ncIMPACT is a PBS North Carolina production, in association with the UNC School of Government.

Funding for ncIMPACT is made possible by: - Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBSNC.

- The right job really can change everything.

We find out how three North Carolina communities are creating that opportunity for residents.

This is ncIMPACT.

♪ - Welcome to ncIMPACT.

I'm Anita Brown-Graham.

In child welfare, the toughest moment isn't the paperwork.

It's the first time a new worker walks up to a stranger's door.

Cumberland County and Fayetteville State University found a unique way to prepare their people for that moment.

We head there to see what they built.

- Cumberland County trains social workers to protect kids and help families, but often loses them before that training can pay off.

So the county tried something that has nothing to do with hiring or pay.

Instead, they built a home visit that isn't real.

It's a full walkthrough of a real home, one you can search room by room.

We spent the day inside the lab and in the field, watching the version of this job that nobody sees.

We find out, does practicing the hardest part of the job actually keep people in it?

- I've been at DSS in Cumberland County for two plus years now.

Donte Dennings is a social work investigator in Cumberland County.

I'm the first person on the scene to inform the client of the allegations and, you know, start the investigations to see about any type of maltreatment, abuse, or neglect.

He hasn't always done this.

He used to teach high school.

And I saw a lot of success in the classrooms.

However, even in that success, there's always that one or two or even, you know, even more students that no matter what you did for his interventions, you just couldn't get through to that student.

Good morning.

I'm social worker Denning with the Department of Social-- - [David] He wanted to reach those students earlier, before whatever was happening at home followed them into his classroom.

- Even me as a teacher, like I knew students had struggles, but I didn't know it was to this extent.

It's a part of the job nobody can prepare you for.

And it's the part that was pushing people out.

- Right?

Is this impacting the safety and the well-being of these kids?

- Denise Wilson trains new social workers at Cumberland County DSS.

She says one of the hardest parts is keeping people in the job after she trains them.

- It's not a North Carolina specific thing or a Cumberland County specific thing.

That's the case across the country.

Everyone in this field knows how difficult it is to retain staff and turnover is an issue.

- The cases keep coming either way.

They just get spread across fewer people.

- It's very difficult to do quality, consistent, social work if the workers that are here are overwhelmed.

Right?

Because every time there's turnover, the workers that remain have to take on that slack.

- So DSS started asking people on their way out why they were leaving.

- During staff exit interviews, one of the recurrent themes that kept coming up was they didn't feel ready.

They didn't feel prepared.

They felt like they were over their heads when they went out into the field to do this work.

- It was the walk up to a stranger's door and not knowing what to do once they got inside.

So Wilson and her team went looking for something that would make new workers feel ready before their first real case.

But a few minutes down the road, a professor was working on the same problem and neither one of them knew it.

- [DeniseÑ Think about how we talked about risk and threat.

- [David] A few minutes from the county office, students at Fayetteville State are learning the same job.

Danisha Judd is a senior in the social work program.

She got interested in this field because of her own experience with a social worker.

- I went through a very hard time and I needed a social worker.

So I feel like that I can be the social worker that I needed back in that hard space.

So it sounds like you had a positive experience with your social work?

I did, I did.

And she really, she gave me another step back at life.

She gave me a, just to let me know that I could do it.

Being one of the first ones to say, I'm proud of you.

And it doesn't seem like a lot, but those words, they mean a lot.

- Before she can do any of that, she has to learn how to read a home she's never been in.

So the school built a simulation lab on campus.

What were some of the ways that you trained students before this simulation?

So before the simulation, role plays in the classroom, guest lecturers that come in and speak about it, pictures, that sort of thing.

And what are the limitations of those things?

Oh, very limited, right?

So the students only hear from a perspective from someone else.

It's different when you get to immerse yourself in the experience yourself.

- In January of 2025, they found simulation software built at the University of Utah.

It's called the Virtual Social Work Trainer.

- And when we walk in, of course, we have basically a whole panel of being able to view the home in every angle that we possibly can.

- Students walk through a room on screen, room by room, and mark what they see, risks, hazards, anything that tells them a child might not be safe.

- And we also have a case file.

The case file basically lets us know what we're going to home to look for.

- One of the biggest teaching moments for students is realizing what they bring into the house with them.

- The more practice that we're getting with this simulation, the more we're just learning that our biases have to go out the window because certain things will be misunderstood as far as risk.

If I go in with my bias and I apply that to this home, I'm doing more harm.

- The students find it very beneficial because they get that opportunity to practice and they get the opportunity to get it wrong and to ask questions, 'cause that's what we want.

We want you to ask questions and not be afraid of getting it wrong because we want to help you critically think about the skills that you're using.

- A few minutes away, Cumberland County was doing the same thing with its new hires, coincidentally using the same simulation software.

