CEO Initiative 2020

 SPEAKER: It's important that we always communicate the purpose of innovation. And that is to solve challenges. And one of the key challenges right now is to make sure that the health pandemic doesn't turn into a hunger pandemic. And even in the western world, for the first time in decades, we've had to ask ourselves whether we have safe access to food. And my local supermarket here in Oslo ran out of some food items back in March. Now that was sold quickly, but the difficult reality right now is that we're moving in the wrong direction on hunger. The numbers are increasing. It was already at 800 million people going to bed hungry before the pandemic and 135 million people at the brink of starvation. That number is doubling and the COVID-19 is a key driver to that. And here we have a joint responsibility to group together as companies and to bring data out there and to help poor farmers to increase their yields. And in our company, to have that purpose to see that what we do matters means that the teams, they really work day and night to come up with solutions where we could link millions of farmers with agronomic advice. That's something that I don't think we would have been able to do that in months or even years what they did in just a number of weeks. So it's this purpose or being part of something that is greater than ourselves and even the organizations that we represent. 

In the western world for the first time in decades we had to ask ourselves whether we had safe access to food.

Will the pandemic transform into a global food crisis?

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 GINA RAIMONDO: As you say, Cliff, one of the hardest parts about this crisis is that it is simultaneously a public health crisis and an economic crisis. And both are as serious. And we have to be tackling both at the same time. So right now, in Rhode Island, of course, and really, in every state, we have thousands, tens of thousands of people who were put out of work overnight, really, in March. And the economic pain has been disproportionately felt by lower skilled folks, lower income folks, and people in certain industries-- hospitality, retail, restaurants. So we launched a new initiative called Back to Work Rhode Island. It's a public-private partnership. And I have done a lot of public-private partnerships from day one here, where we are providing job training, but we're doing it in concert with companies who are willing to hire the folks. They've committed to hire people who've been trained through this initiative. So this isn't train and pray. It's train, graduate, and promised to get a job. And as any governor will tell you, one of the challenging pieces to make job creating work is actually the matching function. You have empty jobs-- you have jobs. You have companies who are looking to hire. You have people who are out of work. We need to match them and train them. So we partnered with Google to do a pretty sophisticated search to try to find who is out of work and what jobs might they match well with. And then we have an artificial intelligence powered chat-- Skipper. Skipper is, if you're looking for a job, if you're out of work, you go to Back to Work RI and say, "Hi, Skipper, I'm Gina. I was a waitress. I'm out of work. I'd like to get a new job. Maybe I'd like to get into the healthcare industry." And Skipper will walk you through kind of career coaching, if you will, career coaching around what I should think about, how I should fix my resume, and what job training I should achieve. So it's really a pretty sophisticated job training where we provide the job coaching and the matching. And I just-- I feel it's necessary in COVID, but quite candidly, with the rate of change in our economy and the need to reskill and upscale folks, it's something we're going to continue post-COVID. 

Rhode Island's Governor says both are equally serious.

CEO Initiative 2020

Will the pandemic transform into a global food crisis?

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In the western world for the first time in decades we had to ask ourselves whether we had safe access to food.

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Will the pandemic transform into a global food crisis?

Gina Raimondo details the twin crises of the pandemic - both for public health and the economy