SPOKANE — Rock on Spokane Community College.
For the fifth year in a row, the school received funding from Metallica’s education foundation to support career and technical education programs.
This year, the metal band’s program, All Within My Hands, gave SCC $5,000 to support existing workforce transition programs that provide resources to students in need; like veterans, those on food programs, previously incarcerated students and those switching careers.
In 2019, the Metallica Scholars Initiative gave ten community colleges around the country $100,000, including SCC, to support such services. In each year following, SCC has received varying amounts from the initiative to enhance services that teach “soft skills” that employers look for that workers may not have the knowledge in.
“What we do is trying to make workers retailer their skillset to make them more employable,” SCC spokesperson Jeff Bunch said. “Maybe they’ve been doing physical labor their whole life and now they have a back injury and now they have to transition jobs. Maybe they don’t know basic math because they’ve never had to use it.”
This year, SCC is using the $5,000 in conjunction with other grants to purchase about 450 backpacks and other school supplies with the initiative’s Metallica-esque logo. Students can apply to become a Metallica Scholar and receive a backpack, as well as workforce services.
“My vision is you’ll walk around campus and see like nursing students in their nursing uniform on and you’ll see they have a metallica backpack on,” said Workforce Transitions Manager Wendy Jones.
The Workforce Transitions Center is a “one-stop shop” for support services at SCC and operates through four different grants, helping students register for government assistance, find childcare or address issues so students can focus on school.
“We are the office that helps students address or eliminate barriers while focusing on retention,” Jones said.
Jones estimates the program will serve 350-500 students this year.
“Our average age of our students is like 34, I think,” Jones said. “Most of our students can relate to Metallica or grew up listening to it. It’s kind of exciting for them.”
Bunch said the band selected community colleges out of applicants based on their history in the cities themselves. Metallica has performed in Spokane multiple times, including an attendance record-breaking show in 2018 at the Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena that drew more than 13,000 metal heads.
“They actually chose Spokane as a place they’ve had good experiences in in their music career,” Bunch said. “They basically said, ‘We only want to consider places we’ve been to and felt like we want to make an impact at.’”
The five-year-old initiative now supports 42 community colleges nationwide. SCC was among the original institutions to receive funding and is the only one in Washington. The idea is to wane schools off the program as their services become more established and can act independent of Metallica’s funding, Bunch said. Meanwhile, the school acts as a leader to colleges entering the program later.
At the end of this year, Metallica’s initiative will have served an estimated 6,000 students pursuing education in subjects like automotive repair, welding, nursing, sonography and other in-demand technical fields.
“The Metallica Scholars Initiative is so important to us because we are seeing results,” said Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich in a press release. “Five years in, with the help of community colleges across the country, we are helping people fill these essential jobs which require skills and training. We are so proud and grateful that we can facilitate this program.”
