Aldermen, Board of

A special meeting of the Board of Aldermen was held Monday, March 21, 2016, at 7:30 p.m. in the City Hall Auditorium President Brian S. McCarthy presided; City Clerk Patricia D. Piecuch recorded. Prayer was offered by City Clerk Patricia D. Piecuch; Alderman Richard A. Dowd led in the Pledge to the Flag. The roll call was taken with 13 members of the Board of Aldermen present; Alderman Caron and Alderman Cookson were recorded absent. Corporation Counsel Steven A. Bolton was also in attendance. COMMUNICATIONS MOTION BY ALDERMAN WILSHIRE THAT ALL COMMUNICATIONS BE READ BY TITLE ONLY MOTION CARRIED From: Brian S. McCarthy, President, Board of Aldermen Re: Special Board of Aldermen Meeting MOTION BY ALDERMAN WILSHIRE TO ACCEPT AND PLACE ON FILE MOTION CARRIED PRESENTATIONS Joint Presentation by Greater Nashua Chamber of Commerce and One Greater Nashua Ms. Liz Fitzgerald, United Way of Greater Nashua I am one of the two Co-Chairs of the One Greater Nashua Coalition. I want to thank you for extending this invitation to speak with us. There are a lot of folks sitting up here and that’s because this is a community based coalition with many people participating and representing many different organizations. I am going to give you a little bit of history of where the coalition came from and why we want to go forward with such a thing and my co-chair, Jared Barbosa will talk to you about just exactly what the coalition is and Janeth Orozco- Sanchez, Jennifer McCormack and Tracy Hatch will talk about each of the specific goals as they are chairing those specific goals. Galina will also talk a little bit more about the opportunity and the imperative for the work that we are doing. About three years ago during United Way’s Day of Caring some folks in the community came together as their contribution for the day; the Day of Caring is a community-wide day of service where about 350 people from companies and organizations throughout the city give up a day at their office or at home to go into the community at one of our service providers and do some kind of task or function for a non-profit. It’s usually painting a wall or building a fence. These particular individuals met at the community college and just had a conversation about their vision for the community and Greater Nashua. That conversation was facilitated by New Hampshire Listens and one of the recurring themes that came out of that was the idea that the community was growing and rapidly changing in its demographic make-up and that although there were leaders emerging in all different walks of life and communities, the groups were not connecting. The establishment leaders were not connecting with the people that were emerging in different communities. All of the people at the table felt like that was a really important thing to address. Paul Hebert, who was president of the United Way at the time and Chris Williams who was president of the Chamber of Commerce volunteered to take that on and find a way that we could bring the communities together. Just about six months after that meeting the Endowment for Health put out an RFP around immigrant integration. They were looking for four communities in the state. They wanted a broad sector of people to come together and plan. They were willing to fund for the planning and they wanted one proposal from each of the communities and if they liked what they saw they were willing to invest for three years in those initiatives with some best practices coming from Welcoming New Hampshire. Special Board of Aldermen Meeting Page 2 March 21, 2016 This might be a hard slide to see. This breaks down our interest as a United Way was in health. So, in terms of health you look at how long a person lives and how healthy a person’s lifespan feels. Of all the things that contribute to a person’s long-term health outcomes, their social factors are 40% of that. So not your DNA, not your access to healthcare but how well you live and where you live and how you feel about how you live. That’s why we chose to focus on social inclusion in integration. The Endowment for Health was very broad and allowed each community to define what their term for immigrant was. We felt that people could be living in our community and not feel connected to us for three weeks or three generations and still not feel connected to the community. We painted the term immigrant as broadly as possible and that’s where we came up with the notion of a One Greater Nashua; a feeling that our community is strongest when all people have the opportunity to participate at their full potential. Mr. Jared Barbosa, Co-Chair, One Greater Nashua Coalition I’d like to start this aspect of the presentation with a quote. “Nashua’s legacy as a community of innovation, advancement, experimentation, invention, enterprise, diversity, culture, tradition and youth stands as strong as granite, as powerful as our rivers and as eternal as our land. The Gate City will go forward and continue to make history.” This quote really sets the tone for what OGN is all about and aspires to be. It is our mission, our goal, to improve healthy equity through social integration and social inclusion. Hence our motto “Stronger Together.” After many weeks of meetings we reconvened as a coalition to develop a well thought out plan, a plan that includes opportunities in economic vitality, community engagement and leadership. We strongly believe that opening these doors will lead to improved overall health. We value our growing diversity and I’d like you to remember that for the next slide. This slide shows a map of Greater