Watch: How can California’s economy recover from coronavirus crisis? OnwardCA experts discuss
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A live online forum Thursday afternoon will offer perspectives on how California can rebuild its workforce after hundreds of thousands of workers across the state have lost or will lose their jobs.
The video forum is a joint project between OnwardCA.org and The McClatchy Company’s newspapers in Fresno, Sacramento, Modesto, Merced and San Luis Obispo.
It will stream live from noon to 1 p.m. Thursday on fresnobee.com and the four other newspapers’ websites, as well as The Sacramento Bee YouTube page.
Confirmed participants are California Secretary of Labor Julie Su; Jake Soberal, co-CEO and co-founder of Fresno-based technology firm Bitwise Industries; and Cedric Brown, chief foundation officer for The Kapor Center, a technology nonprofit in Oakland. Bitwise and Kapor are two of the collaborators that developed OnwardCA.org, a new website that offers a wealth of employment and emergency aid resources for people who are looking for new jobs.
Soberal, Brown and other invited participants will address a wide range of questions from viewers. They will discuss how working families can find firm financial footing, how the state’s economy can be rebuilt, plus which industry sectors are being hardest hit and which ones are hiring.
The discussion will be both practical and policy-oriented, and will touch on how California can create new and more inclusive systems as it emerges from the pandemic.
More than a million California residents lost their jobs in a two-week span in late March, after the coronavirus epidemic prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom and a growing number of California counties to issue sprawling “stay-at-home” orders and business closures to prevent the contagion’s spread. The result has been a devastating financial blow to the families of affected workers and to the businesses that employed them.
Bitwise and its software development arm, Shift3 Technologies, worked with Oakland-based technology nonprofit The Kapor Center, employment-networking company LinkedIn, cloud-based software company Salesforce and other collaborating technology organizations and educational and government agencies to bring the OnwardCA website to fruition.
OnwardCA.org is “about getting us back up on our feet,” Newsom said when he announced the Bitwise effort on April 2. “Not just small businesses, (but) now people who have been laid off that need a job.”
OnwardCA curates a dizzying expanse of resources and programs that can help coronavirus-displaced workers and their families – resources that are scattered across the internet.
A key component of OnwardCA is a database of companies and industries that are hiring workers across the state to ramp up their own response to the pandemic, from health care and logistics to call centers and delivery services and more. When the site launched last week, OnwardCA included an inventory of more than 70,000 positions, with the expectation of adding thousands more.
But matching out-of-work residents with jobs in industries that are hiring takes time.
“We all know a job search doesn’t pay for the groceries next week,” Soberal said. “We have to show them how they can get help with food and money and childcare, and help with the difficult journey these workers are on to get back to work.”
In addition to the jobs database, OnwardCA also provides information and links to resources, based on the user’s location and personal needs, such as:
- Immediate sources for monetary aid — from unemployment to industry relief funds for workers to loans and grants for small businesses.
- Emergency non-monetary resources — including food, shelter, medicine, groceries, child-care, and more.
The directories of available resources are targeted geographically based on where visitors say they live or work.
This story was originally published April 8, 2020 at 3:39 PM.
