A discussion on adult basic education with COABE CEO Sharon Bonney and program director Houston Mayor's Office on Adult Literacy Jacqueline Aguilera on the Work in Progress podcast with Ramona Schindelheim
A discussion on adult basic education with COABE CEO Sharon Bonney and program director Houston Mayor's Office on Adult Literacy Jacqueline Aguilera on the Work in Progress podcast with Ramona Schindelheim

Inspiring educators and helping adults achieve literacy and numeracy and career success

A conversation with Sharon Bonney, CEO, Coalition on Adult Basic Education, and Jacqueline Aguilera, Houston Mayor's Office for Adult Literacy
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In this episode of Work in Progress, we’re talking about the integral role adult basic education plays in helping working-age adults achieve literacy and numeracy, increasing their employability. My guests are Sharon Bonney, CEO of Coalition on Adult Basic Education (COABE), and Jacqueline Aguilera, project manager for Houston Mayor’s Office for Adult Literacy.

Adult basic education covers a range of literacy skills beyond just reading and writing, including numeracy, critical thinking, digital literacy, and contextual skills for careers and life.

COABE works to inspire educators and help adults succeed, with national, state, and local partnerships to provide education and skills training for adult learners. Bonney says it is a vast network.

“We work with many different partners, over a hundred national partners such as IBM SkillsBuild, Google, Amazon, and Tyson Foods. There’s 49 state partners that we work with called State Associations. We have over 2,300 local programs and then we also have 60,000 individual members,” she explains.

Bonney adds that adult education programs serve a diverse population with significant barriers to employment and economic mobility, including migrants, those who have aged out of foster care, the homeless, formerly incarcerated, and immigrants.

The Houston Mayor’s Office for Adult Literacy is one of those local programs. “Some individuals need language skills. They need career prep. They need pre-skilling or upskilling. There are different types of programs that actually help to connect the learners to career opportunities. That is very important because adult ed is a talent pool developer,” says Aguilera, who manages that program.

Bonney continues, “They’re working with learners with the most barriers to life and employment, and they have a great success rate. Helping get people to work, and helping to break generational curses. We’re helping to feed these learners into the workforce and into community college.”

Adult education matters and it makes a difference to the community, says Aguilera. “Passion, commitment, and the dedication to the success of not only the individuals, but of the community and the families, and then the impact that they can have, again, returning to the economic health of the city, which benefits the states, which benefits the nation.”

Bonney, Aguilera, and I discuss how, despite their enormous impact, these programs are often significantly underfunded and how they try to overcome that.

You can listen to the entire podcast here or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find our podcasts on the Work in Progress YouTube channel.

Episode 357: Sharon Bonney, CEO, COABE, and Jacqueline Aguilera, Houston Mayor’s Office for Adult Literacy
Host & Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Theme Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4
Transcript: Download the transcript for this episode here
Work in Progress Podcast: Catch up on previous episodes here

Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.