Nashua; the blue & yellow indicate sections that are the highest concentration of our non-white adult population and here is a concentration of our non-white youth population and red being the highest concentration. The reality is diversity is growing. In ten years that’s our workforce. We feel it is important to value this growing population and we believe that our plan truly invests in it. We have a three pronged approach to our three year plan to fundamentally change the way Nashua makes decisions. We knew it wouldn’t work if we tried to reinvent the wheel so we built a bigger table. Building a stronger cohesion between stakeholders and ultimately creating stronger feelings of belonging among all residents. Each pathway has its own focused goal group anchored by existing institutions in the community. Specific measured goals and objectives; each goal group connects through others through the goal. Goals are interconnected and complimentary. I’ll explain a little bit about each goal. Gateways and cultural navigators help newcomers with skills that they need to succeed. Business and civic engagement attract young people to our community and encourage civic leadership and engagement and youth leadership. Ms. Janet Orozco One of the things that mainly highlight with the youth goal group is that we as a community emphasize on middle schools. We learned that some of the neighborhoods are very different and unique so when the middle meet for the first time coming from the twelve elementary schools it’s a different dynamic of how kids associate with each other and how parents interact with other. We also learned that perhaps if we come up with a system or build up in the culture of the middle school that are in our communities; how do we make it more of developing academics of success, opportunity of engagement for the parents and the youth and kind of build up what is in their schools already. When we approached the administrators of the schools we also offered the opportunity of enriching their curriculum in the sense of when we could provide cultural effectiveness training in the sense of what are the faculty learning that we could build that from and also have a more global understanding of what the community sees as a community because it’s easier….I can say that being a minority Latina in my neighborhood, I find ways that I can highlight what my district is about but also bring in what I have. We wanted to allow that opportunity for the teachers to understand what the parents have to bring and how they could bring it in a more effective way where everyone understands each other. We could highlight projects that the school per se wants to do. One of the things that we were invited to do was to become part of the summer program, the ELLO Summer Program so we came in with a very open mind and understanding that the school already has a curriculum for that but we built up on leadership so we worked Special Board of Aldermen Meeting Page 3 March 21, 2016 with the youth at the high schools during the summer and this is an opportunity where middle schools and high schools are together and we had a great opportunity of exploring what leadership meant to them and how they felt about their community. Many of them had projects for their own particular school. It’s amazing to see the progress that these teens have been able to do for their school. Some were able to advocate for multi- language dictionaries in their school in a very short period of time. Their schools probably have over $500.00 in dictionaries that they didn’t have at the beginning of the year. Moving forward I think we will continue with the schools doing a welcoming nights for parents and also for the youth. Another thing is to reach out to the afterschool programs in the Nashua area; we have all of the participants like the Boys and Girls Club, Girls, Inc, YMCA, the Nashua Prevention Coalition; anyone who is identifying themselves as working with youth. Ms. Fitzgerald I’d like to talk to you about the navigator, Cultural Navigator is actually the title that this group started with and this program is actually modelled after a program that the Hartford Public Library started four years ago to be a partner in Hartford’s grappling with the growing immigrant population and how to make them feel more integrated. In Hartford in particular the library has the American Place so it’s a little bit more than the Navigator Program but we took that and we adopted it and made it more special to Nashua. The Navigators are a group of community volunteers and they are trained to be friendly neighbors and mentors to immigrants and refugees in our city. Their particular role is not to be a social worker but a friendly face to give them advice and help them engage more fully in their community. The library and the Adult Learning Center have formed a partnership and the Adult Learning Center is posting the coordinator position for our Navigators and the library is hosting a series of welcome events that will be run by our Navigators. The first events topic is Emergency Services so we are inviting folks from the fire department and the police department and talk a little bit about when it is appropriate to call emergency services and what to expect to happen when you do that. We recruited our first group of Navigators in September of last and we had over 30 people volunteer and 18 of them were from another country and represented 14 other languages that were spoken. They were joined by 13 volunteers that were long-time Nashua residents. We had a Navigator who volunteered and she had only been in the country for