The Spark

On Saturday The Whitaker Center will be hosting a Space Day event, called “Space & Entrepreneurship.” That will feature presentations by locally known NASA Astronaut Bob Hines; Bob Hines was selected by NASA to join the 2017 Astronaut Candidate Class. He reported to the Astronaut Office in August 2017. He has served more than 23 years in the United State Air Force (USAF) as an instructor pilot, fighter pilot, and a test pilot. Before his selection in 2017, he was serving as a Research Pilot at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. He has accumulated more than 4,000 hours of flight time in 50 different types of aircraft and has flown 76 combat missions in 3 different aircraft types while supporting contingency operations around the world. Hines served as the pilot on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-4 mission to the International Space Station, which concluded on Oct. 14, 2022. He logged 170 days in space, overseeing the arrival of crew and cargo, maintaining the space station, and conducting science experiments of various disciplines.

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Visual artist, photographer, videographer, and storyteller Shelby Wormley, owner of We and Co. which is a storytelling platform based out of Lancaster Pennsylvania, that allows people to tell their stories in their own way and by their own terms. Through well-crafted visual strategies, every person is given their own platform no matter what background or avenue of life they come from. As a company, they are advocates for a strong community and strive to provide a safe place for inclusive and diverse storytelling. Every story is worth hearing which is why you'll steer us in the direction to best tell your tale, not the other way around. W.E. & Company hopes to build partnerships with all capacities of the community including businesses and neighbors. Her latest exhibit The Shop Presents: Essentials in our Vault Gallery, currently at the Susquehanna Art Museum, explores the importance of barbershops and beauty salons in Black and Brown communities during the global pandemic. 

Website: https://www.weshareyourstories.com/

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Doug Wonder is the owner and operator of I See Magic, which is a black-owned interactive entertainment company that provides Magic Shows, Balloon Twisting, Face painting, magic workshops, rentable inflatables. Additionally, Doug offers masterclasses on how to be a magician, and offers the ultimate magic kit to get interested clients immersed in the world of Magic. 

Website: https://www.iseemagic.com/

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Since the beginning of 2023, Americans around the country have been celebrating the 50th year of Hip-Hop being in existence. One of the most influential hip hop pioneers was DJ Kool Herc, a Jamaican immigrant regarded as the founding father of hip hop. Kool Herc made history in 1973 when he and his sister hosted the “Back to School Jam” in the recreation room of their Bronx apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. That was the beginning of the genre of music we enjoy today from artist like Jay-Z, Eminiem, Kanye West, and Drake. But, the genre encompasses so much more, like breaking dancing, graffiti, art, and journalism. Leon Laing a hip-hop photojournalist joins us on the The Spark today, to talk about his journey, and how he got involved in Hip-hop journalism and photography.

Leon's Hip-hop Pictures: https://leonlaing.smugmug.com/The-Book-of-Hov/n-934D39/

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Eight percent of aircraft pilots in the U.S. are African-American. Less than six percent of pilots are females. That’s against the backdrop of a shortage of pilots that is expected to grow to 4500 by 2025.

New Cumberland based Pilots With a Purpose is a unique organization that it says “provides educational opportunities to expose young people to potential careers in aviation by increasing minority and female participation in aviation careers.”

With us on The Spark Wednesday were Ed Nielsen, co-founder of Pilots With a Purpose and Clyde Smith, a recent air traffic controller at Capital City Airport.

Nielsen was asked how Pilots With a Purpose got its start,"it came to be a long time ago, only I didn't realize it when I used to work with kids up on the hill and having been born on the Hill and graduated from in Harrisburg. Yeah. Was working with kids and a once in a blue moon, I would take them up for a flight. And it was a an enormous experience in terms of seeing a very different world than they thought when they're down the block in the hill. That led to fast forward now to about three years ago. I've been I've been a pilot for about 40 years, private pilot with an instrument rating. And I had a young man who was a cancer patient from Penn State Hospital and thought I'd take him up for a flight. He'd never been up before, wasn't sure what was going on. He was still in recovery big time. And I took this young man up and it was like an eye opener from 30 years ago when I was working with these other kids. And this young man not only seized the opportunity to get into aviation, but he actually is enrolled and graduating now from a school up in Williamsport on technology, aviation technology. And he now has told me he wants to get into possibly getting into an airline transport rating of some sort. So we'll see how it goes with him. But that was kind of a spark and it just happened in a conversation with my my co-founder colleague Susan Nailor Adams, who is the owner of Cargill Aeronautical Academy, which is where I fly. And we just took off with the idea, took us about a year to put the idea together in terms of what kind of organization."

Nielsen said the young man living with cancer is healthy and well on his way toward a career in aviation.

