On Thursday, the SCTE Foundation unveiled a new campaign intended to build a fund of $10 million or more. The funds would be used to sustain educational, training, and diversity initiatives for the cable telecommunications workforce indefinitely into the future, according to a statement put out by the Foundation.
“As an educational resource for current and future technical professionals, the SCTE Foundation seeks to play an important role in deepening and diversifying our industry’s talent pipeline,” Mark Hess, SVP, business and industry affairs for Comcast and president/chairman of the SCTE Foundation, says.
The “#BuildingExperts” campaign is tasked with generating more than $7 million in new donations during the next three years to complement more than $2.6 million currently on hand. The Foundation says the goal is for investment income alone to fund grants that can advance its mission of increasing workforce skills and supporting growth of cable engineering careers for women, minorities, and young people outside of the industry.
Hess points out that the campaign is designed to ensure continuous, dedicated support for current and new grants and scholarships that will not only improve the skills of the current workforce, but attract new talent to the industry.
Advance/Newhouse’s Nomi Bergman and Cisco’s Yvette Kanouff are heading up the campaign to secure large corporate and individual donors. Broadband Advisors Group’s Keith Hayes will be working on grassroots contributions.
A kickoff event at this year’s SCTE/ISBE Cable-Tec Expo saw pledges from both Arris and Huawei at $50,000 each. Large individual pledges were also made by a variety of executives, including Hess, Hayes, Shaw Communications’ Jay Mehr, CommScope’s Jim Hughes, and others.
Information on donating is available here.
The SCTE Foundation provides a variety of individual grants for learning and development, as well as the SCTE Foundation Scholarship for Engineering and Software Development, the Catherine Oakes Memorial Leadership Scholarship for Women, and SCTE Foundation Grants for FIRST robotics clubs. From July through October of this year, the Foundation reportedly distributed more than $12,000 in individual grants and awarded the Lansdale Catholic (Pa.) Cyber Crusaders with the Foundation’s initial FIRST grant.