a few months, she didn’t drive and she didn’t have a job. One of the other Navigator volunteers showed her how to use the bus and helped her find the courage to apply for a job at a place where she had already applied once, she got a job and now she is employee of the month. It’s fantastic to see a group of volunteers become friends and become a support for one another. We see this program as a way to person by person change our city and make it a more welcoming place. Our Navigators are not trained to do tasks for someone but to help them find the courage and the daring to help them figure out how to do it for themselves. I like to think about it as our Navigators helping immigrants learn what the expectations and possibilities of their new home are. Ms. Tracy Hatch, President and CEO of the Greater Nashua Chamber of Commerce I am not here tonight representing the Chamber, I am here as the co-chair, along with Galina Szakacs; we are the two co-chairs of the Business and Civic Leadership Goal Group for One Greater Nashua. Most people the Chamber is all about economic development and a skilled workforce and that’s true but what leads to that are leaders, the people in our community who step forward like all of you have on the Board of Aldermen to take a role in shaping our community. We need to make sure that when we look to leaders of the future that we are not just looking to those of us who are traditional Nashuans. We want to look into some of the areas within Nashua that aren’t traditional Nashuans and we want to engage and support them. When you think about how many of us got our start in leadership positions we followed some fairly traditional paths. We joined Rotary, and exchange club or the Lion’s Club or became members of the Chamber of Commerce. Yet for the newcomers or those who may have had several generations here in Nashua but don’t come from our white bread background, that’s not necessarily the normal way that they connect and as we look for leaders in the future, we need to be very cognizant of that. We need to not only open the doors to those more traditional places like the Rotary and the Chamber of Commerce but we also need to see where are those leaders, that 18%, those youth leaders that Jared pointed to and Janeth pointed to, where are they connecting today? Where are their parents connecting because it’s probably not where you and I connect today? We need to find Special Board of Aldermen Meeting Page 4 March 21, 2016 that and we need to understand how those connections are being made and reach out to make sure that those connections are being made community wide or 10 or 20 years from now our leaders will continue to only represent a smaller and smaller population of Nashua and that’s not helpful or healthful for any of us. Another big piece of what the Business and Civic Goal Group is working towards is the establishment of Nashua Listens. You’ve heard Liz talk about the initial stages of One Greater Nashua forming in the first place and kudos to the United Way for the work that they have done over the years but in particular for bringing New Hampshire Listens in to have a conversation about what was happening in our community and recognize the opportunities and challenges happening in our community. There are any number of conversations that we may and will face as a community that may be difficult for us to have. If you look nationally at conversations around immigration; the newest people coming to our country whether they are refugees or immigrants, whether they are legal or illegal, those conversations are happening in a very difficult environment which not often leads to positive outcomes. New Hampshire Listens helps to train local communities to have their own version of that; to help have conversations in the community that directly affect that community. We are hoping to establish that within Nashua, not to run it ourselves or have it be an individual social service agency but to have it be truly a coalition of leaders and thinkers in Nashua who learn how to have challenging conversations as a way to lead us forward. I think if you look at a whole of what we are trying to do, it is to build leaders and help ensure that in 10 to 20 years from now when we might not be active at the table anymore that the new leaders understand what our Nashua is about and that they feel they belong. Ms. Galina Szakacs, Co-Chair, Business and Civic Leadership Goal Group for One Greater Nashua My role is a little bit different in this presentation. I joined as a coach and as a person with cultural experience in social life and cultural adaptation. I have worked for 23 at Pfizer as a manager. OGN is not a charity. Now you have everything, this is the land of opportunity and the American dream. Then you think why they don’t do it, why they are not good students or why they don’t work or why they are on welfare. Why don’t they contribute to the country that opened the door? I would like to say that we all experience difficulty to establish who we are in this country and in this city? All of your positions didn’t come to you very easily and so you fought to be who you are in your identify. You try to make relationships with people and a lot of people don’t understand you and you are here on your land. People who are coming here are not of this land. They are different people. They don’t know what to do or how to behave and I have experienced that myself. Even if they have the ability and capacity they are not sure that they can step in and say hello I am….because they feel that they are guests. Unless you feel that you are one of