Early in his administration, Gov. Ralph Northam proposed an ambitious goal: achieving universal broadband connectivity statewide by 2028.
In May and July, Northam and General Assembly leaders announced plans to speed up that timeline; instead, they aim to deliver broadband to most of Virginia in 18 months using $700 million from the $4.3 billion the state expects to receive through the federal American Rescue Plan, relief funds approved by Congress in March geared to help localities recover from the pandemic.
“We were very excited to hear about that,” says Jonathan Belcher, executive director of the Virginia Coalfield Economic Development Authority. “That’s obviously a very important issue to Southwest Virginia.”
About 11% of rural Virginians have no access to any internet service, according to the 2019 Virginia Commonwealth Connect broadband report.
When employees at the Blacksburg and Abingdon offices of the 1901 Group began working from home in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 crisis, some didn’t have access to broadband connections or had inadequate or intermittent bandwidth, says Sonu Singh, founder and CEO of the Reston-based IT services company owned by Reston-based Fortune 500 government contractor Leidos Holdings Inc. 1901 Group’s IT department had to set 10 employees up with mobile hot spots, which use a cellular network to connect to the internet.
“We had to kind of scramble to get them wireless access,” Singh says.
Last fall, the General Assembly allocated nearly $50 million to fund the Virginia Telecommunication Initiative (VATI), which funds broadband extension to unserved areas.
A sizable chunk of that money seems to be flowing to Southwest Virginia. In January, VATI awarded $1.23 million to the LENOWISCO Planning District Commission to extend 73 miles of fiber in Lee County and $16 million to the Cumberland Plateau Planning District Commission to construct 1,312 miles of fiber in Buchanan, Dickenson, Russell and Tazewell counties.
In March, VATI announced an award of $7.87 million to the Mount Rogers Planning District Commission to extend the broadband network in Smyth, Washington and Wythe counties and in the town of Damascus.
Expanding the availability of broadband is critical to economic development in Southwest Virginia, according to Belcher.
“Certainly, it’ll make it easier to recruit and also to expand industries that rely heavily on it,” Belcher says.
Singh agrees. “The reality is that if you don’t have broadband, it’s going to be hard to drive technology jobs.”
The $62.5 million, first-phase redevelopment of Danville’s White Mill into a mixed-use commercial and residential project on the Dan River marks a new beginning for the former textiles factory that was the most visible symbol of the city’s economic decline.
“It has become an eyesore and a reminder of the loss of our major industries,” says Corrie Bobe, Danville’s economic development director. “In its current state, the White Mill does not depict the true story of the growth and change that is taking place throughout the region.”
The 100-year-old former Dan River Mills plant has been vacant for more than a decade following the collapse of the region’s textiles industry 15 years ago.
Breathing new life into the massive, historic structure “is of significant importance to our community as it will further activate our riverfront and provide a high-quality space for people to live and work,” Bobe says.
Wisconsin-based The Alexander Co. Inc., which is developing the approximately 20-acre property, is completing architectural and engineering plans for the project, scheduled for completion in summer 2023.
It will feature 110,000 square feet of commercial space and 150 housing units, with another 100 housing units planned for later.
“We are setting aside over 20% of the apartments for workforce housing,” says Dave Vos, development project manager for The Alexander Co., based in Wisconsin.The project is being developed in partnership with the Danville Industrial Development Authority. “We decided to redevelop the building under a joint venture with the IDA in lieu of purchasing it outright,” Vos says.
The company is working with the IDA on commercial space as well as 216 parking spaces on the lower level. The city’s parks and recreation office also is in the process of planning for the approximately 75-acre Riverfront Park, which will abut the parcel.
The structure is “one that will last for many generations, and for me to witness its rebirth for a second life confirms why I think Danville is rapidly becoming a model for urban renewal,” says Alonzo Jones, Danville’s mayor.
Another plus is the fact that the upcoming Caesars Virginia casino, scheduled to be in operation by the end of 2023, will be about three miles away from the White Mill project, Jones adds, saying, “We will be able to provide a housing opportunity for recruitment and retention of their employees.”
