NORWALK — As sunlight streamed into the SoNo Collection Magnificent Room upon the graduates of the Project Retail workforce education program, speakers emphasized that education breeds opportunity.
The program graduates lined up beside wall-to-wall picture windows in the room and processed one by one to the stage to accept certificates while a crowd of their families and loved ones cheered and applauded their achievements.FIT professors taught the participants who completed 50 class hours cumulatively either in-person or at the WorkPlace’s Bridgeport office and virtually.
Project Retail’s 98 percent completion rate speaks to the commitment each participant had in furthering their career, said Adrienne Parkmond, the WorkPlace’s chief operating officer.
Ashley Barr, 32, of Bridgeport, said she left the program feeling prepared for new job prospects. She’s looking for new jobs to use skills she learned in Project Retail while she is a secretary at the Connecticut Department of Developmental Services.
“(Project Retail offers) an opportunity to excel in my career and helps me get to where I need to,” Barr said after the ceremony Thursday morning, noting that she wants to open a youth services business.
Barr currently studies human resources at Charter Oak State College; she said being able to further her education with Project Retail empowers her.
The WorkPlace, which coordinates workforce development programs across Connecticut, partnered with the FIT in the $750,000 Project Retail funded by the state budget this year, state Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, said at the ceremony. The graduation taking place at the SoNo Collection was significant: the mall has been a huge retail employer since opening in 2019, the state senator said.
In his remarks to the program graduates and other attendees, Duff implored they remain ambitious and set their sights high.
“Anything is possible,” Duff said.
Michelle Artis, the program’s director from the WorkPlace, said that retail employment is more than just showing up to a retail job.
“There’s merchandising, there’s the operational part of retail,” Artis said. “Retail really is just front-facing, giving a service to customers.”
The Project Retail program took a top-down approach in educating participants in every part of giving that retail service to customers and beyond, Artis said.
From a job fair at the end of the program on Monday, four program participants got new jobs. They’re not the only ones. Parkmond said that one-third of Project Retail’s 57 graduates have new jobs. One program graduate just got a job that paid $28 hourly, she said.
“That changes lives,” she said.
The graduating class of Project Retail largely comprised people of color, a demographic that has faced significant systemic employment discrimination.
A February 2023 Pew Research Center survey of nearly 6,000 Americans revealed that 41 percent of Black respondents said they had faced discrimination in hiring, pay or promotion in their lives; 20 percent of Hispanic respondents said they’d faced that discrimination and 25 percent of Asian respondents did.
Jacqueline Jenkins, FIT’s interim executive director for the Center for Continuing and Professional Studies, said that Project Retail falls squarely within the school’s social justice initiatives.
“We have a commitment to supporting diverse individuals and we also have a commitment to the creative industries and so this ties them all together,” Jenkins said.