us you will not step in and you will not say that I have a problem or say that I have something to bring to the table and we have to understand that because actually we are interested for them to come to our house. We are not a charity giving them gifts. We are actually personally interested in diversity. We would like to help them to recognize their identity, to feel like they belong and not guests and to tell them that it is okay. Come and tell us who you are and what you can do and we will find a pertinently. I am in the Civic and Business Goal Group and it wasn’t an easy conversation at first. What does that mean? Does that mean I have to cut a piece of my pie and give it to them? I already have a good business and I don’t need to spend my time but in reality what happened was every new business coming to Nashua make our economy stronger and sustainable because we are in constant change and you don’t know what will come tomorrow. If you have a very narrow and very focused business you might not be flexible enough to survey. If you can increase the variety of the business you not only bring different customers to yourself but you actually make yourself more flexible. Another point is that it is a beautiful garden. Coming to a new country, these people coming to you, coming to a new culture, they have special genes in their DNA. To come and cross the border and know that people speak a different language and walk on a different side of the road, you already have to have courage, you already have to be flexible and be willing to learn. I have a friend from Ghana and he doesn’t use a fork, I could be very biased and say well, this person doesn’t use a fork and I asked how come he doesn’t use a fork and he said in our country everything we eat is a stew, we don’t have water in Ghana. They are a little bit braver than we are in our comfortable situation. If you look, more than 30% of Fortune 500 companies’ were founded by immigrants. They took a risk; they had nothing to lose, the already lost their home and their country and they will live here for many years before this will become their home. Every foreign born worker with an advanced degree creates 2.5 jobs for American born workers. After decades of steady growth Nashua experienced a negative net immigration. My question is Special Board of Aldermen Meeting Page 5 March 21, 2016 if we have the most educated immigrants then how come they don’t stay? How come the people are leaving and New Hampshire has 2,000 unfilled high-tech jobs right now? What is wrong? That does not paint a good picture. It means my daughter will go live in another state after she graduates from college. It means that educated diverse people who can create 2.5 jobs for us will leave too. I think they are leaving because they don’t feel that they are welcome. Look at us, what color we are; I went to the Chamber of Commerce, I went to Rotary because I was invited. Look who is there, there are no diverse people there. So what, they don’t have ideas, they don’t have talents? Or, is it that they feel uncomfortable to invite and talk and ask how you are; where do you come from or what can you do. That is my point about why OGN is not a charity. We don’t take this grant for three years and give to poor and unfortunate people who came here or live here for 20 years. OGN is a project and should sustain 10 years after now and it’s good for the city and restore the cycle of dependence and start the cycle of contribution. That’s all, thank you. Ms. Jennifer McCormack, Director, Nashua Public Library This slide is very aptly titled “Join Us.” I am really proud as the library director to be part of this initiative. I’m proud to be part of this effort to change our city to make it more welcoming. There are other city services also involved; the Public Health Department has been involved in this project since the beginning and the schools are involved on a couple of levels. We are inviting any community leader whether it be elected officials or anybody watching to come and work with us and at the very least embrace the values that we are talking about that people that are new to our city no matter where they come from are important contributors and make our city stronger and better and that we should be welcoming and asking people that are new with a different color skin or a different language or a kooky way that they wear their hair, what do you have to offer that would make our community better? If you could join us coalition that would be great. If you can just talk about us verbally and just offer support that would be fantastic. We would love to hear questions from you. If you have any particular interest in becoming involved you can speak with me, Liz or anyone up here. Alderman Lopez I have been working with One Greater Nashua since its inception on the Cultural Connections Committee and the first thing I want to say is that the RFP, the Endowment for Health, the initial project was beyond the scope of anything that the Cultural Connections Committee could have accomplished. I think the organizations in Nashua and given the timeframe that we had to actually submit for it, the United Way was the only one who could have stepped up and pulled this together as quickly as it was done. That’s not one of the things that was dwelled on in the presentation but a lot of people had to work very hard very quickly in order to present something that was a valid project and was also of use to the City of Nashua. I think that the Cultural Connections Committee has particularly benefitted quite significantly. Among the leadership we have the