Transcript: Mayor Adams, CUNY Chancellor Matos Rodriguez Announce Near $12 Million Expansion of CUNY Inclusive Economy Initiative

May 20, 2024

Lauren Andersen, University Associate Provost, Careers and Industry Partnerships, City University of New York: I'd like to welcome James Lovey. He's the Vice President for Investments at Company Ventures, which is an NYC-based venture capital firm. He has supported tech-driven startups and has for many years run an internship program together with CUNY and his team, Mia in the back, who made this all possible. They've partnered together with us in Blackstone LaunchPad to ensure that students can connect to paid work-based learning in thriving tech sector jobs. Our alumni, some of whom were here a minute ago, [Auri] over there, have gone on to work full-time at Company Ventures and other iconic employers across the city. James, thank you to you and the team and feel free to say a few words. 

James Lovey, Vice President, Investment and Operations, Company Ventures: Thank you, Lauren. Hello and welcome, everyone, to Company Ventures and our space here. We're really excited to have you and excited to announce the expansion of CUNY's Inclusive Economy Initiative. 

As many of you know, we're an early-stage VC firm that has community at the core of everything that we do. We've had the privilege of working with the city through the Mayor's Office and the NYCEDC on a number of programs to help New York City founders grow and scale their startups and social enterprises. We're also proud to have been an active participant in workforce development programs in partnership with CUNY and Blackstone. Since 2014, we've connected hundreds of startups with amazing interns from CUNY schools. We also provide students support services, professional development, and mentorship to supplement their hands-on experience. 

Our collective goal is to empower individuals to reach their full potential. This means actively seeking out and removing barriers that have historically marginalized certain groups, fostering a culture of inclusion and tapping into new channels for recruitment. Last summer, with Mia Manantan’s leadership, we found placements for 50 students. 30 percent of the students have reported that they've worked with their host company at the end of the internship, and 91 percent have said that learning, culture of a startup, and networking opportunities were the most beneficial part of their experience. And this summer, we're excited to have placed 85 students who will begin the program in a few weeks on June 10th. 

These internships have had major impacts on students' early careers. Here's what they've had to say in their own words. I developed self-confidence in my work through working on meaningful projects and receiving positive feedback from my coworkers and intern peers. It was great to have the space to grow and find my voice in my professional career. The best part of the internship was being able to learn about applications that I've always wanted to learn, also networking and meeting new friends. On the flip side, I'm also proud to say that the early-stage companies who are working tirelessly to develop new products, manage investor relations, and win customers benefited just as much as the students did, sharing that it's a great program that we sincerely appreciate and has made a difference in our business, and this experience was fantastic overall, and we're grateful to be a part of it. We hope we can participate in the future. 

As you can sense from these responses, the program is truly a win-win for everyone who participates. Workforce Development Program [inaudible] initiative, but a continuous journey. It requires ongoing commitment, open-mindedness, and a willingness to adapt and learn. We're glad to be on this journey with you all and look forward to another great summer of supporting these students.

Andersen: Thank you, James. We have the opportunity today to hear from a lot of our private sector partners who are making this work possible, and I just wanted to take one quick second to acknowledge the public sector partners who are in the room. Deputy Mayor Ana Almanzar, thank you to your team and Mike Nolan for all the work you've done throughout the years to make this possible. We have the executive director of the Mayor's Office of Talent and Workforce Development, Abby Jo Sigal, thank you for being here and your leadership. 

Now it is my pleasure to introduce a public sector educator through and through. Through his many years at CUNY, first as a professor at Hunter and then as president of Hostos Community College and Queens College, there's been no greater advocate for the professional success of CUNY students than our chancellor, Félix Matos Rodriguez. In the five years since the chancellor took office, CUNY has directly supported nearly 20,000 students in direct connections to internships, paid internships through programs that we run centrally. That's not including the many partnerships that we have with employers, 20,000 in five years since he started. He's elevated the priority of student career success to the forefront of CUNY's 2030 strategy and pushes us all each day to think about how we can do more to ensure that CUNY students today and for decades to come are actually able to pursue the career paths that they come to school for. 

Without his leadership, it's very clear, especially for those of you who know him, that we would not be sitting in this room today. It's my honor to work for the chancellor and I'd like to introduce you to come up and say a few words. 

Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez, City University for New York: Thank you, Lauren, and it's so great to be here, to be with all these incredible partners who've been part of the journey for such a long time, so many other friends and collaborators, so delighted to be here and looking forward also to having Mayor Adams a little bit later, who's been also such an incredible partner in this entire journey. I'm going to, as this is one area that's particularly exciting and important to me, so to be disciplined so we can hear from all our wonderful colleagues, I'm actually going to try to stick to my remarks here because if not, this could be a very lengthy and painful exercise and nobody wants that. 

Again, we are so lucky to have had in this journey partners such as the Bank of New York Mellon, Centerbridge Partners, Blackstone Charitable Foundation, Bloomberg LP, Goldman Sachs, so many of these key partners that have come to join us at times coming with different kinds of programs, but have been the kind of partner which provides support for the students, dear to our heart, at the end of the day, but also have brought their own experience, what they have learned from these programs and others, and have helped us to shape their individual programs and now sort of build this much more comprehensive network, which is the blueprint for how we hope that in a couple of years, all of our campuses have a menu of how they're going to be engaging our students from the day one in thinking about careers. 

To Maura, to Johanna, to Courtney, thank you so much for what you do and what you will continue to do because when I come back to you, ask me for more funding, right? We wanted to catch that on tape for future generations to do. And James to Company Ventures, thank you so much for the partnership, for hosting this event. When you were talking about the 30 internships and the ongoing work, and thank you, Mia, for making it all happen there in the background. 

One of the things that's very exciting for me in this announcement is, so you have the individual impact that each one of those internships, each one of those apprenticeships, everything that we do would applied learning what that does to that individual student. That is very powerful. I think this is one of the reasons why many of you wake up every morning and either do this work or support this work. 

In addition to that, we are reshaping program and policy at scale. How often do we get the chance of that great satisfaction of touching individual lives, knowing that you're making a difference, hearing the statistics that James mentioned about the placement of the students and how much they have learned, how much they value the experience, but then also being able to apply that at scale so that we actually reach a lot more students and we create a system that is prioritizing that. I think that is the kind of things that are one in a lifetime opportunities for many of us who are blessed to do many wonderful things in the hats that we get to wear. Really special day for me today. As you can see, I'm already not using the notes that the team prepared. 

The internships that we have run together have provided pathways to hundreds of students into a world of startups, tech, businesses, and we're thrilled to shine a spotlight on your dedication to opening doors to our students. In 2022, as New York City, like much of the country, was still recovering from the pandemic, I had the privilege to join Mayor Adams to announce the launch of the CUNY Inclusive Economy Initiative. It was built on a shared belief that cooperation will be key to the economic recovery of the city. With that in mind, CUNY Inclusive Economy thought to forge partnerships with many of the companies here today in order to make CUNY a magnet for businesses and launch our students into careers of their choosing. 

We built on proven models that connect the students to in-demand careers. We thought to expand the capacity of our campuses to grow and sustain talent pipelines with employers across multiple sectors and we did this by adding industry specialists to build bridges between the employers and the students with a particular focus on fast-growing fields such as tech, healthcare, and green jobs. As I said before, the initiative is more than just connecting those dots. 

We found this, and I think if anybody here doesn't know how I feel about paid internships, I guess you have not suffered through a press conference or an event with me. It's not just the chancellor repeating something, it's good data. We know what we've learned that the students in the tech programs that we have who participate in a paid internship are three times more likely to secure a job after graduation. We also know that first-time job, they get to it quicker. The first-time pay, which follows you through your career, is also higher. We also know that it has an impact on retention, meaning that the students who participate in these internships are bound to stay in course and graduate on time and faster. 

Again, we wanted to keep creating those paths, working with our partners, bringing more hybrid academic and career advisors, individuals that can talk to those students, not just about the right sequencing of the courses which you need to take, which is key and important. It keeps people on track, make sure you don't waste money on track, all those things which are key, but also injecting a trajectory of thinking about their careers. 

As one of the things that we are embedding into this program, which was funding that came from some of you, but also in our partnership with Robin Hood is our career mapping. In the same way that normally when you are looking at a website and looking about a major and you're trying to figure out your courses and it takes Business 101 in the fall, Business 102 in the spring, that sequencing that we also have something equally mindful for the students with their careers, right? What are you supposed to be doing that first semester? If you're thinking about a career in this field. We also know that some of the things that we're going to be telling them apply even if they switch their major, right? That is that having that goal in mind since the beginning that is going to be really helpful to us. 

