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Thank you, Jordana. I really appreciate all the work that you’re doing, bringing us together today. I think it’s a great step, moving forward. Thank you Chris as well for supporting this initiative. So today I want to talk about, three things. One is about the South Texas Triangle. The other one is about areas of opportunities, which align with everything that you just said, I think you hit the nail on the head on all of them. And why the Rio Grande Valley Broadband Coalition is the win that we need in the region. And as context, over the past five years or so I’ve been working with Dr. Antonio Petrov and David Robinson, Jr., at the Urban Future Lab Research Center at the University of Texas in San Antonio on this concept of the South Texas Triangle, which is a mega region that connects the Austin-San Antonio Metroplex with Laredo, the RGV, Corpus Christi, and the northern Mexico states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo León.
Now, everyone knows that the Texas Triangle is a an urban cluster, a powerhouse. However, broadening its scope to encompass the south creates a transnational hub, home to more than 35 million people where the future is young. We have a very young population and the region will continue to grow over the next 30 years or so. So this is a unique, historical opportunity, one that we need to take advantage of. And through our work we envision a prosperous South Texas Triangle region by fostering awareness and facilitating the exchange of social, economic and environmental resources between the region of San Antonio and Austin, all the way to northern Mexico.
And to advance this idea, we recently launched an op-ed series with the San Antonio Express News, in collaboration with the Urban Future Lab and the Better Futures Institute, about the South Texas Triangle. And so we invited writers and experts from diverse fields to offer insights into key regional areas including energy resilience, demographics, digital and urban infrastructure, trade, economic development, the environment, the job market and so on. And some of these ideas have been discussed sporadically here and there. However, what we wanted to do was to frame a regional perspective, bring all these perspectives together over a period of time, from multiple voices across different industries to advance the ideas that can help crystallize the vision for the future of the region.
For instance, the latest op-ed in the series came out this Sunday in print and I think Thursday on digital. It is named The Future of Work in San Antonio, written by Beto Altamirano, my co-founder and a San Antonio entrepreneur. And he talks about three key ideas essential to transforming our future: the attracting and recruiting of emergent enterprises; equipping the workforce with re-skilling; and fostering regional collaboration. All three, I think, are included in the work that we’re discussing here today. Because, as a region, we have Boeing, Toyota, SpaceX, Tesla, and many others. And moreover, these emerging sectors such as biotechnology and cybersecurity are growing fast and contributing to the expansion of bioscience and healthcare industries.
But to fully capitalize on these emerging sectors, the leaders across the region need to commit to seizing long-term growth opportunities, and this includes investment to create a supportive ecosystem that nurtures innovation and entrepreneurship. To accomplish this, it is crucial that the region has access to broadband infrastructure and high-speed internet just as Jordana mentioned.
Which brings me to the next key area, the upscaling, the transformative wave of Industry 4.0, that we know as the famous Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is the next stage of the digitalization in the manufacturing sector. And the rapid digitalization of work in the last decade urgently demands this skill building, as highlighted in the Brookings article that Jordana circulated before this call.
The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2025, half the workforce will need re-skilling due to technological advancements. The importance of digital competency and emergency technology is critical to drive the change in our communities.
Now, digital technologies can raise many workers’ productivity and wages. Yes, they optimize efficiency and that can create some challenges but it also creates new jobs. This is happening already with AI. One of the fastest growing professions is the so-called prompt engineer. Those who know how to ask the right questions to Chat GPT and how to get the information from the large language models.
Which finally leads me to the third key area which is the regional collaboration. So this small business broadband fund introduced by Rio Grande Valley Broadband Coalition, including all these partners, TeamPharr.net, VTX, Smart.com VTX fiber, Region One Education Service Center. This is a great initiative, and it makes the case for this regional collaboration that is needed. It is the type of win that we need to help make the vision a reality and it’s a prime example of place-based investment. Even more, it is a great opportunity to boost innovation, an ecosystem of innovation. It provides the small business owners and entrepreneurs with access to the three legs of the stool of digitalization, which is the infrastructure, the affordability, and the digital skills.
A recent report by the Latino Business Action Network shows that just in the last 12 years, there’s been a 34% growth in the number of Latino-owned businesses compared to minus 7% of non Latinos. And these Latino business owners have nine times the wealth of Latino non-business owners. Plus, in the next 10 years, a million plus college students will graduate from college. And if we don’t have the infrastructure in place to empower these young people to find opportunities near their home and in our region, they’ll go somewhere else to find them. That’s for sure.
And so entrepreneurship and small business ownership is a means to reduce income inequality. And not only does business ownership present a path for greater financial security, but its benefits also reach beyond the business owner to the broader community. And so if we can provide all the key components of the digitalization, we can have an impact of an order of magnitude in the region. And we need to be bold, and bet on our ability to shape the cities of the future. Jordana, back to you. Thank you.
Editor’s Note: The above commentary was provided by Alberto Gomez Isassi, PhD, CEO of the Better Futures Institute, as his opening remarks in a webinar hosted by Connect Humanity. The webinar was held to discuss the need for better broadband infrastructure in South Texas. The “Jordana” Gomez referenced is Jordana Barton-Garcia, a senior fellow at Connect Humanity. The “Chris” Gomez referenced is Chris Worman, co-founder and chief partnership strategy officer of Connect Humanity.
Editor’s Note: Here is an audio recording of Gomez’s opening remarks on the webinar:
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