former Vice Chair Barbosa and Janeth Orozco who is a member. In addition, the project, the goal group, the leadership and civic engagement has already benefited the Cultural Connections Committee specifically because two of the alumni of the graduating Greater Nashua Leadership class, which was organized through that Leadership and Civic Engagement Group as our current chair, Levon Colone and our incoming vice chair, Rafael Calderone. It was my opinion when we started this project that there is a tremendous opportunity for additional leadership in the minority communities around Nashua. There are already neighborhoods, communities and leaders that have solved their own problems. They have created their own networks of where to go to when you need to solve issues, how to celebrate together and how to experience Nashua. Last year’s Latino Festival, we put a lot of work into reaching out to people who did not traditionally go to that festival and when they attended they were surprised that the festival is large and well run; there’s food and music. They didn’t necessarily feel welcome going on their own until they had that invitation. This is a two- way street; we have an invitation through this coalition to experience cultural groups to become part of their history. I think it’s an important project for Nashua to have moving forward because the two base challenges that we have in terms of population is an increasingly large diverse population and an increasingly large aging population. How do we pass on Nashua’s heritage to make sure that it is sustained as the elderly population starts to decline and the new people start to come in? The way we do that is through this kind of engagement. Special Board of Aldermen Meeting Page 6 March 21, 2016 I am particularly enthusiastic about this, I have been working with them since its inception and I think it’s a great coalition program for the City of Nashua. President McCarthy Tracy I wonder if you might address how the Chamber is reacting to the coalition. Ms. Hatch As I said, the Chamber is very focused on an economic development and a thriving and vibrant business community, not just in Nashua but in Greater Nashua and across the state. I’ve been involved in the One Greater Nashua Coalition since I took the position as the head of the Chamber and believe passionately in what the coalition is trying to achieve, not because it’s a charity because it’s not but because I think it is in the best interest of our community as a whole and particularly the business community. Our Board of Directors led currently Paul Hebert for another five days; we have created a strategic plan for the Chamber for the first time in a bit that specifically and explicitly incorporates the ideals and ideas of One Greater Nashua. We have seven tenants, seven strategic areas that we will be focusing on that map in many ways to some of the things that you have heard about this evening. For example, if you ask businesses in our community what the most important issues that they face to their success, one of the top two invariably is going to be access to a skilled workforce. The slide that Jared showed earlier that showed the non-white population of adults in Greater Nashua was kind of really centered on Nashua itself, it wasn’t very explosive. Contrast that to the map on the right hand side those 18 and under who are non-white; those are the employees and the employers 10, 15 and 20 years from now. If we don’t reach out today and welcome them in this community and that they have a future here then we are saying that 20 years from now that we don’t want a robust business community. We have built into the piece about access to a skilled workforce, the work that we are doing through One Greater Nashua. Capitalizing on our diversity, that is one of our strategic points in the Chamber’s strategic plan. We cannot be a vibrant, robust and attractive community that others, particularly young people want to come to if we turn our back on the diversity that exists today and is only going to grow in the future. Those are two examples of how the Chamber of Commerce has affirmatively and specifically incorporated the ideals and objectives of One Greater Nashua into the work that we intend to do over the next three to five years. Alderman Lopez I want to say for the record that the chart that is presented here which says adults as a minority as a percentage of the population and then children as a minority percentage, it’s my guess that this is representing the comparative percentage. You could glance at this and be confused and say okay why are all the adults’ right there and the children are everywhere? What it is really saying is the ratio. If you have one person who is Hispanic and one person who is white then they compare but if you have a large family of five children who are Hispanic and then one child who is white; I think that’s what the chart is depicting but I wanted to double check. Unidentified Speaker That is correct. Unidentified Speaker That is another factor that I think was interesting that we looked at this kind of statistical underpinnings. We talked about the negative migration for Nashua and actually for the state as a whole, had there not been an influx of foreign born individuals into our state, the state would have seen the population decline overall. We only have grown because of non-native people coming into our community. Again, if we want to see our population shrink and we want to have less opportunity for children and we want to see jobs go elsewhere Special Board of Aldermen Meeting Page 7 March 21, 2016 because