This is why we're doubling down in this vision. So far, we have served over 3000 students with the CUNY Inclusive Economy, about 2,000 organizations engaged working with us centrally or with the campus. We've done this with a $20 million expansion which is the next phase that we're doing with the generous support of the mayor and our great funding partners that you're going to hear from in a second. We will be able to expand from six departments that we are already working with to 17. If we had additional dollars, we could do a lot more. The demand, one of the great things and those of you who worked at CUNY for a while, that sometimes when we have programming that comes from the central office, the welcomeness at the campuses is not always there, right? Oh yes, really good. Why don't you try this campus first? Then, we go in the next cycle. That's really good, but we're doing middle stage. I cannot take another thing on my campus. The phenomenal thing is that in this space, actually I have the presidents making phone calls, going on Lauren and the team telling me, no, this has to be on my campus. This is really important. I heard from the other presidents how transformational it has been. We're really onto something and we want to be able to continue to build this up to scale. 

We're building from Blackstone's LaunchPad Entrepreneur Program and with them, it's been a true partnership in redesigning when we started the journey and then getting to the point that we're now, we've learned a lot from what they brought to the table. The CUNY Futures in Finance, with our good friends, from Centerbridge and Bloomberg and Goldman Sachs. Thank you so much. That's also been an incredible thought process as we have sort of continued to redefine the program and now welded into the CUNY Inclusive Economy. 

With this critical investments, I think the goal, by the end of 2030 in a strategic plan, we want 80 percent of the CUNY graduates to be in a career of their choice. I need to make a note here because this is some of the things the chancellor doesn't win, right? I want to be able to say 100 percent, right? Then there's always that I go, but still 20 percent of our students go to graduate programs. It would not be technically correct to say that 100 percent of your students will be in careers of their chosen because we have 20 percent going to graduate school. Now you know the reason why we don't aim for 100 percent because the other 20 are going to graduate school, which is also something that we like to do in the university. That 80 percent basically means anybody who's not going to graduate school is going to be in the career of their choice by 2030, right? That's what that goal actually means. 

I also want to acknowledge that this is teamwork and I want to thank [Jennifer and Michael, Abby and Tamara] for the work that you all do. Some of you I'm meeting for the first time in person, I've seen you virtually and in emails, but also a testament of the great leadership in this field is that the person who's responsible for writing these notes didn't want me to thank her, right? I'm going to make sure that we give Lauren a big round of applause for her leadership and all that she does in this arena. The message here is muy sencillo, facilito, right? Easy, right? If you want to invest in New York, you invest in CUNY, right? 

That is the future of our city. That brings all the incredible talents and assets that New Yorkers can bring to the table to different fields and industries all over the city. The desire to be in the city and to stay in the city, which is the DNA of our CUNY students. The companies that have been participating in these programs, I have no doubt, I have no doubt that the talent that you've been getting from the City University of New York stands up to the test of any talent that you've been bringing from any other universities that you've been recruiting from. The one thing that I have no doubt is different is the diversity that you get from that team and the commitment that you're going to get of individuals who stay here in New York and help your companies thrive here locally. 

Thank you for that investment. Thank you for that belief. Thank you for being incredible thought partners in this journey. The best is yet to come. This is the beginning of crystallizing a vision that we hope in partnership with our campuses that will be the way that career engagement and this work at CUNY is elevated to the next level. We need the public support, we need the philanthropic support and just know that the willingness in the entire CUNY central team and in our campuses is there and we thank you for the partnership. With that, I turn it back to Lauren.

Andersen: Thank you, chancellor, much appreciated. As the chancellor said, we simply can't do this work without our partners and today's announcement is truly a public-private collaboration and reflects many years and dedication of doing this work together. It is my pleasure to bring up first our partner, Maura Pally, the Executive Director of Blackstone Charitable Foundation who the chancellor mentioned has been working with us for several years around an innovative collaboration called the Blackstone LaunchPad and we're thrilled for this next wave of collaboration where that will be integrated into our CUNY inclusive economy work. Thank you, Maura.

