Airport Experience® News - Conference 2023

ONE-ON-ONE

DEN’S ECONOMIC ENGAGEMENT New Effort Is Designed To Accelerate Economic and Workforce Development

BY C AROL WARD

ditor’s Note: Denver International Airport has established The Center of Equity and Excellence in Aviation (CEEA), a first-of-its-kind in the aviation industry. CEEA was formed as an accelerator for economic and workforce development. Key initiatives include growing access for underserved communities to build equity into prosperity opportunities, supporting small minority and women-owned small businesses to increase generational wealth, and preparing current and future employees for a career pathway in the aviation industry. The CEEA also seeks to advance aviation research and innovation that drives best practices with a global impact. CEEA is an integral piece to implementing DEN’s Vision 100 strategic plan, which will prepare the airport for 100 million annual passengers in the next five to eight years. The center itself will start construction in the fourth quarter of 2023 and will be located on Level 4 of the Hotel and Transit Center, as part of the Great Hall terminal project. AXN’s Carol Ward spoke with Andrea Albo, deputy chief of staff at DEN, about the latest developments in implementing the CEEA goals. E

WARD: Can you give me an overview of the CEEA and its key initiatives/goals? ALBO: Our Vision 100 has four pillars. One of those pillars - our first pillar - is empowering our people. CEEA is intended to impact everything we do at DEN, because we’re focused on people development at the bottom of our work. Our CEO, Phil Washington, has done great work in other organizations in building what we’re calling “career pathways programming.” We had a lot of youth programming, but what was missing was a very concentrated, robust structure and process on how we develop employees. That reflection is what spurred the need to formalize all these different programs into one division now known as CEEA. The programming focuses on three key areas: business development, career pathways and research and innovation. For the Business Development Training Academy, one of the main tenants of CEEA is ensuring that we have a focus on equity. We’re embedding it, we’re weaving it into everything we do as a means of living our values. While CEEA is for everyone, we are very intentional about making sure that we are doing outreach

and concentrated relationship-building within marginalized communities, to make sure that we’re bringing them along in the journey, because they’re often left behind and don’t have access. We started engagement by hearing from our small businesses - minority-owned, women-owned, veteran-owned businesses. We asked, “Whether you’re already doing work at DEN or you want to do work at DEN, what does the experience look like? They were not shy, and we needed that. We needed to hear the hard truth, which was, “It’s complicated, it’s time-intensive.” The sentiment was that it feels discouraging. We took a step back and said, “Okay, we’re government. DEN is part of the city and county of Denver structure, and we know that there are rules and regulations and laws that govern our work.” And we can also look for ways that we can build efficiencies within that framework. We did just that in partnership with the small businesses, as well as some of our prime contractors, who were very helpful and interested in helping to improve the process for all. Over the course of about a year, this group came together and built what is

Above: Andrea Albo, deputy chief of staff, Denver International Airport.

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