $12.8M in ARPA funding, alongside local philanthropic dollars, to connect more Detroiters, partnering with telecommunication giants like Comcast and Verizon to bridge the digital divide.
But that funding is exhausted, and coupled with the lack of funding for workforce training, programs like Focus: HOPE are feeling the strain.
“Bridging the digital divide in Detroit is going to require giving free access to the internet,” Graydon says. “That’s what’s needed…not giving somebody help to pay their bill for a year, because if they’re in the same position two years later, they’re only good for one year.”
‘Not Using the Local Talent’
Roughly 90% of Michigan jobs require digital skills, yet one-third of workers statewide currently have low or no skills, according to a 2024 analysis from the National Skills Coalition. The same report estimates that workers who transition from a job with no digital skills into one with at least one skill can see a 23% increase in wages. This has been borne out by rigorous research of digital skills training programs in other cities like Washington, D.C., and Baltimore.
“We need to teach people how to use the basic online resources that we’re currently offering and scale them up to that level,” says Christine Burkette, former director of Detroit’s Office of Digital Equity and Inclusion.
A major part of the city’s efforts to promote digital literacy is its tech hubs, located in libraries and recreation centers throughout the city. The tech hubs offer residents access to free Wi-Fi, laptops or tablets, technical support, digital literacy classes, and workforce development courses.
With 18 locations across the city, officials see the tech hubs as an opportunity to upskill underemployed Detroiters, seniors, and returning citizens, many of whom account for the city’s workforce participation rate of 54.6%, among the lowest in the nation.
Those “core residents,” Burkette says, “are not in that tech space at all.” She says the city needs to expand its career pathways, providing more opportunities for residents to find jobs in tech-related careers across the region’s industries.
“We need to show them how their skills are transferable to IT jobs,” says Burkette. During her tenure with the city, Burkette helped expand internet access across the city and advance digital literacy skill training.
“We’re not creating those career paths that lead directly to job fulfillment locally. Our population is growing, our talent is growing, but (companies) are shipping their talent in, they’re not using the local talent.”
Employer Connections: A core aspect of Focus: HOPE’s workforce development programming has been its longstanding partnerships with regional employers, ensuring the training they offer Detroiters reflects the skills needed in the local industry.
That’s something workforce training experts and industry leaders say needs to happen with more consistency, particularly with the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence.
“It’s going to take more partnerships between training, mentoring, companies, and education to ensure that we can bolster the pipeline,” says Jill Bright, chief transformation officer for OneMagnify, who spoke at a fall event on Black tech talent hosted by the Detroit Regional Chamber.
“We’re losing people who don’t stay to finish a program. If there’s something an employer can do with a commitment to hiring, to front some funding, that would be one idea.”
Skill Disconnect: Chioke Mose-Telesford, director of Improving Practices & Outcomes at Corporation for a Skilled Workforce, says there’s a tension between the skills local talent have and the experience and qualifications companies are asking of them.
“Employers say the skills are the thing that matters the most, and then say, ‘where’s their Bachelor’s of Science degree in computer science?’, which sometimes does not translate to the skills that they want.”
Holley, the IT student at Focus: HOPE, worries about that disconnect on a deeply personal level. She graduated from the 15-week program this spring as one of the top of her class. But while she’s got the certification and skills, Holley is still concerned she won’t be able to succeed.
“I don’t have the confidence that I need,” she says. “My teachers and my classmates…they’re proud of me for passing, and I’m happy that I passed, but what am I gonna do with the experience?
“I don’t feel comfortable enough to go in and say, ‘I got coding down pat.'”