Maura Pally, Executive Director, Blackstone Charitable Foundation: Thank you, Lauren, and thank you, Chancellor Rodriguez. I'm so proud to be able to announce that Blackstone is committing $4 million to CUNY Inclusive Economy Program. That brings our total commitment to CUNY since 2021 to $10 million. We truly believe in CUNY the institution, in CUNY leadership and most importantly, the incredibly inspiring CUNY students. We stand behind them, we support them, we're wowed by them every time we bring them to some type of event and just meet with them or place them in an internship. That's truly why we're here. 

Just a little bit about Blackstone, for those who don't know, since I have the mic, Blackstone is the world's largest alternative asset manager. We own over 230 companies and we're the world's largest owner of commercial real estate. That is quite big, yes. What that means is that we have an incredibly unique vantage point to employers. What is happening in businesses? What makes successful businesses? A key thing that has come out of our unique vantage point is talent matters. Specifically, talent combined of diverse teams of people with varying backgrounds, interests, identities, experiences, make better business decisions. For Blackstone, this is not a charitable thing, though for me it is, as the charitable head, but we really focus on this work because we know it works and we know it matters. 

Blackstone LaunchPad, which has been mentioned a few times, is really an extension of that work because at Blackstone, our goals are really twofold. We want to identify untapped talent and provide them pipelines into companies. We also work with our companies to develop a culture of inclusivity so that untapped talent is set up to succeed and really have a mobile career in those companies. With Blackstone LaunchPad, the way we've chosen to do this is by helping support students learn entrepreneurial skills. This originally started as a program about a dozen years ago, truly just focused on students who had a business idea and wanted to be a CEO. What we realized over the years was the entrepreneurial skills, leadership, problem solving, communication, tenacity is what we look for in people at Blackstone and what really every employer looks for. So let's broaden the pool, help support students to develop these skills. Now we're in over 60 schools across the country, primarily HBCUs and Hispanic serving institutions. We develop programming to help them build these skills. 

We also realize that skills are just not enough. Students need opportunity. My remarks will be even shorter thanks to Chancellor Rodríguez going so clearly through how much internship matters. Internships, paid quality internships can be game changers in students' lives. Last year we piloted an internship component to Blackstone, to our Blackstone LaunchPad. We're placing students at Blackstone, at our portfolio companies and at select startups. This summer we will have placed 250 students, 100 from CUNY at our employer network. We truly believe that this is a game changer and it is such perfect alignment with CUNY's commitment to tripling the number of paid interns who graduate from CUNY. That is an ambitious, bold goal that really will be a career changer. We couldn't be more happy to partner with the CUNY team on that. 

I do really want to thank Chancellor Rodríguez and Lauren and Lauren's whole team. You two have been such incredible thought partners. You've been patient with us, we've been patient with you. I really feel we've gotten to such a great place where our shared goals, originally our approaches were different, but our shared goals were always the same. Now they're coming together really beautifully. I think that's also true for the other corporate partners. That's not an easy task. Kudos to you and your team for getting all of us on the corporate side aligned with your vision and excited about it. 

I also do want to thank Company Ventures. You've been our partner for over three years. We underwrite the internships, but it's you and your team who help make them so successful. It's really been a wonderful partnership. Thank you to Company Ventures. With that, I just say, I think we're all so proud to be here and excited to see the success that students experience through this new program. Thank you so much. 

Andersen: Thank you, Maura. I just want to underscore the partnership truly has been tremendous with Blackstone, with these partners on the stage. We really appreciate the chance to build something together, which is really fabulous. As many of you know, CUNY is 175 years old, and there aren't many institutions that see us as a young up-and-comer. It turns out Bank of New York Mellon has celebrated their 240th anniversary this year. If the current era is any indication, I'm sure if we go back in the record books, we would find evidence in the 1800s of collaboration between our institutions. Because Bank of New York Mellon has been so dedicated to making the city that they call home, one that is more inclusive, one that is truly based on partnership. I'd like to welcome Courtney Murphy, who's the Director and Head of Strategy and US Giving for Global Impact at BNY Mellon. Sorry, that was a long title, but I hope I got it.