The two have been working together ever since.

- They have opportunity to do an internship with them during their educational career.

They have an opportunity to then seek employment thereafter.

So we're looking at ways to partner to help reduce turnover and help fill those vacancies.

- But is it actually working to keep people in the job?

Wilson says it's too early to tell, but there are signs it's making a difference.

Workers coming out of onboarding tell her they feel more prepared.

The county has also seen less turnover since the training started.

But the training only happens when the county is hiring.

And for a while, the county wasn't making new hires.

- We actually had to have a hiring freeze for a bit.

And so being that this is implemented during onboarding, we weren't able to do onboarding as consistently as we would have wanted to.

- Retention rarely comes down to just one thing.

For Dennings, who came up before any of this existed, it was a person.

- I was blessed enough to be able to have an amazing supervisor that was able to hold my hand.

I'm here two years, and she still holds my hand through a lot of my cases.

- As for Danisha, she graduates soon.

Then all that training gets tested.

She wants to work at DSS in child welfare, and eventually, she wants to be a supervisor.

- I chose social work so I can serve.

So that is the biggest thing, is being that good impact for people.

- Whether all this will help keep her in the job, nobody will know for a few years.

For ncIMPACT, I'm David Hurst.

- In Randolph County, the problem wasn't keeping workers around.

It was that enough workers didn't exist yet.

Thousands of jobs were coming with Toyota's new plant, and few people were trained to fill them.

The local community college partnered with Toyota to train a workforce starting from scratch.

We head there to find out how it's going.

- This is the biggest economic project in North Carolina history.

It's a Toyota plant in Randolph County, a $14 billion facility with more than 5,000 jobs when it's fully up and running.

But a factory this size doesn't come with a workforce.

And this rural community didn't have workers with these skills just waiting around.

County leaders had to build a workforce from scratch, and fast.

So what did they do?

And is it working?

- You have your in-leg, your armrest.

- Raul Carbajal spent most of his adult life in manufacturing, most recently working 15 years at one company.

- I was pretty comfortable where I was at, but I was not getting continuous improvement.

You know, I was just stuck at that level.

- Then he saw an ad on social media.

Randolph Community College was recruiting for an apprenticeship that paid you while you trained for a job at the new Toyota plant.

- I needed a paycheck, and I needed more education as well.

And when I looked into the apprenticeship program, they were like, "Hey, we'll send you to college," especially Toyota.

They were like, "Well, you were sitting in class.

We're paying you while you're sitting in class, so you are gonna get a 40-hour paycheck at the end of the week."

So that right there was like, man, that's me right there.

- He signed up for the program, but when he did, the Toyota plant hadn't even opened yet, and nobody could guarantee it ever would.

When Toyota announced it was coming to Randolph County in December of 2021, there was a lot of excitement.

- The Triad is becoming the epicenter of lithium-ion battery production.

Those were the words from Toyota this morning.

- The county had actually been in the running for a Toyota Mazda plant before, back in 2018, but ultimately lost it to Alabama.

So getting the call this time meant something, but county leaders had seen announcements fall apart before.

Despite the excitement around a job announcement like this, sometimes those announcements don't always come to fruition.

How confident were you that this would actually happen?

- When Toyota came back the second time, I knew there was interest there, and if we did our work, it would happen.

Don't know if you remember, at that same time, there was much ado about Wolfspeed.

There was a lot about Boone Supersonic, and even the Vietnamese facility, Vinfast, down the Carolina Corps.

We're the only one that's standing and going according to plan.

- What's the secret then?

- Well, we made it easy for them to come here.

We had the site ready, we had the infrastructure ready, and we had the workforce.

- And making it easy came with a price.

North Carolina has pledged more than $660 million to Toyota, and that money is tied to hiring.

4,500 jobs by 2035, averaging $62,000 a year.

The state bet on workers who didn't even exist yet.

- We didn't have the infrastructure, we didn't have the workforce to just immediately start doing all that training in-house.

It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of space, it takes a lot of expertise in a lot of different areas, and so the right thing to do is go partner.

- And they found that partner 20 miles up the road.

Randolph Community College had been training apprentices for local factories, maybe a dozen or so at a time, but Toyota was going to need hundreds of skilled trade workers alone.

- When I came, I did receive a lot of advice from my colleagues.

- You know, there are 58 community colleges, and the second week I was on the job, they told me, they said, "If you fail, all of us fail."

So I said, "No pressure."

- The community college's answer was the Industrial Maintenance Technician Apprenticeship.

It launched in 2023 and is now training its third class of students.

Joshua Howell is in his second year.

His wife got hired at Toyota and told him about the program.

He applied without any formal technical training.

- You start out in this program, you're kind of like a contractor.

They get you on a company, and they tell you, "We have a spot for you, but you kind of have to earn the spot."

