Empower the Disenfranchised With Community: An Interview With Tim Styer

Darshan: Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of DarshanTalks. We had a really fun, special guests with us. We have Tim Styer and Tim is gonna be talking to us about, uh, like one of the conversations we've been having. We've sort of come out of this recession, uh, starting to come out of this pandemic in a way where we're going. Um, people are losing jobs. People are having a hard time trying to figure out how to make their money. And some of it's related to obviously the fact that, um, the, like the jobs simply went away, but some of it's related to the fact that these jobs are actually farther, farther away. And the people who are getting those jobs are either, uh, people who live close to that location, um, or, or simply are, uh, what's the word I'm looking for? Uh, they, they, they have, I forget the term right now, privileged. They have certain privileges, um, that, that some of the others, some of the other people may not. And this may sound like a weird thing to say. I let Tim explain a little bit more about what he does, uh, to explain a little bit more about how this plays into pharma in the life, sciences and health and what kind of go from there. So, Steve, Tim, great having you on, tell us more about what you, Tim: Yeah, first of all, I'm the president and CEO founder of Ride to Work and we're a limited liability company. And so our focus has always been on transporting, working with companies and nonprofits who do workforce development, transporting folks that are on the lower rungs of the economic scale from inner city, Philadelphia, the decent pain entry-level jobs out in the suburbs that they, that public transportation can't get them to. One of the things that we, uh, that occurred to us, and this was back in June when we started. And this was like when the numbers started coming in for the pandemic and we looked at it and what struck me Darshan was the fact that, um, I had seen some data from Philadelphia works, which is the workforce investment board for this Philadelphia and entire region that indicated that unemployment claims went up 132% in Philadelphia and 85% of those folks were from black and Brown communities in Philadelphia, Philadelphia, you may or may not know, had to dubious distinction of being the poorest large city in the United States. Tim: We had a Florida pandemic poverty rates of up to 24%. It's been an implacable issue for a number of years, and there's a lot of different theories out there that, that that's, you know, point to the reasons why we are looking at like a little slice. So when we talk about the recovery of a region like Philadelphia, we understand that we can't do it the way that we've always been doing it. In other words, we cannot neglect some of the poor areas in Philadelphia and the poor population, and that also bought away includes. And let me just, you know, we're, we're looking at this totally data-driven evidence-based for instance, right now in Philadelphia, unemployment is about 15% in black and Brown communities in some zip codes in Philadelphia, it's 20, 24% with those who are just coming home from incarceration. It is as high as 48%. Tim: Conversely, on the other hand, there's a lot of supply chain jobs that are warehouse jobs working in, um, um, distribution and so forth. That doesn't require a lot of skills that are in places that you can't get to, that people can't get to because they don't have a license. We fill that gap. And we feel as though that we can sort of close that poverty gap by at least providing people what we call like a first step into employment and getting socialized back into the workforce and, you know, be part of the recovery of this area. And it makes good business sense also. Darshan: So talk to us about that more,