Nielsen had worked with kids in foster care or had been involved in the criminal justice system. He talked about the mindset a young person needs to pursue a career in aviation," You need to where know where you are right now. And then you need to know where you want to be. A lot of times in foster care with delinquent placements, the kids don't really have a plan. There's a short term plan in terms of behavior, But in terms of long term, where do I want to go and how do I want to build on my experiences? Bad as they may have been to be a better person and a better employee, as it were. So those kind of things come together. I think they're crystal clear. You have to do it in an airplane. I need to know where I was, where I am right now, and where I'm going. Clyde is going to be monitoring the same stuff. So a student that has that capacity to overcome the emotional side of things and trauma that they've experienced and has a sense of those three perspectives, if you will. That's what we look for."

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October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and The Spark has scheduled a series of interviews surrounding this topic. Not only to have a conversation, but to shed light on the issue of domestic violence and the services that are provided to help you, or anyone you may know that has been affected by domestic violence. And with the third week of October being designated as the week without violence, we spoke with the CEO of the YWCA, Greater Harrisburg, Mary Quinn, to discuss the ways the YWCA is working to end domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking in our area. 

Mary states that, "The YWCA will be celebrating 130 years here locally next year. And during that time, we have always started serving women who were coming into the city of Harrisburg, meaning a safe place to stay. And over time, our programs and services have evolved. And today, we're serving victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and now human trafficking. But we are connected to a bigger global movement, which is where the week without violence comes in.

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Heidi Castillo and Ole Hongvanthong have been entrepreneurs for the better part of a decade, and along the way have helped countless small business owners not only start, but maintain and grow their clientele. Now, Heidi and Ole have their eyes set on expanding their own business ventures, and have ventured into the cold world of ice cream. Mezcla, Which is a hand crafted Mexican inspired ice cream shop located in Lancaster city, is the name of their newest venture. 

Castillo says, "This ice cream is made by a couple Puerto Rican and Mexican American, and they've been making ice cream for over 20 years. So it's a homemade style ice cream. You know, the ice cream traditionally has less fat and more air. So people say that it kind of like tastes like gelato, But I guess that's like the closest thing that you could compare it to. I grew up in California, in Anaheim. And it's very, culturally diverse. And there's a variety of foods. And being in Lancaster, I miss having that variety. And I always have to travel to other cities, bigger cities, to get the things that, I like. So for people like me, we always have to, like, travel somewhere else. And so I kind of wanted to just bring that to Lancaster because there's a lot of people like me in Lancaster who don't have that food necessarily, ice cream being one of them, because, you know, different flavors. So I wanted to bring that here."

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In May of this year, the Lancaster Asian American Pacific Islanders (LAAPI) celebrated a proclamation from the Lancaster County Board of Commissioners, that officially designated the month of May as Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in the red rose. Last week, their President Cindy Lam Guo was one of the honorees for the YWCA women of achievement ceremony (last week), where local women from Lancaster were celebrated for their extraordinary deeds. AAPI member and community leader Adam Hosey discusses what's next for this budding organization.    

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Journalist Roundtable discussion on the book rules in York, Pennsylvania. This roundtable discussion was held on Friday October 13th. 

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In early America, apprenticeships were how many skilled workers learned and trained. Apprenticeship came to the colonies by way of England, where it was the first step on the road to economic independence. In England, master craftsmen hired apprentices in an exchange of training for service. Once their term of apprenticeship was completed, former apprentices traveled from employer to employer earning wages as journeymen.

Today, apprenticeships don’t have a large role, but it is growing. The U.S. Department of Labor reported an increase in registered apprenticeships from 200,000 in 2014 to 490,000 in 2022.

According to the Department of Labor, workers that have gone through apprenticeships have starting salaries of $80,000.

Joel Kline, Managing Partner of Allegro Learning Solutions in Harrisburg was on The Spark Monday and talked about what today's apprenticeships look like,"A model where an employee has some some day one skills comes in and does both what's called RTI -- related training and instruction, and then on the job training. Then after a period of time with working with a mentor is capable of doing that job and in many cases is hired to do that job."

Kline pointed out that today's apprenticeships are not just for the trades as they often were in the past, but there are now a growing number of apprenticeships for white collar or "gold collar" jobs -- many of which are in the technical fields.

Kline was asked what are the advantages of an apprenticeship,"The research has shown that those employees then retain at a much higher rate and stay much stay longer at your company because of that commitment. A second is for employers is that apprenticeships are typically stepped in terms of wages. So you can bring someone that you feel is a suitable candidate, but not quite there in terms of knowledge and you don't have to pay them what you're paying quite as much. Right? You're not paying them pennies, but you're paying them a wage while they're learning and you're stepping them that wage up then through the apprenticeship. So if you look at it after a three year period, you've saved a little money on wages as that person learned and also then created training and to created kind of the perfect person for that role. And then the other really benefit is that right now, I think most people who follow workforce know some of the sobering statistics about the size of the workforce and of course, the quiet quitting and all of the kinds of problems that the workforce faces for the future. And this is a way for an organization to build their workforce for both the current and in the near term, but also for the long term."

Kline indicated that many employers still think that apprenticeships are just for the trades and not for tech jobs. He also said there needs to be better coordination to get the word about funding and training.

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