Courtney Murphy, Director, Head of Strategy and US Grants, Global Impact Citizenship, Bank of New York Mellon: Thank you, Lauren. Thank you, Chancellor Rodríguez, for inviting me on behalf of BNY Mellon and the Bank of New York Mellon Foundation. We're proud to continue our longstanding partnership with CUNY. This is a really special collaboration for us given our deep roots in New York City and the special role that CUNY plays as an esteemed institution that helps New York to work. 

As Lauren mentioned, BNY Mellon is celebrating our 240th anniversary this year. New York City is our home and has been since 1784. We have grown up with the city. BNY Mellon was the first company traded on the New York Stock Exchange and happens to be the oldest continuously operating company in the city. Since our earliest days, we've played an important role in New York's history, and not only in its emergence as the world's financial center, but also in helping build the city and state itself. 

A little bit of trivia. In the early 1800s, BNY Mellon helped to fund boats along the Hudson when the Industrial Revolution took steam. More recently, we were a lender to the railways, to the Erie Canal, to the New York City Subway, and countless other projects that have helped to build New York City and State. Today, we continue this work across many dimensions, one of which is helping to build an inclusive economy. We're proud to both support and recruit from CUNY. It really is a mutually beneficial relationship. CUNY students bring, as we've heard, a diverse top talent pipeline that helps to strengthen our company and to make our company more resilient for the long term. We have a focus on mentoring in our internship programs, and we also provide flexible arrangements to help students who we know are extremely hardworking, often holding multiple jobs at the same time. We have a focus on our philanthropic work, our corporate giving, on empowering communities so that everybody can thrive. We serve to advance a more inclusive economy through our philanthropic corporate giving, through efforts to support organizations that provide social mobility, that help to strengthen financially underserved communities, and that also help to build a more resilient future. 

As part of our $20 million multi-year commitment to developing the workforce of the future, which was fulfilled last year, we provided funding to CUNY for paid internship programs and also a new transfer scholars program. Our impact advising program has been working very closely with CUNY central office on its technology strategy. Now we're excited to contribute to the expansion of the CUNY Inclusive Economy Initiative, which as we've heard, will help to reach even more CUNY students with early exposure to careers and professions through skills building and internships, among many other facets of this incredible programming. The faculty and residents programming will also tap our experts and our leaders as adjunct professors and we look forward to continuing to support the capacity and operations of CUNY through our pro bono program. Through this initiative, BNY Mellon is proud to continue to invest in the students and families of CUNY who truly represent the best of New York. Thank you.

Andersen: Thank you, Courtney, very much. Welcome Mr. Mayor. Our last industry partner, but certainly not our least industry partner is Johanna Meadows, the head of the Centerbridge Foundation and managing director at Centerbridge Partners. The Centerbridge team under Johanna and the co-founder and managing partner, Jeff Aronson, have gone above and beyond to make sure that CUNY students can not only understand the skills they need to enter the financial sector, but also have the opportunity to do so. They've dedicated a whole summer cohort of internships to CUNY students and brought together additional partners, Goldman Sachs and Bloomberg LP to launch CUNY Futures in Finance, which we have been running for two and a half years now and are thrilled with the results and very excited for it to be coming under the banner of CUNY Inclusive Economy. Johanna, please come say a few words.

Johanna Meadows, Managing Director, Head of Centerbridge Foundation, Centerbridge Partners, L.P.: Hi everybody, it's so nice to see you all today. Thank you for hosting us. Thank you to the chancellor, to Mayor Adams and of course our partners. I'm Johanna Meadows, the head of the Centerbridge Foundation, as Lauren just said. As Maura did, since I have the mic, I have to tell you a little bit about Centerbridge and why we're here today. 

We were founded about 20 years ago. We are a global investment manager focused on private equity, private credit and real estate. When we were founded in New York City by Mark Gallogly and Jeff Aronson, we also established our philanthropic foundation, which has been ingrained in our firm's culture ever since. Our mission, as many of our missions here today, are to provide economic and educational opportunities for young people so they could achieve their potential. We approach that mission a few different ways. Through our philanthropic investments in partnership with Bain & Company, who provides strategic support. I see Carrie here today. Our team volunteer initiatives across New York and London, and of course, our multifaceted deep partnership with CUNY. 

