Birmingham Promise

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The Birmingham Promise Initiative is a program created by Birmingham mayor Randall Woodfin, and operated through the newly-created Birmingham Department of Innovation and Economic Opportunity, to provide business apprenticeships and college scholarships to Birmingham City Schools students. The initiative is operated as a public-private partnership in conjunction with United Way of Central Alabama.

Birmingham's program, developed by Deputy Director of Talent Development Rachel Harmon, is modeled largely similar programs in Kalamazoo, Michigan and Buffalo, New York which have show long-term success in improving graduation rates, closing achievement gaps in public schools, and reducing juvenile crime.

Such programs require large amounts of private investment from partnering businesses and charitable foundations. The initial implementation of Birmingham's program coincided with a reduction in the city's direct annual disbursement to the Birmingham Board of Education, from $3 million to $1 million in the 2020 Birmingham budget. In the program's "pilot" year, 2019, a total of 20 students were placed in paid summer internships. In October 2019 the City Council approved an annual appropriation of $2 million for 5 years to the Birmingham Promise Initiative.

In June 2019 the Birmingham Promise Initiative was awarded a $150,000 grant from the Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship (PAYA) to support strategy development and implementation.

In August 2019, Woodfin announced that the Birmingham Promise program would begin offering all graduates from city schools a "last dollar" scholarship to attend public in-state 2- and 4-year colleges to which they have been accepted for enrollment, beginning with the class of 2020. The program, previously referred to as the "Fred Shuttlesworth Promise Scholarship," is funded through an endowment assembled from city appropriations and private donations.

References

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