This is the first of three conversations we hosted LIVE from the National Fund's premier, biennial convening, SHIFT Toward an Equitable Future.

A large part of our work at the National Fund is identifying ways in which we use our national platform to drive regional change on issues such as occupational segregation.

As part of that work, we identified career navigation as one such lever. We believe that it must be addressed at a systems level because the impact of occupational segregation goes beyond the worker. It impacts every facet of the workforce ecosystem from companies, education, human welfare, generational wealth opportunities, cities, towns and states because we know that inequities in our systems costs us in a myriad ways. So, we decided to take a deep dive into career navigation to identify opportunities to better support equitable opportunities for all. Today we'll be talking with some of our amazing collaborators who participated in this work.

This conversation focuses on young people who are just starting out in their careers. We met these folks last summer during our Career Navigation interviews. We were excited to be joined by: Juvilee Hernandez from Chicago where she is a youth organizer at Northwest Center; Reginald Bridges is also from Chicago, and he's an assistant kindergarten teacher with It Takes a Village early learning center; and Kayla White, an IT worker in Birmingham, who is also currently working as an intern with AlabamaWorks!.