Workforce development and opportunity youth - Prudential Financial Sarah Keh
Workforce development and opportunity youth - Prudential Financial Sarah Keh

Seeding innovative workforce development solutions for opportunity youth

A conversation with Sarah Keh, VP Corporate Social Responsibility, Prudential Financial, from the Aspen Ideas Festival
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In this episode of the Work in Progress podcast, I’m joined by Sarah Keh, the vice president of corporate social responsibility at Prudential Financial to discuss the company’s $180 million committment to helping opportunity youth find a pathway to good jobs and wealth building. Keh sat down with me to discuss the philanthropy in June at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Opportunity youth are young people between the ages of 16 and 24 who currently are not in formal education or training and are unemployed. There are almost 6 million people who fall into that designation, a number that has grown since the COVID pandemic.

Even before the pandemic, in 2019, Prudential decided to invest $180 million by 2025 in programs that will help young people across the globe gain the right skills to compete for and succeed in quality jobs. 

“The reason why they have come into the situation that there are in…is not because they don’t have the will or the desire. It’s oftentimes they are born into a situation that doesn’t provide them the access to the opportunities that you and I may have had in our upbringing,” says Keh.

She says the Prudential believes it is important to look at opportunity youth for their potential and act on it. “We’re really focused on this population because we believe these are our future leaders of nonprofits, of businesses, of government, and they just need access to the right resources and tools to provide them the good skill.”

Keh says the company has already achieved in five years what it had set out to achieve in six – the $180 million in nonprofit programs that are providing that training and opportunity.

“We’ve invested in over 20 different organizations globally that have impacted hundreds and thousands of young people. We know even just last year through our impact data that over 500,000 opportunity youth were connected to training opportunities and employment opportunities.”

Here is the U.S., those workforce development programs include Year Up, YouthBuild, and Per Scholas.

Keh and I go into details on how these programs are helping and how the can help young people build wealth. We also discuss Prudential’s work of a local level in Newark, New Jersey, the headquarters of the company which turns 150 years old next year.

You can listen to the podcast here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can also find it on my Work in Progress YouTube channel.

This podcast was recorded at the Aspen Ideas Festival, in collaboration with the Aspen Institute.

Episode 325: Sarah Keh, VP Corporate Social Responsibility, Prudential Financial
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.