Thus far, we’ve been spared from the heat wave that gripped Oregon, as well as the drought hitting California, not to mention western wildfires. But summer is still always a hot time here in Virginia.
Looking back, it wasn’t until 1968 that the commonwealth passed liquor-by-the-drink legislation. In addition to slaking thirst during the hot months, this moved many business and political dealings out of bottle-lockered private membership clubs and into the public eye.
Two years later, the University of Virginia admitted its first female undergraduates. That same year, the U.Va. School of Nursing graduated its first Black woman.
The pendulum that swings left also swings right.
In 1971, Lewis F. Powell Jr. penned for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce what has become known to history as the Powell Memorandum (see Page 20). In it, he outlined steps that the national business community should undertake to protect the free enterprise system against various forces of societal change.
That same year, Powell, a senior law partner at Richmond-based Hunton, Williams, Gay, Powell & Gibson (now Hunton Andrews Kurth) and an active leader in the American Bar Association, was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon.
Fifty years later, the pendulum that went from left to right is going left again. Another wave of change is sweeping across Virginia.
Not only have most Confederate monuments come down (Virginia had, by far, the most of any state), but the General Assembly has loosened restrictions on access to voting. The commonwealth’s constitution has been amended to provide for a bipartisan redistricting process. On July 1, the state also skipped right past decriminalization of marijuana and went straight to legalization, despite ongoing federal prohibition.
In electoral politics, hubris supports maxims such as, “As goes Virginia, so goes the nation.” This has proven wrong as often as it has proven right. Still, Dee Cee has undoubtedly gone from left to right and back to left again. If anything, this often happens more quickly on the national front than it does in the commonwealth.
While anything that might eventually come out of the current circular firing squad among national politicians in both parties remains undecided, what’s going on in Dee Cee remains important.
Take infrastructure as an example.
Virginia’s Commonwealth Transportation Fund (CTF) receives almost $1 of every $5 of its funding from federal sources. Regardless of whether new federal infrastructure spending winds up at $1 trillion, $4 trillion or somewhere in between, this is real money that translates into important projects and jobs for Virginians. The CTF funds maintenance and construction for Virginia’s highways, ports, railways and public transportation. Federal funding enables much-needed projects in all these areas to move forward.
Moving forward — what a novel idea!
With COVID in the rearview mirror, business events are beginning to start back up, in-person board meetings are resuming and schools are reopening.
There’s no doubt that some trends accelerated by the pandemic are here to stay. Much like FedEx in the 1980s, Zoom has forever become both a noun and a verb. The shift from storefront retail to digital ordering and home delivery, as well as the impact of remote work on downtown and suburban office space, remain open questions. In economic development, will the scale of corporate headquarters locations decline? Can manufacturing come back to primacy?
On the homefront, we’re now having dinner parties and catching up with friends without using Zoom. Cocktails to go are no longer just a fixture in New Orleans; they will be legal in Virginia for at least another year.
Virginia also has retained its prestigious ranking from CNBC as the No. 1 state for business.
Business is back! Billionaires are engaged in a space race! Cocktails, anyone?ν
Small Nonprofit|Kim L. D’Errico, CFO Special Olympics Virginia, Richmond
When Rick Jeffrey was coming on board as president of Special Olympics Virginia in 2000, Kim L. D’Errico was his first hire. If you ask him, he’ll say it was a good one.
D’Errico was seeking a change from the large public accounting firm where she’d worked since college. Jeffrey was looking to land a highly qualified individual to help propel forward the nonprofit that provides sports training and athletic competitions for children and adults with intellectual disabilities.
“We were very lucky,” Jeffrey says. Not all nonprofits can attract a CPA, let alone one who buys into the mission like D’Errico has.
Jeffrey initially hired D’Errico as director of finance and administration at Special Olympics Virginia, which is based in Richmond but has offices throughout the state. She advanced to senior director of finance a couple of years later and today holds the title of vice president of finance and administration, chief financial officer. The William & Mary graduate is a member of the nonprofit’s senior management team and oversees an annual budget of about
$6.5 million.