employers can’t find the skilled workers they need then we can ignore that but I don’t think that’s the vision we want to see for our community. President McCarthy To me this slide and the one about the main stream job creation says to me that what we are seeing now is an influx of people who are different in appearance, language and culture from the people who sit around this horseshoe but common in the goal of hard work and creatively will create individual and community prosperity. I think it’s imperative that we capitalize on that. At some point I want to retire into a community that will stay in the manner of which I have become accustomed and somebody else is going to have to pay for that and that’s going to have to be the next generation of entrepreneurs and business people who bring prosperity to the community. I think it’s in our own enlightened self-interest to make sure that that pool of resources that can produce community prosperity is unburdened and able to do so. I want to thank the panel for coming in and doing the presentation and please keep in touch with the Board and let us know what else we can do to help. ADJOURNMENT MOTION BY ALDERMAN SIEGEL TO ADJOURN MOTION CARRIED The meeting was declared adjourned at 8:22 p.m. Attest: Patricia D. Piecuch, City Clerk Building Strong Communities Community Leaders Identify Need to Bring Community Together…  Immigrant Integration Initiative • 4 Communities • Social Barriers to Health • 3 years of Implementation Support • Best Practices from Welcoming NH Why Social Inclusion & Integration? Summary Health and Equity Index 2006-2010 American Community Survey Across indicators, Black and African American residents experience the most significant inequity, followed by Hispanic and Latino residents. Over Crowding is the biggest predictor of inequity among all variables studied. Single Average Unemploym Family Mother High School Home Food Business Over Index by Job Quality ent Income Poverty Household Degree Ownership Stamps Ownership Crowding Race White, non-Hispanic 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 Asian 0.8 0.0 0.9 0.0 0.7 1.1 1.6 0.5 0.8 4.3 1.1 American Indian 1.3 0.0 1.6 2.2 0.0 2.4 1.9 2.9 0.0 0.0 1.2 Two or More Races 1.0 1.7 1.2 1.7 1.7 1.3 1.5 2.4 0.0 3.5 1.6 Hispanic or Latino 1.5 1.9 1.4 2.2 2.2 2.3 2.1 2.9 4.2 6.7 2.7 Black or African American 1.6 1.6 1.5 3.3 2.5 1.5 2.2 3.3 8.5 6.1 3.2 Average Index by Factor 1.2 1.2 1.3 1.6 1.6 1.7 1.9 2.2 3.0 5.2 1.0 or less = No Disparity 1.1-1.4 = Small Disparity 1.5 - 2.1 =Moderate Disparity 2.2 or greater = Significant Disparity Data Source: NH Center for Public Policy 2013 Health and Equity Report Card  A Coalition of Neighbors We Value Our Growing Diversity • Economic Vitality • Community Engagement • Leadership Capacity • Improved Health Outcomes In Partnership with  Snap Shot of greater Nashua’s Growing Diversity Adults that are minorities* as a % of Children that are minorities* as a % of Population Population. *Minority includes everyone with the exception of those classified as non-Hispanic white. Source: 2010 U.S. Census Map Source NRPC Three-Pronged Approach  GATEWAYS AND NAVIGATORS BUSINESS & CIVIC YOUTH ENGAGEMENT LEADERSHIP   Middle schools focus  Cross-cultural awareness  Community connections Youth Leadership  Academic success  Closing opportunity gap Youth leadership Community service Family engagement  Nashua Navigators Peer mentoring Key Gateways & Navigators Community connections Belonging/Welcoming 18 Members 14 Countries 10 Languages  Mentoring built on self-awareness  Improving sense of belonging for all  Strong community connections  Learning & sharing Nashua culture, civic life and laws  Community strengthened when all achieve their best potential  Engaging diverse leaders Business & Civic Leadership Branding Nashua as a culturally rich community Creating economic vitality and opportunity for all Key Questions What are the possibilities for cultivating a strong Nashua?  Increased Diversity in LGN How can we share our wisdom to  Cultural events & celebrations activate the already existing pool of  Nashua Listens diverse talent?  Economic opportunity plan  OGN business awards  Culturally effective employers OGN Not a Charity Focus on the Basic Elements of Human Condition Three provocative ideas…  1. The Economy is Not a Pie More like a Garden 2. The Value Proposition of Immigrants 2X Rate of Entrepreneurship/ Immigration IS an Entrepreneurial Act • More than 40% of Fortune 500 Companies were founded by Immigrants (18%) or their kids (23%) • Comprised Almost All Net Main Street Growth between 2010 and 2013 • Every foreign-born STEM worker with an advanced degree creates 2.5 jobs for native born workers • 1 in 10 hold advanced degrees • NH ranks in Top 10 states with highly educated immigrants Data Source: WEGlobal Detroit 3. Economic Imperative of Integration • Median Age of Workforce Is Climbing • After decades of steady growth Nashua experiencing negative net-migration • Minority Children fastest growing group • Lifestyle Choices of Millennials • In 2018 US faces a projected shortfall of 230,000 STEM Workers (NH 2,000 unfilled high tech jobs right now…) Join Us! Background Data and Links Steve Tobocman The Economic Development Imperative of Welcoming’ http://www.weglobalnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/New- Hampshire-Nashua.pdf Economic Impact of Immigrants in NH by NH Center for Public Policy http://www.nhpolicy.org/UploadedFiles/Resources/Foreign05272015.pdf NH Health and Equity Report Card by NH Center for Public Policy Health and Equity in NH 2013 Report Card (nhpolicy.org)