Thrive Dispatches Season 2, Episode 9: Building the Workforce Behind the Workforce with Jamal Berry
This week, Dr. Matt Biel speaks with Jamal Berry , President and CEO of Educare DC , a model early childhood program serving more than 375 children prenatal to age five across two campuses and partner sites in Wards 7 and 8 of Washington, DC. Jamal joined Educare DC in 2013 as an infant and toddler mentor teacher and has moved through nearly every layer of leadership since. He is also an Ascend Fellow at the Aspen Institute .
In their conversation, Jamal and Matt talk about what drew Jamal to early childhood work in the first place (his mother, the first in her family to attend college and the kind of person who always pulled out an extra plate at Sunday dinner), and what has kept him there. They explore what it really means to close the opportunity gap, not only for the children Educare serves but for the families and communities around them. As Jamal puts it: “We’re the workforce behind the workforce.”
The conversation turns to some of the concrete solutions Jamal has built at Educare DC. A workforce development pipeline called the Traveling Teacher Aides program, which recruits candidates with a high school diploma, trains them for 30 days, and places them in classrooms as support staff who can grow into lead teachers. 60 educators have been trained so far, with a goal of 100. A second campus that recently earned National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) accreditation. And the ongoing fight for DC’s Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund , which Jamal says kept teachers in the field who were “ready to be out the door” and which is, in his words, “constantly under threat.”
Jamal also shares a framing that runs through his leadership: “Adults are children that grew up.” When you treat development as something that does not stop at five, you build different kinds of organizations. You think about trauma, about scaffolding, about what is behind a behavior, about time for play. You take staff to “Work Hard, Play Hard” days when they earn an accreditation. You hire for passion and train for skill. And as Jamal told Matt about the teachers in his classrooms, they are “the architects of their brains,” and we would not pay an architect minimum wage.
For questions, comments, or ideas for future episodes, please email us at: thrivecenter@georgetown.edu .
Download Full Transcript
Listen to the episode on Spotify
View the episode on Vimeo