For her, the move to a nonprofit was the right thing to do. “I always knew and [my former employer, Arthur Andersen LLP] always knew that I was going nonprofit someday. … It was just where my heart was,” she says.
Special Olympics normally hosts multiple events throughout the state each year, but 2020 was markedly different because of the pandemic. “We had to do some serious brainstorming,” D’Errico says. The organization ramped up its online training efforts and made the decision to retain all of its employees.
Thanks to strong reserves and a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan, “there wasn’t any point where we were concerned about paying the bills,” D’Errico says.
The organization has begun to hold regional sports events again, but management decided to hold off another year before resuming the large Special Olympics event normally held in the summer at the University of Richmond.
“We’re still walking a little bit different path than we would be pre-pandemic,” D’Errico says. She’s hoping this fall will bring more normalcy.
The mother of three children under the age of 10 says she feels like being a parent makes her a better employee, and vice versa. “You need to exercise different parts of the brain,” she says. That’s also one of the reasons she decided to minor in Russian, studying extensively about that country’s culture and history at William & Mary. It’s important to tap into your creative side in order to help solve everyday problems, even ones that involve finance, D’Errico says.
“I feel so blessed to be able to work for a nonprofit,” she says. “I like being an accountant but it motivates me so much more to know the work that I do makes a difference in the world.”
She spends some of her time off working with a young nonprofit organization called For Richmond that unites churches across the metropolitan area to help those in need. D’Errico chairs the board of that organization, which used to be named BlessRVA. It now has two employees.
“It’s interesting to see the front end” of a nonprofit, she says. “There’s a lot that I can provide in terms of advice to them.”
Jeffrey feels fortunate that D’Errico landed and stayed with Special Olympics. “When you’re running a business … your CFO is probably the most important person on your team,” he says.
“She has a very specific set of skills. … She’s found a way to be able to use those skills to strengthen and move the organization forward.”
That’s a tough balance, particularly in the nonprofit sector, Jeffrey says. An individual has to be “not only a first-rate CFO but a first-rate servant leader.” ν
The Business Network for Offshore Wind’s International Partnering Forum (IPF) — North America’s largest offshore wind conference — will be held in Richmond Aug. 24-26.
The forum will connect global industry leaders to businesses in Virginia and beyond that support the construction and operation of offshore wind farms.
With the offshore wind industry placing greater focus on the Southeastern United States, Virginia is a strategic location for IPF, says Matt Smith, director of offshore wind business development for the Hampton Roads Alliance, the regional economic development organization.
“Heavy focus has been on the Northeast, which has a greater density of [offshore] wind projects,” Smith says, but “there is a shift of focus down toward the mid-Atlantic. We have world-class port facilities and waterfront facilities that can serve the industry. [Virginia’s] maritime workforce is larger than many other states combined.”
Virginia will soon be home to the nation’s largest offshore wind project by capacity — the $7.8 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind farm being developed by Dominion Energy. CVOW is scheduled to come online in 2026 and could power more than 660,000 homes.
Off the coast of North Carolina, Kitty Hawk Offshore, a wind project aiming to reach similar scale, is in the permitting process. Construction by Avangrid Renewables could begin as early as 2024.
Dominion, Avangrid, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy and the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy are sponsoring this year’s IPF.
Smith hopes the forum will give global offshore wind companies insight into the potential for building an offshore wind supply chain in Virginia. The state has strong maritime capabilities and other supporting industries, but Europe is decades ahead in supplying parts and components. This could change as more projects come online in the U.S., Smith adds.
While plans for an offshore wind supply chain are nascent, the industry is still expected to bring significant revenue to Virginia businesses. Starting in 2027, Dominion expects CVOW’s annual operation to generate $210 million in economic impact annually, which will mainly come from international renewable energy companies engaging with U.S. companies, says John Larson, director of public policy and economic development for Dominion.
“There will certainly be opportunities for Virginia businesses to provide goods and services to those tier one suppliers,” Larson says. “It is a great time for Virginia businesses to come to [IPF] to meet these leaders in the industry.”
