Rebecca Taber Staehelin

Nonprofit leader, toddler boy mom, donut enthusiast

[Connor DiemandYauman @connord_y]

The answer to AI-related job loss is not “reskilling.” Not on its own, and definitely not in the way everyone is saying it. Let me explain...

By every rule of self-interest, this should be our moment 🤝

Rebecca and I run Merit America, one of the largest nonprofits in the country reskilling workers for good jobs. And right now every CEO and Senator is saying the answer to AI is reskilling. Jensen Huang even promises the upskilling process will be "delightful." 😅

So we should be thrilled. Instead we wrote the piece we're probably not supposed to write:

Reskilling alone is not going to save us. 🚨

Here's the math 👇

Reskilling is a bridge. 🌉 Bridges only work if they lead somewhere. Build one to a cliff and you've got a roadrunner cartoon. Meep meep 🐦‍⬛

So how many people might need to cross it?

📉 Stanford: early-career workers in the most AI-exposed jobs are down 16% since ChatGPT launched.
📊 Anthropic's CEO: up to HALF of all entry-level white-collar jobs gone within 5 years.
📋 BCG, in a report literally titled "AI Will Reshape More Jobs Than It Replaces": 16 to 25 MILLION US jobs vulnerable.

Now let's lowball harder than anyone serious would. Take 5% of the white-collar workforce. That's still 4.5 million people who need somewhere new to go.

"But there are millions of job openings in the trades!" 🔧

That one is a trick of language. Most "job openings" are just churn. Someone retired, someone quit, and the seat gets refilled by the next person already in line. Strip out the churn and the genuinely unfilled good jobs across EVERY non-white-collar field come to maybe 600,000 to 900,000. Total. And that is us being generous.

So here's the gut-punch 😬

Displaced (lowballed): 4.5 million
Genuinely open good jobs to catch them: under 1 million

That gap is what gives us night sweats.

The fix is not less reskilling–we need a whole lot more of it! The fix is building the other side of the bridge: a real plan to create jobs at a scale this country has never tried 🏗️

Because we know what "wait and see" gets us. Remember NAFTA? Jobs gone, cities hollowed out, livelihoods destroyed, because we let it happen with no plan for the people left behind. If NAFTA was a category 5 hurricane, AI is an asteroid. ☄️

So what could a real job-creation plan look like? Cue the movie montage 🎬
🏛️ Leaders on the hill beam after passing the largest infrastructure bill in history.
🏦 A Fortune 500 boardroom adds a new line to the quarterly deck: Jobs Created.
🎖️ The military leans into the largest job-training operation in the country.
💻 Training that takes months, not years, built around work shifts and school pickups, with real jobs waiting on the other end.

If you're tired of choosing between AI doom and AI hype, this is the third lane. It gets scary before it gets hopeful. And it does get hopeful.

Full piece here 👇
https://t.co/1jHwPjAPLs

[Connor DiemandYauman @connord_y]

Garry, you're great, but this is a bad take.

We've raised $200M+ from philanthropy and have worked with most major funders. MacKenzie Scott's process was one of the most thorough. They asked for a lot and went deep — but only on what actually mattered. No BS. We received $15M (it was exactly the right amount for our org).

You said there are "a bunch of examples in the long form post" of harmful gifts. I count two. Out of $26B given. And you're framing this as "harmful to the republic"? A billionaire wanting to give away her fortune to nonprofits too quickly — that's the threat to the republic you chose to tweet about? Out of everything happening in this country right now, the fact that this cracks your top 50 most tweet-worthy concerns is wild to me.

A huge amount of philanthropy is stuck. It's a huge problem in our sector. Large endowments with big staffs and years of "figuring things out." Most pay out the legal minimum — in some cases less than the annual interest earned on principal that already generated a tax deduction. There's extensive reporting on how many Giving Pledge signatories have moved capital far more slowly than the public narrative suggests.

And re: your "Stewardship Pledge" — one hour of auditing per $1M given — sounds reasonable until you do the math. Elon Musk donating half his ~$300B fortune would require 150,000 hours of oversight — 72 years of full-time work! You've just made the most elegant argument ever for why many billionaires don't give.

M. Scott is actually moving capital. At scale. When you deploy $26B quickly, some grants won't work — that's to be expected. How many VCs have ended up funding companies they shouldn't have? Why is "move fast and break things" exclusive to silicon valley tech companies?

To be clear: there are real, fact-based critiques to make about what's happening in philanthropy right now. This hit piece on Scott isn't one of them. This kind of framing can meaningfully hurt organizations doing real work, and I know that's not your intention.

If you want to talk about what's actually broken and how to improve it, my DMs are open.

[Rebecca Taber Staehelin @rjtaber]

@astaehelin 👀

[Rebecca Taber Staehelin @rjtaber]

RT @connord_y: .@JoeBiden please let us know if this time no longer works for you.