We simply cannot accomplish our mission without CUNY. The biggest engine of social mobility in the country in our own backyard, right? Which works tirelessly to help students reach the middle class. Our CUNY partnership has four dimensions. Don't worry, I won't go through each one totally. We have our fellowship, we have philanthropic support. We have our summer internship, as Lauren just mentioned. Of course, Futures in Finance, which I'll talk about in a second. Our partnership really began about eight years ago, sitting around the table thinking about how do we walk the walk? How do we support CUNY students? Not only on the philanthropic side, but getting them into careers in our industry. 

We developed the Investment Industry Fellowship. It's a nine month program for sophomores and juniors who want to get into the industry. All of our workshops are run by our Centerbridge team members, they’re mentors to the fellows as well. To date, we've worked with over 130 fellows, most of whom have interned, and many of whom are already working in our industry today. Actually, a few of them met Mayor Adams on Zoom this fall, which we were really fortunate about. Also one of our fellows is here today, Gabriella. 

While this fellowship has been and continues to be quite successful, we knew and we strongly believe that we should not be doing this work alone. That's why we're here today, to talk about partnership and the impact that partnership can have. A few years into running the fellowship, we partnered with our friends at Goldman and at Bloomberg, who were already doing incredible work with CUNY as well but to together as equal partners, take one step further to help build a bridge to the thousands of young people from CUNY who are looking for jobs in our sector and to connect them to our companies, not just the three of ours, but to many financial sector companies across New York City. 

We announced Futures in Finance in 2021 and launched it in 2022 to build the capacity, really hiring team members across three campuses — Lehman, Brooklyn, and City — to expose 3,000 students to this industry. As we move this initiative to the next phase of growth, all of us, Bloomberg, Goldman, and Centerbridge are incredibly excited that we could roll Futures in Finance into the CUNY Inclusive Economy Initiative as the first finance track. 

Working together with the additional support of the city with a CUNY team embedded in academic departments, we'll be able to connect with more students, more faculty, and more industry leaders to help students achieve their goals. We look forward to many more companies coming together at the table with us to do this. I'm also like the chancellor, when we're among this crowd, we should certainly be saying that because at the end of the day, we deeply believe that investing in CUNY's strong, diverse talent together and establishing these career pathways is not only important for CUNY, it's not only important for the firms here today, but it's imperative for our city. It's exactly what the chancellor said at the beginning of this. 

I'm looking forward to what's ahead for Futures in Finance to continuing to work together with Lauren's amazing team day in and day out, get excited. We're here for the ride and we're really excited. Thank you all so much. Thank you.

Andersen: Thank you so much, Johanna, for your dedication, your magnetism and the emails I know you're going to write to a million people after this to get them on board. Now it is our great fortune and we are so grateful to have closing out this program, a tremendous champion for economic mobility, a two-time CUNY graduate himself, the 110th mayor of the City of New York, Eric Adams. Thank you.

Mayor Eric Adams: Thanks to the chancellor. This was my first year in office. We talked about this initiative and people often ask why is this so important? I think Johanna really nailed it when she stated it is not only the mission of her company, but it is really the mission of our city when you think about it. 

I always use the analogy, when I was, my family owns a lot of land in Alabama. When I go down, I sort of played a farmer role and I move hay from one side of the land to the next. One day the trailer broke down and I had to figure out how to accomplish the task. I hooked up a motorcycle to one of the wagons and moved it over to the other. When I finished, I thought about, I said, I [inaudible] this in Cambodia. They don't have a lot of cars. They'll use something called a tuk tuk to move their items, everything they move on a tuk tuk. 

When you think of CUNY, you often say, well, okay, we're doing the students a favor. No, you're not. The students are doing us a favor. If we're going to solve global problems, then we have to have a global workforce. We're going to need individuals to sit in a room with us who are going to bring their cultural understandings and how they viewed life and their life experiences. Those intangibles are just invaluable. When you sit down in a boardroom, if everyone in the boardroom looks like you, talks like you, walks like you, eats the same food, do the same thing, you're going to have the monolithic approach to face a global problems. 

The problems we're facing now is going to take, wait a minute, I remember grandma used to use this to do that. I remember grandfather used to do this to do that. All of that relationship, you could be academically smart and come from some of the major expensive institutions. I know it first hand, I'm still paying for my son's madness. That's all great. But that emotional intelligence from life experiences of growing up in New York City, where 4.1 million people use the subway system, 8.3 million people with 35 million opinions telling you how to do things. So much is happening here. 