Six hundred. That’s how many Advance Auto Parts employees are bidding adieu to their desks, cubicles, printers, water coolers and commutes in Roanoke, the city where the company was founded in 1932.
The giant auto parts retailer won’t be bringing back employees to its 275,288-square-foot office space at Crossroads Mall. They’ve all been working remotely for more than a year, during the pandemic. Why come back now? the company says.
“Our corporate team members have adapted really well to working remotely,” says Advance spokesman Darryl Carr, discussing the company’s decision from his home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he is working remotely. Advance moved its corporate headquarters to Raleigh, North Carolina, in 2019.
“We came off one of the best years in our company history, and this year has started off as well, if not better,” he says. “It didn’t seem to make sense for our team members to be going into an office full time again.”
Advance also plans to close a smaller 9,668-square-foot office in Richmond, where 50 other employees will continue working remotely.
Advance is not alone in making this transition. After the pandemic sent people around the globe home to work from their dining room tables, couches or home offices for at least 15 months, companies are evaluating whether to return to an office space as America gradually reopens and more people receive COVID-19 vaccines.
Some Fortune 500 companies based in Virginia have already made decisions. Capital One Financial Corp. in Tysons notified workers in June that it would be moving to a hybrid work model, alternating between remote and in-person days. Richmond-based utility Dominion Energy Inc. is launching a one-year pilot program allowing eligible employees to work hybrid schedules. Henrico County-based Altria Group Inc. in Henrico County is allowing salaried employees to continue remote work. And Goochland County’s CarMax has said it will allow some workers to have hybrid schedules, while others will work remotely.
While many businesses may resume some level of in-person work, office spaces and the ways that companies use those spaces likely will not look the same as before the pandemic.
Weighing the options
Across Virginia, commercial real estate brokers and representatives are working with office customers who have a plethora of new needs, sparked by the rise of remote or hybrid working options.
Some want less office space, while some want more in order for employees to spread out for social distancing. And still others want to create “hoteling” and “hot-desking” areas, which would allow for workers with flexible schedules to share common desks. Others are leaving the office behind altogether.
In large urban areas such as Northern Virginia, landlords are offering short-term leases and other incentives to entice businesses back to physical office spaces. Right now, office tenants are asking for shorter term leases rather than making 10-year commitments, says Joseph Farina, principal of the Washington, D.C., region for Divaris Real Estate Inc.
In New York City, some office landlords are lowering rents and even outfitting buildings with new restaurants and club-like dining, even including speakeasies, in order to make the return-to-office experience more attractive for tenants.
“Just a computer on a desk isn’t much of a draw,” says Farina, whose company’s Tysons office building recently added a fitness center.
The pandemic has changed the world of full-time work, and the office market may never look the same, some real estate executives say.
At the height of the pandemic, some firms made knee-jerk reactions, dramatically downsizing office space, says Julie Whelan, global head of occupier research for commercial real estate firm CBRE.
But with nearly 50% of the U.S. population fully vaccinated as of late June and most states dropping restrictions, some businesses are backpedaling as they perceive it to be safer to return to the office.
Hampton Roads has seen a sharp increase in office space subleasing, says Perry Frazer, executive vice president and principal at Colliers’ Norfolk office. Photo by Mark Rhodes;
“The pandemic wore on and the cracks began to form around what was really beneficial about working from home versus what was detrimental,” Whelan says.
According to CBRE’s spring 2021 Occupier Survey of 185 U.S.-based companies, 41% of companies said they planned to return to offices by the third quarter of the year. Just 9% of companies reported that their office portfolios would become significantly smaller over the next three years. That’s compared with 39% of companies surveyed in September 2020. However, about 72% of the companies said they were planning for modest office space reductions this year, which was up from 45% last September.
Largely, companies continue to weigh their options, though. Office vacancy rates in Virginia rose during the first quarter of 2021, but rents rose or remained steady in most markets, according to the Virginia Realtors association.
