PBN 2023 Business Women Awards
SOCIAL SERVICES/NONPROFIT INDUSTRY LEADER: Nina Pande | Skills for Rhode Island’s Future executive director
NINA PANDE HAS been told that she can’t call herself a Rhode Islander because she wasn’t born here. But one would be hard-pressed to find someone who cares more about the future of the Ocean State than Pande, founding executive director of Skills for Rhode Island’s Future.
Unlike other career development agencies that focus on preparing job seekers for industries, SkillsRI seeks to serve as a demand-driven intermediary between those job seekers and the employers themselves. In practice, this means that SkillsRI tailors training programs to the specific needs of its employer partners.
SkillsRI looks to create an “ecosystem” in which the state’s workforce can thrive. From small businesses to large universities and corporations, SkillsRI manages more than 260 employer partnerships on any given day.
“We start with employers in mind,” Pande said. “We help build the talent pipeline.”
Pande’s journey began when her parents sought the same economic opportunity that she now helps others achieve. After immigrating to the U.S. from India, Pande’s father started a chemical manufacturing company in Rhode Island. Pande left the state to get a master’s degree in social work, and returned to work for the R.I. Department of Children, Youth & Families, where she worked with justice-involved youths. This job was “perhaps the most important part of my education,” shaping her priorities throughout her career, she said.
After several years working for the state, Pande entered the nonprofit world. She created youth-focused programs for various Providence community organizations and served for nine years as Federal Hill House Association’s executive director. These experiences helped her understand the importance of education, especially in the “formative years” of youths, she said. But at the same time, Pande was beginning to look at the bigger picture, the context kids were coming from – families.
She began asking herself the fundamental questions that now drive her career. “How do we make sure folks have a path to economic mobility?” she said. “What are the systematic barriers to success? How do you disrupt systems that, intentionally or unintentionally, don’t allow people to grow?”
Pande confronted these questions head-on. In October 2016, a group of Rhode Island officials and local businesses banded together to fund an Ocean State “replication” of the Chicago-based organization Skills for Chicagoland’s Future. Then-Gov. Gina M. Raimondo said at the time that SkillsRI would put the state at the “forefront of innovating new solutions” to unemployment.
By the time SkillsRI launched, the organization received 150 hiring commitments from local businesses with help from connections made in Chicago.
Pande says education goes hand in hand with economic development. Her favorite SkillsRI programs are ones that involve students, such as the PrepareRI Internship Program. That program secures paid internships for Rhode Island high school juniors. These students, most of whom reside in districts where academic performance is lacking, also can take college classes, Pande said.
“We as an agency believe firmly that in our public education system, students need to have significant exposure to career opportunities,” Pande said.
Pande doesn’t sugarcoat the challenges students and job seekers face, especially in the COVID-19 pandemic’s wake. The business community sees “more and more individuals who’ve come out of the pandemic with trauma,” she said, especially in industries such as education and health care.
After teaching for many years at Rhode Island College and serving until recently on the Providence Public School District’s school board, Pande sees education as a particular challenge for the state. Rhode Island, she says, needs to make some strategic investments in public education.
“We are encouraging our industry partners to help lead” those investments, Pande said.
Even so, Pande sees encouraging trends, such as an increase in new small businesses, that she wants to support.
“Rhode Island has everything we need to be the nation’s trendsetter in so many areas,” she said. “To get there, though, every Rhode Islander that wants to work should be able to get on a pathway to a skilled job.”
