Worcester Business Journal

wbjournal.com | December 11, 2023 | Worcester Business Journal 21 Local business is good business V I E W P O I N T E D I T O R I A L BY JULIE BOWDITCH Special to WBJ W e are deep in the season of giving. It is now common knowledge that corporate social responsibility is vital. An organized employee giving program, sponsoring fundraising events, and offering your associates pro bono or volunteer hours can all have a motivating and positive effect on your team. Let's take it one step further. Does leadership actively model your employee-giving program? Do you show up or send your management team to the events you support? Do you facilitate and encourage the implementation of volunteer hours and empower your team to engage with the organi- zations that matter most to them? ese are the things that can take your CSR efforts from performative to transformative. It can make a difference in retaining and attracting talent and maintaining a collaborative culture. Giving translates to the business-to-business space. Each of us has a unique platform and a budget, whether big or small. Even those of us at relatively small non- profits have necessary operational functions. We all have choices in terms of where we invest those dollars. Supporting local and small businesses is crucial to a healthy economy and a symbiotic community. We have the collective power to sustain other businesses in our region, help them offset rising taxes and rental costs, and keep their lights on. We have the potential to make sure our big city preserves that small-town feeling that has attracted and kept us all here. We can each contribute directly to the health and well-being of our neighbors. is time of year is a tangible reminder of why local generosity matters, but it's so much bigger than Small Business Saturday or the holidays. Yes, it's about where you host your staff party or get your catering from, but it's also about where you choose to take your client to lunch or dinner any given month. It is about where you order your company's promotional products or mer- chandise. It's about who designs your website or brokers your insurance. It's about who you subcontract with year round. We have an opportunity to hold one another account- able. e first questions I ask when I interview a new potential vendor are: What is your service region? What does giving back look like at your company? Who are your other clients? I'll never be their biggest customer, but I can remind them we care and only do business with those in alignment. What if your company did that, too? What if we all did? Your clients and employees want to know you contrib- ute to the area where you solicit and maintain business. Conduct business locally and give generously to organi- zations strengthening and supporting our community. Investing back in the area that can make or break your success is a smart business model. It will prove profitable in the long run. Julie Bowditch is the executive director for the foster child advocacy nonprofit e CASA Project Worcester County. Colleges need more students Julie Bowditch I n fiscal 2014, the five Central Mass. state universities and community colleges had a combined full-time equivalent enrollment of 25,011. By fiscal 2023, that number fell 26% to 18,467. Few businesses can withstand the loss of a quarter of their customer bases, and the trend experienced by the local colleges mirrors a national drop in enrollment. at drop has been caused by a variety of factors, including a demographic dip in the number of high school graduates as well as the continuing rise in the cost of higher education. Like the private colleges in the region, the five public schools – Worcester State University, Framingham State University, Fitchburg State University, Mount Wachusett Community College in Gardner, and Quinsigamond Community College in Worcester – have gotten creative in trying to attract non-traditional students, including looking internationally and encouraging people in the workforce to return for additional education. Gov. Maura Healey gave the public colleges an assist when her administration expanded the MassGRANT Plus program by $62 million this year, covering the tuition costs for an estimated 25,000 students statewide. Local college administrators already are praising the effort, saying the funding will go a long way to help students who face an uphill financial battle that can easily throw them off track in pursuit of a degree. Worcester State, for example, says about 1,000 will benefit from the expansion this year. Administrators are now calling on the Healey Administration to make the expansion permanent, so students can earn their degrees over multiple years. Importantly, the funding simply gets more students into public colleges. In the search for nontraditional students to bolster falling enrollment, these schools can now pull from a different demographic: people who couldn't pay for college, or were simply scared off by the sticker price. One year of expanded MassGRANT Plus funding isn't going to cut it, though, for Central Mass. public colleges to build sustainable pipelines into these communities. e higher level of funding needs to be sustained for multiple years, and eventually grow. In fiscal 2023, the entire state expenditure for public universities and community colleges totaled $938 million. An additional $62 million is significant, but in the scale of the state's $56-billion dollar budget, it's a rather small investment. e additional funding is allocated from the new millionaires' tax implemented in 2023, so the increase wasn't cut from another program. Not only does this funding open colleges up to a broader base of residents, who could earn more money and contribute more in taxes, but the program simultaneously strengthens our state universities and community colleges and their long-term sustainability. Beyond the high value they already provide in educating our workforce and preparing students for tomorrow's careers, public colleges are important employers and valuable members of the community. With chronic workforce shortages, we need all the qualified students we can get graduating locally, and those individuals deserve a bright future in the career of their choice. Long-term funding for MassGRANT will go a long way to addressing those issues. The above Editorial is the opinion of the WBJ Editorial Board. The Viewpoint column, the A Thousand Words cartoon, and the Word from the Web commentary represent the opinions of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of WBJ or its staff. WBJ welcomes letters to the editor and commentary submissions. Send them to bkane@wbjournal.com. W A T H O U SA N D WO R D S B Y R A M Ó N L . S A N D O V A L W

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