At the end of 2020 and in early 2021, businesses started to consider and even make some decisions about what they would do with their office space.
“The fact that they were making decisions started to drive deals,” says Perry Frazer, executive vice president and principal at the Norfolk office of Colliers, a commercial real estate firm with offices throughout Virginia and the United States.
In some cases, these decisions may not be cost-driven, Whelan says. “They are not a lever you need to pull … from a profitability standpoint. It’s a lever you are pulling because of how your people work.”
Commercial real estate analytics company CoStar Group sublet 51,000 square feet of office space from Owens & Minor at Richmond’s Riverfront Plaza. Photo by Caroline Martin
Subleasing on a roll
Some of the changes in office space are evident from the increasing amounts of subleased space on the market as companies seek alternatives to paying for square footage that they no longer need.
For instance, as of late June, there were several 50,000- and 100,000-square-foot office locations available for sublease in Hampton Roads, which has never been a sublease market, Frazer says.
“Subleases tend to offer companies more flexibility,” Frazer says. “They are typically shorter-term leases. The reason that that works for tenants is [that] right now people are still uncertain on what … [their business model] will look like in two, three or four years.”
Rent relief and relaxed leasing terms are several ways that landlords are attracting sublease tenants, real estate representatives say.
It’s working — at least in the Norfolk area.
Much of the sublet space that became available last year already has been filled, says Craig Cope, executive vice president for Harvey Lindsay Commercial Real Estate in Norfolk.
In Richmond, CoStar Group, a Washington, D.C.-based commercial real estate analytics and information provider, took over approximately 51,000 square feet of office space at Riverfront Plaza, subletting from Mechanicsville-based Fortune 500 medical supply company Owens & Minor, which moved out of the space because of its increased number of remote-work employees.
The picture is similar in Northern Virginia.
“We’re seeing additional sublease space continue to come onto the market and tenants really still looking for more flexibility than they did, in the way of shorter-term leases, and assessing the hybrid work model versus pure telework,” Farina says.
Still, company decisions right now are all over the map, and at least some companies are appearing bullish on office space. For instance, in July, Massachusetts-based defense contractor Raytheon Technologies Corp. renewed its 521,000-square-foot, three-building lease at the former AOL headquarters campus at Loudoun County’s Pacific Park in Dulles.
In the past year, “we have helped just as many clients grow in new markets as we have downsized,” says Rett Turner, first vice president for Cushman & Wakefield | Thalhimer in Richmond.
So long, cubicles
Although Advance Auto Parts employees will no longer work five days a week in office buildings in Roanoke and Richmond, the company plans to retain a small area in its Roanoke location as collaboration space, Carr says. Employees can meet there to work on joint projects and for other in-person work needs.
The details about the new space are not yet known, because the company still is discussing logistics with its landlord, Carr says.
More companies are requesting this kind of collaboration space within office structures, real estate representatives say.
“The fields of cubicles will go away,” Cope says. “There will be some space that is shared by multiple employees. There will be more areas for people to come together during the day. You will see some private offices in that mix.”
These common, shared areas are known as huddle or hoteling spaces.
In the post-pandemic era, Whelan with CBRE estimates that people will spend about 3.2 days a week in the office and 1.8 days working elsewhere. That’s a 24% reduction in the time that people are spending in a physical office, compared with before the pandemic when people worked about 4.2 days a week in an office.
But that likely will not translate into a 24% reduction in office space, given the ways that people will continue to use offices going forward, she says. Even as corporate tenants continue to make decisions about how often employees will work from office buildings, they also must consider when their leases run out and about how many employees they expect to hire over the next several years, Whelan says.
“You might actually not be able to get rid of any space because of the head count that you’re bringing in,” she says.
A majority of respondents to CBRE’s Occupier Survey said they expect employees to be in the office at least half of their working time, if not more.
“The question is, how do we go from today’s environment and all of the sudden jump to whatever the new normal is going to be?” Whelan says. “That means you have to uproot the behaviors you formed over the last 15 months. Change management has to be done to really change that behavior.”
