“I like to do impossible things,” Tessa LeSage says.
That’s a good thing because eight years ago, the Southwest Florida Community Foundation (now Collaboratory) recruited Tessa from the Lee County government and charged her with the organization’s biggest undertaking to date: Turn a fledgling student financial aid initiative into a full-scale regional workforce development pipeline. Tessa admits she didn’t know where to begin.
But she had been honing her skills and big-picture thinking from the start of her career as a mental health case manager in the early 2000s. During that time, “I realized that it was almost impossible to help anyone because of how our community is designed,” she says, referring to the region’s minimal public transportation and the unwieldy distance between residential neighborhoods and downtown jobs and services. She studied public policy and worked as Lee County’s inaugural sustainability manager, intent on solving community challenges from a holistic, systemwide, collaborative, data-driven approach.
The FutureMakers Coalition launched in 2015 with Tessa at the helm and a vision to increase the number of Southwest Florida adults holding college degrees or other career credentials to 55 percent by 2025. The shift required reimagining how industries, educators and civic leaders work together to ensure residents acquire the tools they need to advance themselves and the region.
Within a year, the group had set its regional outcomes as one of 75 of Lumina Foundation’s national Community Partners in Attainment, which was likewise pushing to transform the workforce. Today, FutureMakers Coalition includes some 140 partnering organizations, from employers to early-learning providers. The percentage of adults with career credentials has ballooned to 42.2 percent. The Coalition achieves this through initiatives such as a push to re-enroll FGCU and Florida SouthWestern State College students who had stopped their schooling. The effort yielded 1,500 returning students, 240 more degrees—and a deeper understanding of why they paused their educations and how to dismantle such barriers.
The needs are even more critical in the wake of Hurricane Ian, which left many FutureMakers beneficiaries homeless. “We’ll be focused on how FutureMakers can ensure folks have the training for these much-needed jobs as we rebuild,” she says.
And, the group’s about to accelerate even more. The federal government awarded FGCU, in partnership with FutureMakers, a $22.9 million grant—the largest in the university’s and Collaboratory’s history—to develop the Southwest Florida Equitable Jobs Pipeline. Efforts focus on growing the talent pool in K-12 education, healthcare, manufacturing and logistics. “Education is the pathway to success,” Tessa says. “Once one generation changes, they create change for their families for generations to come.” —Jennifer Reed