You know, the guy that hired me, he always used to say it's a two-year interview, and he's very right in that.

- The program runs two years, part classroom at RCC and part hands-on at the plant, and they're not training for standard manufacturing.

This is battery manufacturing, a product so new that Toyota is still figuring it out alongside the workers.

- We're learning the product and starting a new plant at the same time, so by its very nature, that presents, you know, unforeseen challenges and, you know, new opportunities each day.

- All of that work came to a head in November of 2025 when Toyota marked the official start of production at the Liberty Plant.

But this community had been here before, and it hadn't always gone the way people hoped.

For most of the 20th century, Randolph County ran on manufacturing.

But by 2008, Forbes named its county seat, Asheboro, one of America's fastest-dying towns.

Poverty had climbed from 16% to almost 27%.

Incomes were down, and the manufacturing that built this town hadn't been replaced with anything.

For 15 years, this county worked its way back.

Toyota became the biggest project of that comeback.

- I think we're prepared for it.

I think that it will be here, and the county will continue to grow and receive the benefits from it.

- Toyota says about one in four of its hires so far are Randolph County residents.

- Steady state in the workforce are usually the local people, because if you're from here, yes, sometimes people move back, but this is still home.

And the more you can do at home, then the better.

So we try to pour into the local community, the local education, local infrastructure, to make this respectfully a better place for everyone.

- And Toyota isn't done building.

Joshua Howell says he's hoping to land one of the jobs still coming.

- Growing up here, did you ever think that there'd be this kind of opportunity?

- Well, not really.

I will say Toyota has definitely made an impact, I would say, on North Carolina.

I mean, just in general, a huge company like this coming out.

I mean, there's always been some production manufacturers in Asheboro, North Carolina, but I haven't really seen any quite this scale.

- But the plant Joshua is training for today is only a fraction of what Toyota has planned.

- We're only about a fourth of the way through what the original or intended potential of that site is.

We're in a budget process now.

The site's about $3.4 billion.

So it's going to just continue to grow over the next 10 years.

- And Randolph Community College plans to expand too.

Five minutes from the Toyota plant, they're working on a new campus aimed at training workers for advanced manufacturing and skilled trades.

For Raul, the program wraps up in about a year, and he's also aiming for a maintenance job on the floor of the Toyota plant.

- Anybody that feels like they are too old for it, give it a try.

You will be happy you did.

You're never too old for continuous improvement.

- Community leaders call the apprenticeship program a first step.

Toyota still needs 5,100 workers at full build out.

It's got about 3,000 now.

For ncIMPACT, I'm David Hurst.

- The last two stories were about getting workers ready.

This one is about investing in the people already working.

Charlotte is spending hundreds of millions on six corridors it calls under-invested.

That includes Albemarle Road, one of the most diverse corridors in the city.

We head there to see what's changed.

- Imagine working full-time, not just one job, sometimes two, and still not making enough to get ahead.

That's daily life for thousands of people along this Charlotte corridor.

The city says employment here is just as high as the rest of Charlotte.

So why are families here still falling behind?

The city has poured more than $250 million into six corridors just like this one.

We're asking whether that money is making a difference.

It's lunchtime at Sen Mee Noodle House in East Charlotte.

Sitting on busy Central Avenue, the restaurant serves one of the Queen City's most diverse neighborhoods.

15 languages spoken here.

That diversity is one of the reasons Jenny Zajac and three other women chose to open shop here in 2024 with Thai, Lao and Vietnamese flavors in the city's Albermarle Road Central Avenue corridor.

- We found this great location that we understood that this culture, diversity area, would know that they would understand our taste because our taste is flavorful, it's bold, it's spicy, sour, it's umami, it's we're looking for.

- But the restaurant and the established neighborhood around it sit on one of six corridors, the city considers under-invested.

That's important because corridors act like arteries that influence the quality of life for residents and sustainability for its businesses and workers.

- A corridor is typically a street, a transit line.

It's usually longer, so a couple miles in length has a diversity of businesses.

Sometimes you'll see residential sprinkled in and it also has its own identity.

- The city says employment here matches the rest of Charlotte, 92 percent, same as citywide, but the average household along this corridor takes in just under $40,000 a year.

Across Charlotte, it's 64,000.

The Albermarle Road corridor once served as a commercial heart in Charlotte, the challenges in this corridor of aging buildings include attracting new businesses and jobs with higher pay.

- So you have a lot of older building stock is what we would call it, where it may be difficult for a new business to get up and running in that type of building.

They may have to make a really large investment.

- Another challenge to overcome, this corridor lacks an anchor to attract businesses or new industries like tech and logistics.

Eastland Mall closed in 2010.

The residential population kept growing without the corresponding growth in higher wage industries and jobs for the residents here.