The largest number of graduates coming to New York City. We are outpacing the entire country in new tech startups that are coming here and the relationships we have. This is an international city and nothing personifies the international aspect of our city than CUNY. You go to CUNY and the chancellor is so proud to throw out those numbers of how many different countries, how many different languages, how many different life experiences. That diversity is going to produce the better product. 

This is a real win because you can build pipelines to many things, but a pipeline to a profession is going to lift up our entire city. I'm so excited the chancellor had the vision to see what were the possibilities. Thank you so much for this, of bringing this level of diversity. Just walk anytime you want to be optimistic about our future, go on a CUNY campus, walk through Baruch, walk through New York City College of Technology, walk through Brooklyn College, walk through Medgar Evers College. You walk through and you can feel the energy that I believe diversity comes with. My years, I'm a CUNY two-fer, as it was stated. My years at New York City College of Technology, I knew nothing about sailing the waters of Mykonos, Greece until I met someone from Greece. 

I knew nothing about thinking about going to Moscow until I met a Russian-speaking student. When you think about all of your creative energy, it comes from that classroom. Now it's going to the boardrooms. You're going to have someone from the South Bronx telling you how do you expand financial literacy and how do you get new bankers? You're going to have someone from Brownsville saying how do we deal with the food insecurity in our community? If you want to open a Sweetgreen, here's a way to do it to make it attractive to the community or South Jamaica, Queens, right by your college. How do you use technology to identify the issues around climate change? 

This is what it's going to take. This is the type of visionary leadership that we need. We have the best product in this entire country because of our diversity. For some reason, we ignored these CUNY students. We did not believe they brought all that they have to offer. Now with partnerships with these great corporations, they are realizing because they're seeing their forward thinking, they're realizing that the answer lies in our CUNY institutions. So CUNY Inclusive Economic Initiative is a real win for us. We may not have won the game yesterday, but we have a win today. We still got the Rangers. Still got the Rangers. The program puts talented CUNY students on the path to good paying career jobs. We're really excited about it. 

Look at today, the numbers were mentioned. We have served over 3,100 students with more than 2,000 industry partners and advanced our goal to connect 80 percent of CUNY graduates with careers following graduation in 2030. With the monies there, it includes a $4.8 million that's baselined in the city budget. It's not going away. $7 million from our private partners to reach an additional 1,200 CUNY students annually across over 20 academic departments as part of our spring job sprint. We have more jobs in this city than in the city's history. What has happened in the past is that it was not spread out evenly. 

Came into office, Black unemployment was four times the rate of white. We cut that in half for the first time since 2019, we're down to less than 8 percent. We're seeing that prosperity, the popularity turn into prosperity for our entire city. I am just really proud of this initiative. 

This is an initiative that's going to help to include all New Yorkers to be part of the popularity of our brand is turning into prosperity for our New Yorkers. Thank you to our partners. Thank you for making this happen. Let's continue to employ New Yorkers and CUNY students. Thank you very much.

Andersen: Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor. With that, we look forward to working with all of you and new partners as we get started in this new expansion. Thank you for coming. Look forward to working with you. 

Mayor Adams: Michael, how are you?

Question: I'm good. I've got two questions, actually. The first is, do you feel betrayed by Andrew Cuomo regarding the whole Riis Houses thing? That's the first. The other thing is, you mentioned this land in Alabama. Where precisely is this land in Alabama when you're going down, like Farmer Joe…

Mayor Adams: Cecil in Montgomery is where my family's from. 

Question: Is that where… 

Mayor Adams: That's where my that's where my grandparents are from. 

Question: Is that like down in South Alabama? 

Mayor Adams: Yes. Ooh. Yes. 

Question: I just know part of…. I just know that one place. 

Mayor Adams: It's in, it's in Alabama. We own a lot of land down there from my grandparents in Alabama. We still hold, they held on to it. A lot was stolen, but they're still holding on to it. 

And I don't feel betrayed. Many people have opinions.8.3 million New Yorkers, 35 million opinions. That's just life in a big city. 

Question: Do you think he's running for mayor? 

Mayor Adams: Not concerned with that. I'm concerned with governing an amazing city. You don't spend 35 years climbing to the top of the mountain and worry about the view. You enjoy the view. Right now, I'm on the top of the mountain. I'm the mayor of the greatest city on the globe.