In summer 2025, George Mason University is scheduled to open a distinctive, $168 million, 360,500-square-foot glass-and-steel tower on its Virginia Square campus in Arlington. Inside its walls, the university’s commitment to innovation, entrepreneurship and the creation of a tech-savvy workforce will be on full display.
In its 60-odd years of existence, Mason’s unwavering fealty to changing and growing with the times has transformed it from a startup branch of the University of Virginia with 17 students who studied at a renovated elementary school into Virginia’s largest public institute of higher learning, with more than 39,000 students.
Mason is a “different model of an educational institution,” says Joseph DeFilippo, director of academic affairs and planning for the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. In just 20 years, he says, Mason has added close to 200 degree programs, far more than any other Virginia state college or university. In what might be taken as an understatement, he explains that statistic by saying that Mason has “a lower threshold for trying new things.”
The school’s latest “new things” are typical of Mason’s ambitious character — not just the new building that is going up on the Arlington campus, but also the just-created College of Engineering and Computing that it will house. The core of this college — no surprise, this being Mason — is brand-new, too: GMU’s School of Computing. The school will focus on statistics, computer science and information technology, subjects formerly under the purview of the Volgenau School of Engineering. As part of the university’s redesign and expansion of its science and technology programs, it is folding Volgenau into the College of Engineering and Computing.
All of these changes are, in huge part, the result of the state’s $1 billion Tech Talent Investment Program (TTIP). The program’s creation was a major part of Virginia’s successful campaign to entice Amazon.com Inc. into locating its multibillion-dollar HQ2 East Coast headquarters in Arlington.
The program’s purpose is to produce 31,000 additional computer science and engineering graduates during the next two decades to feed the enormous demand for skilled workers from Amazon and the many other tech companies clustered in Northern Virginia.
The commonwealth now has the third-highest concentration of technology companies in the nation but, like other tech-centric areas in the country, it doesn’t have enough skilled workers to fill the ranks. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has predicted that the nation will need more than 500,000 new workers in the fields of computer science and IT by the end of this decade.
Eleven universities statewide are participating in TTIP, but Virginia Tech and Mason are the biggest recipients of the initiative’s state funding. Tech is in line for $545 million to aid development of its $1 billion Innovation Campus in Alexandria, close to Amazon HQ2, and Mason is getting $235 million, $86 million of which it will spend on construction of the Virginia Square building. The rest of the construction costs will be funded through philanthropy.
Liza Wilson Durant, Mason’s associate dean for strategic initiatives and community engagement, says the Institute of Digital InnovAtion will facilitate collaborations between university researchers, students, corporations and entrepreneurs. Photo by Will Schermerhorn
In return for Virginia’s $235 million investment, Mason has pledged to graduate at least 15,948 bachelor’s and master’s degree holders in computer science and related fields.
The state’s investment on such a grand scale will have “a very positive impact” on the creation of a diverse digital workforce, says Virginia Economic Development Partnership President and CEO Stephen Moret, adding that Northern Virginia has the potential to become a national leader in data science.
‘Beacon of innovation’
Liza Wilson Durant is a professor of engineering at the Volgenau School. She also is an associate dean for strategic initiatives and community engagement. In that role, she has been overseeing much of the programmatic aspects of the Virginia Square building project.
In addition to housing the new college, the building will be home to the Institute of Digital InnovAtion, still another new enterprise that Mason opened last year. More than 300 Mason faculty, research staff and students will work at the institute to develop technologies and systems in fields as diverse as finance, health and social justice. Durant says that areas of special study at the institute will include cybersecurity for transportation, manufacturing and supply chains and, given GMU’s location just a few miles from the Pentagon, national defense.
She envisions the institute, which will include innovation labs, business incubators and co-working facilities, as “a beacon of innovation” with a big role to play in creating an equally enterprising innovation district along the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor. The corridor already has a hefty head start on that goal, containing offices for tech giants such as Oracle and Amazon Web Services, Fortune 500 companies such as Mastercard and government contractors like Northrop Grumman Corp., not to mention several dozen other companies, large and small, established and startups.
