Birmingham Promise

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The Birmingham Promise Initiative is a program created by Birmingham mayor Randall Woodfin, and operated through the newly-created Birmingham Department of Innovation and Economic Opportunity, to provide business apprenticeships and college scholarships to Birmingham City Schools students.

Birmingham's program, developed by Deputy Director of Talent Development Rachel Harmon, is modeled largely on Buffalo, New York's "Buffalo Promise Neighborhood", which in the span of a decade has been successful in improving graduation rates and closing achievement gaps in that city's schools.

Such programs require large amounts of private investment from partnering businesses and charitable foundations. The initial implementation of Birmingham's program coincided with a reduction in the city's direct annual disbursement to the Birmingham Board of Education, from $3 million to $1 million in the 2020 Birmingham budget. In the program's "pilot" year, 2019, a total of 20 students were placed in paid summer internships.

In June 2019 the Birmingham Promise Initiative was awarded a $150,000 grant from the Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship (PAYA) to support strategy development and implementation.

In August 2019, Woodfin announced that the Birmingham Promise program would begin offering all graduates from city schools a "last dollar" scholarship to attend public in-state 2- and 4-year colleges to which they have been accepted for enrollment, beginning with the class of 2020. The program, previously referred to as the "Fred Shuttlesworth Promise Scholarship," is funded through an endowment assembled from city appropriations and private donations.

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