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Hello and welcome to Speaking of Entrepreneurship podcast at Corporate College. I'm your host Dr. Michael Baston, president of Cuyahoga Community College and I'm thrilled to welcome Beth Hammack, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Beth, so happy to have you with us today.
You joined the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland last August, bringing more than 30 years of experience in finance, capital markets, and risk management. So tell me, what exactly do you do?
Well, thank you so much for having me, Dr. Baston, and it's great to be here, and it's great to honor the 20th anniversary of Corporate College. It really is spectacular. What I spent my time in the private sector was really working in finance and I'd worked across a bunch of different areas. I focused on interest rates and making markets in interest rates to provide investment opportunities to pensions, insurance companies, individuals, corporations. I spent time as our treasurer, which I explained to my children as I signed the checks because that was what they could understand. But it was really thinking about the planning and how do we finance the organization itself. And then my last role was spent working with corporations to help them find financing opportunities and to think about what was the right channel for them. But the reason I was interested in joining the Federal Reserve was that I had spent some time during my career on a couple of committees, one for the Department of Treasury, one for the New York Fed. And so I got to see up close how policymakers think about the role they play and the work that they do. And it became interesting to me at that point that as a market participant, I spent a lot of time thinking about what the Fed would do. And as a policymaker, I spend all my time thinking about what the Fed should do. So for me in those conversations, being at those committees, I started to be more interested in the should than the would. And now I've come full circle over to that side of it.
Oh, that's phenomenal. I recently was at an event that you all had, the policy summit, which was extraordinary and I watched you talk to participants and listen to their points of view of how the country could get stronger and better. What is it like to actually work with the real people whose lives are being impacted every day?
Yeah, it's a critically important part of my job and fortunately it's also one of my favorite parts of the job is going out and talking to businesses, talking to individuals, understanding how the economy is affecting them because when I go to set policy in Washington, what's important is I look at all the data and understand what the numbers are saying, but you have to put a human face and a human voice to that. So being out in the community, hearing how individuals are experiencing it, hearing the pain of high inflation, hearing how difficult it is to make your paycheck stretch, hearing from business owners about their inability to find workers or to keep workers or having workers jump because they can get an extra 50 cents or a dollar in their earnings. All of those challenges are what make up how our economy is performing. And our mission at the Fed is to make sure the economy is performing for everyone.
That's so awesome. I mean because we really do need to have stable families and stable communities but it does take leadership. So tell me a little bit about because of this extraordinary career, what do you think about the need for good leadership in this season as we continue to help families move forward?
Yeah, I think good leadership is always important. It's critical to have someone at the top of an organization who has vision, who has compassion, who's clear and direct and who's trustworthy. And I think you build that in lots of small ways over time. But I think leadership is really about getting an organization to believe in your vision and to help execute that vision and make sure that you can have the biggest impact possible. One of the things that impressed me about the policy summit is that you had students who are actually interning and they were able to participate as well. They were able to learn. So, what advice would you give students to prepare themselves for a career for example at the Federal Reserve?
Well, I love it when the interns come in this season because they bring such energy and such a fresh perspective on everything that we do. What I think is really important for interns and for anyone who's just starting out in the workforce is to ask lots of questions. Be curious. Just really make sure that you can be that annoying person. And sometimes it is annoying to seasoned professionals to have someone asking lots and lots of questions, but that's how you learn. And I found throughout my career that the people who are really just trying to take a different perspective and trying to understand how things work are the ones who are really capable of the most change and the most impact over time.
I love that. You know, how does the Federal Reserve Bank impact local communities? Because I think about the students that I was listening to and how passionate they were about doing the work. So, how do you see your work as really impacting the local community?
Yeah, we have impact hopefully on the national level in the policy setting space but also on the local level around the community development work that we do. So our community development team who hosted the policy summit and put on that event spend a lot of time with organizations in Cleveland, in Cincinnati, in Columbus, Toledo, Worcester, name your favorite small town in parts of Pennsylvania, Kentucky and West Virginia where we are as well. Really understanding those communities and trying to understand what some of the common problems are. So there are three main areas that we focus on which are around workforce development, housing affordability, and small businesses. And so we really try to understand what are the barriers that are keeping people out of the workforce and how have different organizations solved those problems. So, one place that we went to visit, well, two actually. One was the food bank in the greater food bank in Cleveland looking at their community resource model where they try to do all these wraparound services and provide that availability. And then we were also at a place in Cincinnati called the Brighton Center which had a similar model focused more on workforce development, but they also within that looked at housing, looked at child care, looked at nutrition and food security and tried to bring that all together. And so I think our role at the Cleveland Fed is not that we don't fund these organizations. We don't directly support them, but we do provide research, analysis, and data to see what's working and hopefully amplify those trends. So centers like the Greater Cleveland Food Bank Community Resource Center or the Brighton Center, those types of models, if they're working, can get multiplied and amplified throughout the district and the country.
And we use a lot of your research at our institution. We see ourselves as really advancing economic mobility for our people. We use education as the vehicle, but it really is to an end that provides the kind of sustainability for people. We don't want families to just have a family sustaining wage. We want them to have a family thriving wage. Because we believe that sustaining is great. You know, if you're the duck, you can see the duck above the water, but you don't really recognize what has to happen under the water to be sustained. We really want families to thrive. And it seems like the research that you all are engaged in helps inform organizations like us how we can better participate in this work. So, what do you think about the partnering and the utilization of the research and how that's being helpful to organizations like the college?
Yeah, I think it's fantastic. I mean, that's one of our goals is to make sure that the work that we're doing is impactful and that it can be used to help everyone find new opportunities and thrive. I love the way that you say that, not just survive, but really thrive in their opportunities. And so partnerships that we have with community colleges like Tri-C, thinking about these workforce development issues, thinking about the training that needs to happen, how do we get people who want to have great jobs and employers who need good employees, how do we get those two groups together to find the most opportunity for everyone.