The hoped-for product of all this commingling between “gown and town” is an ecosystem of wraparound services that Durant says will produce a competitive edge for the region and speed the transfer of research achievements to the marketplace while simultaneously offering advanced technical training to students.
Supporting all these efforts at the institute will be yet another new Mason institution — the College of Computing’s Department of Cyber Security Engineering. The first of its kind in the country, the department was launched March 1 and will focus on various areas of cybersecurity in various industries in areas including cellular networks, autonomous vehicles and the Internet of Things.
Paula Sorrell, Mason’s associate vice president of innovation and economic development, also is at work on Mason’s multifaceted efforts to boost its synergy with the surrounding community and to make sure the region can make the most of the technologically skilled workers that the university is committed to producing. In fiscal 2020, Sorrell says, Mason supported 10,000 companies, offering 863 training and educational programs that served 18,000 attendees.
Sorrell also oversees myriad business outreach efforts that include:
The GMU Office of Technology Transfer, which helps faculty and students protect their research and bring it to market. Sorrell says it has seen 53% growth in the past five years and recently doubled its staff.
The Virginia headquarters for 28 Small Business Development Centers that the federal Small Business Administration has established statewide.
The Procurement Technical Assistance Center, which provides low-cost or free assistance to enterprises that want to do business with local, state and federal entities.
The Innovation Commercialization Assistance Program, through which experienced entrepreneurs offer free help to tech startups. Mason administers the state program for the commonwealth.
Incubators slated for the new Virginia Square building, along with incubators in Leesburg, Fairfax, Springfield and
Paula Sorrell is George Mason’s associate vice president of innovation and economic development. Photo by Will Schermerhorn
Warrenton that operate through the Mason Enterprise Center, all of which remained open throughout the pandemic. “It’s unusual to run this many incubators,” Sorrell says, noting that the oldest one at Mason dates to 1995.
Diversity and inclusion
These multipronged initiatives aimed at ensuring that the region has the necessary skilled tech workers for a prosperous future also come with a resolute commitment to inclusivity. “It’s part of our DNA,” Durant says. “We want to support companies that look like our students.”
To that end, in fiscal 2020 Mason provided support services to more than 50 companies run by minorities.
Mason, in partnership with Marymount University, also recently ran a cybersecurity internship program for the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative NoVa Node. Starting with 16 paid intern positions, it will expand by 40 more internships this fall. About 70% of the interns accepted for the program so far have been women and people of color.
Mason’s student population is about 47% minority, along with international and multiethnic students. Many of these students are the first in their families to go to college, and many work while they earn their degrees.
“These students are not coming from a deficit. They don’t need help, but access to information,” says Chris Carr, chief diversity officer at Volgenau School of Engineering.
That Mason is successful in finding many ways to provide that information is borne out by its graduation statistics. “Mason has no equity gaps,” DeFilippo in academic affairs says. Minority and majority students graduate at identical rates.
Diversity does not start and end just with students, of course. Developing a diverse technological workforce is also about faculty, so Mason is directing some of its state TTIP funding into a program called the TTIP Faculty Thematic Hiring Initiative. The initiative, spearheaded by Carr and Sanmay Das, a professor of computer science, is creating four faculty positions that will support multidisciplinary education and research in computing fields. The first position will focus on biomedicine and health care disparities and the second on the intersection of artificial intelligence and social justice, with the focus of the other two positions still to be determined.
Many engineers and tech scientists may think that their work has little to do with larger issues, but the emergence of technological innovations such as algorithms to track personal data can affect everything from child welfare priorities to who gets a mortgage or access to medical procedures. “This is not a technocratic exercise,” Das says. “It affects society.”
That assessment, of course, can be applied to Mason itself. As the university continues to grow by leaps and bounds, it will be using its innovative and technological expertise, its business acumen and its belief in multiculturalism not only to supply Northern Virginia with a modern workforce but also to reshape the face of the region itself.
At a glance
Founded
Originally formed in 1949 as an extension of the University of Virginia, George Mason University formally separated from U.Va. in 1972.
Campus
Mason’s main campus is located on 677 acres in Fairfax County, just south of Fairfax city and about 20 miles outside Washington, D.C. Mason’s Arlington Campus, located in the county’s urban Clarendon business district, is home to the Antonin Scalia Law School and the Schar School of Policy and Government. The university also has the Mason Korea campus in Songdo, South Korea, and the Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation campus in Front Royal.
Enrollment
38,542 (fall 2020)
Student profile
Female: 52%
Male: 47%
In-state: 81%
Minority: 47%
Academic programs
In 2020-21, Mason offered 210 total degree programs, including 78 undergraduate degree programs, 94 master’s degree programs, 38 doctoral degree programs and one First Professional Juris Doctorate program.
Faculty
GMU has 1,612 full-time instructional and research faculty.
Large Nonprofit|Clifford Yee, CFO Northern Virginia Family Service, Oakton
First-generation college graduate Clifford Yee’s early career took him from the East Coast to the West Coast and back again in a variety of financial, consulting and management positions. Then, at the age of 40, he had a stroke.
It was Mother’s Day 2016 when Yee’s wife recognized his symptoms and quickly got him to a nearby trauma center, where he underwent surgery to repair a carotid artery dissection. Yee had no idea he had this condition, which involves a separation in the layers of the carotid artery and can impede blood flow to the brain. It’s a leading cause of strokes in younger patients.
Months and months later, after extensive occupational therapy, Yee began considering a job change. At the time, he was managing director of corporate social responsibility consulting for Washington, D.C.-based accounting firm Raffa PC, a division of Marcum LLP.
Yee had heard about an opening at Oakton-based Northern Virginia Family Service, a multifaceted nonprofit. With more than 300 employees and annual revenue of about $35 million, Northern Virginia Family Service provides an array of services to economically challenged clients, ranging from early childhood development and housing needs to immigration legal services and workforce development.
“It just made a lot of sense at that time to get out of the corporate sector,” Yee says. “What mattered to me was having a job that had an impact, had a purpose.”
In 2018, Yee became executive vice president and chief financial officer at NVFS, where his work experience is appreciated by supervisors and subordinates alike.
Stephanie Berkowitz, president and CEO of NVFS, says Yee is a roll-up-the-sleeves partner in tackling tough issues. “Cliff is measured, analytical and approachable, all of which make him an exceptional leader,” she says. “He is a lifelong learner, always seeking new knowledge and information, and among his superpowers, he is a natural mentor, always willing to share his time and knowledge with his colleagues all across our organization and with our broader community.”
Business Operations Supervisor Shirley Hayden, who reports to Yee, says, “He’s the first CFO I’ve worked with who really understands the operations side.” Yee is cheerful and a “very good listener,” she adds. “When I’m talking to him about inclusion, for instance, he listens and takes my recommendations.”
Yee’s father immigrated from China, and neither his parents nor their relatives before them had attended college. Yee earned a business degree from the University of Richmond and later an MBA from Claremont Graduate University while working in California.
He calls his early career path “a big zigzag.” Right out of college, he landed a gig as an IT consultant in Richmond and then took a job at Capital One Financial Corp. Next, he moved to the Chicago area to become the associate executive director for his college fraternity. After “three winters in Chicago,” he recalls with a laugh, he moved to warm, sunny
Los Angeles for a financial consulting job.
After his father started having health issues, Yee moved back east to work for Capital One again, holding positions in Richmond and McLean between 2006 and 2015. “The last man I hired at Capital One when I left actually hired me back,” Yee remembers with a laugh.
Yee says his job experience is helpful at NVFS. Being the CFO of a large nonprofit involves “really understanding how to make these connection points,” he says.
About 80% of the organization’s services are funded through government contracts, so “we have to front that money and wait to be reimbursed.” And the pandemic brought its own set of challenges, with the organization handling $6 million in pass-through funds to provide rental and mortgage relief through the federal CARES Act.
“I tell my wife all the time that if I wasn’t constantly challenged, I would probably need to look for another job,” Yee says. ν
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