They may be working, having to travel a long way to get to where they work.

So they are employed, they are working hard, but they may not have the time or the resources to invest in the Albermarle corridor and the businesses that are there.

This corridor and five others need it new opportunities for residents and businesses, but how would Charlotte design strategies to support business owners like Jenny Zajac in distinctive neighborhoods and at what cost?

The city of Charlotte developed the corridors of opportunity playbook in 2021.

When Jenny and her business partners opened their restaurant, the $259 million program was already being implemented to get the city artery and others flowing again with new jobs, new investments and higher incomes.

It also was heavily focused on transportation investments and transit investments so that people can stay in the corridor, live in the corridor, thrive in the corridor and get to their daily goods and resources.

In this corridor, the playbook includes partnering with Spark Centro.

The city of Charlotte provided the Latin American Chamber of Commerce with $1.5 million in a business opportunity hub grant to build a new center under construction in the Albermarle Road corridor.

According to the city's seed funding, the hub raised $7.5 million.

Karla Cruz with Spark Centro says the center will provide needed connections.

- There's a lot of businesses in the corridor that are struggling with the same things, that if they just connected and leaned on each other for resources, they could be empowering each other and really helping each other through a lot of the problems that they're facing.

[construction sounds] - Opening in stages in 2027 and 2028, Spark Centro will be an entrepreneurship hub, engagement space, recruitment and training center, marketplace and a STEM and healthcare workforce development center for job seekers and job creators.

- We're not focusing just on small businesses but also on entrepreneurs.

We want somebody coming in, maybe making $15 an hour to come out with trainings and making $26 an hour and that's how we're trying to build economic opportunity for them and better the jobs and the pay that our people in East Charlotte.

We know the talent is here, we just want to invest and let them know that we are kind of creating opportunities for them.

- The overall corridors of opportunity investment is more than $250 million, which the city splits into buckets, light infrastructure, transportation, youth and artist support and the built environment to support growth.

In the Albemarle corridor specifically, there are about $10 million of just infrastructure projects underway.

Now those are just sidewalks, connections that doesn't include some transit projects which are really transformational.

- Who decides what is needed and our residents and workers in each corridor being heard?

USS needs and address the departure of Eastland Mall.

The city brings together chambers of commerce and other community organizations.

Spark Centro is an example, opening near the new Eastland yards, a mixed-use complex underway in the footprint of what was once the largest mall in the state.

- You have small businesses expanding at Eastland, so we're very excited to see how that creates additional opportunities again for those existing residences and small business owners.

And then you have all the mobility plus work coming.

Until construction is complete, Spark is hosting weekly small business markets in the parking lot.

Non-profit offices will also be located here.

- So we'll house about five nonprofits that are amazing and work in different areas whether it be workforce development or for small business support.

And then the other side which is going to be co-working spaces, small business incubation, convening hall, all of that good stuff will be open in 2028.

- The plan seems to be working for this business, but what about the larger sustainability picture?

Is the goal to create more entrepreneurs, bring in higher wage jobs, or both?

- The goal of our of the program is to have that generational wealth building opportunity.

So whether that is filling a gap in housing, whether that is providing small business support to get somebody to grow their business from just themselves to one or two employees, those are the gaps we're trying to fill.

- And how do you invest in a place without pushing out the people who made it home?

The city's own analysis found more than half the land around this corridor is most vulnerable to displacement as investment increases.

The city leaders say they pair the construction projects with programs meant to support the residents and businesses already on the corridor.

- Our priority is really to create economic opportunity and mobility for existing businesses and residents.

Sydney Neutel House anticipates more business here on Central Avenue and if they decide to expand.

While Karla looks for transformation on the horizon in their revitalized Eastland yards area.

- I think the course of opportunity really coming in and bringing.

I've leaned on their team.

There's a lot of collaboration within the hubs of connecting Charlotte as a whole.

- $259 million is in the ground.

City leaders say the payoff takes years.

- You don't transform six corridors in six years.

You lay the groundwork.

You set the path.

You lay the foundation and you keep doing the work.

- For ncIMPACT, I'm Melody Hunter-Pillion.

- Every story on this show starts the same way.

People in a community see a problem and decide to take it on together.

That's the magic, pure and simple.

That's what ncIMPACT is about.

Thank you to the local leaders featured in this episode who so generously allowed us to share their work.

And of course, as always, thank you to you, our audience, for watching and engaging.

- I want to hear from you.

Tell us what your community is doing or how we can help, ♪ ♪ - Coming up on: - Some rural communities in North Carolina feel left out of the game when outside companies and institutions are deciding where to invest.

We'll discover how three communities build the solutions themselves.

- "ncIMPACT" is a PBS North Carolina production in association with the UNC School of Government.

Funding for "ncIMPACT" is made possible by... - Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBSNC.