Community Engagement and Public Trust | Skydio Ascend '24

This session provides an overview of the Skydio For All social impact program highlighting the ways we can support customers with community engagement and workforce development. We will explore best practices for organizations to develop and implement sustainable strategies that not only engage young people in STEM education, but also build public trust and foster strong, positive relationships with their communities. Key Takeaways: • Skydio For All areas of support • Identify areas of focus for your community • How to build a community engagement and outreach plan • Tips for addressing community needs and concerns.

Hi, everyone. My name is Mira Marquez.

I manage and lead Skydio social impact program, Skydio for All. And I wanna talk to you today a little bit about community engagement and public trust.

And so thank you for being a small but mighty, attendance group for today.

Alright.

Let's get started. Just out of curiosity, who here currently does any form of community engagement with their organization? No? Alright. I see you NYPA people.

Alright.

And then just out of curiosity, who does not do any community engagement?

Oh, sorry. I'm so sorry. It's been a long day.

Let me go back. Alright. Who does not do any community engagement currently with their organization?

Alright. We've got a couple of folks. And then who does community engagement?

Fabulous, NYPA.

Find community engagement. Community engagement in regards to sharing your expertise with your local community and the community that you operate in, whether or not that's on an education component, or just sharing about your how you're using technology, or what your organization does with your broader community public community around you.

So one of the things that I wanted to talk to you guys about today is how crucial community engagement and building community trust are for, how crucial it is for overall success.

A little bit about the areas of Skydio for All. So Skydio for All covers a wide range of areas, but one of the things I wanna talk to you about is how this program and how we're trying to help our customers with community engagement planning, to help cultivate and build better relationships with your communities that you operate in. And so it's whether or not you currently do not have any type of community engagement programming, or if you do, what we can do to help you to grow that and create a more robust and sustainable program for not only your organization, but also for your community as well.

Or even if you have tried to do things with your community and it hasn't worked out super great, we're here to help and rebuild that trust.

So we're overall here to help you with your community engagement plans. So a little bit about the areas that we operate in.

Schedule for All does a lot of work on the youth STEM education side.

One of the main reasons for this is because we see with any emerging technology space, there's often a large gap when it comes to the public education side. At least here in the US, often public education, may have trouble keeping up with emerging technologies. And so that's something that we wanna be able to support and provide our expertise for the community, and help inspire the next generation of engineers, pilots, and innovators.

We do a lot of work as well in the historical and cultural preservation space.

We've worked with organizations around the globe to help document and create digital twins for structures at risk, whether from natural disasters or, unfortunately, you know, human made catastrophes as well. And creating digital twins is a great way to help preserve, these culturally significant structures for the next generation, but also for education as well.

We do a lot of work in the wildlife conservation space, and this is kind of more of an emerging market with the drone use.

One of the things that we do is to help researchers, bring in emerging technologies, especially drones, to help understand how these can be used to accelerate conservation efforts, but also, build a more sustainable ecosystem within a lot of the wild wildlife space to help with anti poaching or, human wildlife conflict mitigation as well. And so that's one area that we're able to help in, in regards to the environment around us.

At Skydio, we actually have quite a large veteran population, and so that's something that our team has felt very strongly about being able to give back for individuals as they transition from service to civilian life. One of the large things that we do every year is have a veteran's vehicle scholarship where veterans, they submit an application telling us their story, a little bit about their background and what they're hoping to aspire to do as they transition into civilian life and use that use drones as a way to help accelerate that. And all of our applications are reviewed by our own veterans, and I love that we always do in person training and hand off for all of the winners each year, which is great.

The last area of expertise that we our program helps with is the humanitarian crisis side. So what I talked about a little bit earlier, whether manmade or natural disasters, there's also the aspect of just helping people. So whether or not that's working with USAID or helping with demining projects in Ukraine, to here locally in Florida after hurricanes and natural disasters as well.

One of the largest areas that we've noticed over the past couple of years has been the STEM education and workforce development has been some of the largest gaps when it come to our industry growth and sustainability.

And so this is an area that we are actively trying to help fill that gap. There's a lot of organizations that are doing work to share part one zero seven knowledge, and getting more students and younger generations upskilled to learn about actually flying drones. But one of the things that we wanna be able to help bridge is that connection into the industry as well.

And part of the reason for this is because public education, which I mentioned earlier, is not necessarily keeping up with emerging technologies. You know, teachers are often overworked.

Classrooms are overfilled, especially here in the US, and asking teachers to become experts in this technology is a little overwhelming.

So as users, and developers of this emerging technology, we need to kind of take the steps to help bridge the gaps for educators to get younger generations and more students into these fields and help connect them with professionals in their community.

A couple statistics. So part of looking at the gaps that the education space has and also the drone space has is keeping track that minorities and women are often are currently remain drastically underrepresented within this industry.

As of last year, only eight point three nine percent of part one zero seven licenses out of all that were issued to women. And over the past five years, looking at the civil airmen statistics, that's typically gone up either half a point or one point each or one percent each year, which when you think about it, if we wanted to get it close to even thirty or forty percent, we're looking at another, you know, twenty to thirty years, which could be quite painful.

On top of that, there's often mounting barriers of entry when we look at our industry, especially in comparison to crude aviation where, you know, when we look at crude aviation, you had to if you were younger or you had to either know somebody who either had a airplane or you live near, airport or knew somebody who worked in the aviation space, that's where you would get that exposure.

Whereas that creates a lot of pockets in within our regions across the US and across the globe where there's so many individuals, not only just students, but general public that don't have access to this technology, but they also don't have exposure to the careers within the aviation space.

So that's one of the things when it comes to the drone industry is these products are portable. We're able to put them in a backpack, bring them on a plane, and bring them to a lot more regions.

Because previously, you know, crude aviation was incredibly expensive. But even still within the drone space, there are still barriers, and that's something that we're trying to work with and help mitigate and reduce those barriers because there still is a lack of access. Drones can be expensive, and there's also a lack of qualified instructions. What I was mentioning earlier about educators needing to be experts within this field, there's a lot of educators that overall lack qualified ex instruction when it comes to STEM education overall. So to continue to add on an aviation component of it can be really overwhelming and very strenuous on that individual teacher or a small teacher group at a school as well.

On top of that, the US is also falling behind in STEM proficiency.

In twenty twenty two, only nineteen point six, of the degrees issued were in STEM related fields.

So part of this, UNESCO actually partnered with an education group and did a study on this, and they found that on top of this overall statistic of nineteen point six percent going into STEM related fields, they also found with the Pew Institute that roughly fifty four percent of adults, at least here in the US, that students didn't did not go into STEM related fields because they thought it was too hard, which unfortunately is not a great mindset for setting up the next generation for success.

And then on top of that, the average reading level here in the US is a seventh to eighth grade reading level, and literacy competency is absolutely vital to self learning for students.

Additionally, one more thing.

These issues don't start in high school. A lot of programs focus on high school development, which is great and should continue to do so. But looking on the psychological side and the neuroscience side a little bit, a lot of these issues start with kids as young as five to seven years old, where typically kids believe that they are capable or not capable of doing something at that young of an age. In a study by the World Economic Forum, they found that gender stereotypes typically impact kids as early as five to seven years old, which is a little discouraging to say the least. One of the studies that they did was they had a group of roughly sixty, sixty five students draw, a series of professions, and they just said, you know, draw me a picture of a, fighter pilot, a surgeon, and a firefighter, or a jet pilot, surgeon and firefighter.

Out of the group that they requested to do this, only five students drew any of these professions as women, which is incredibly discouraging.

But on a larger scale project with this survey, they asked over twenty thousand students to, what they wanted to be when they grew up. And so out of the ages seven to eleven years old, they found that gender stereotyping, it not only starts when they're relatively young, but it's a global issue. It's not just something here in the US. It was evident in every country that they surveyed.

But they found that career aspirations typically actually kind of set in around the ages seven to ten years old and relatively change very little all the way through their teenage years.

They also found that there's a significant mismatch in the career aspirations of these students and job market demands.

And then on top of that, less than one percent of the survey group found that they heard the job about the job from an individual and person who had visited their school, which goes to show that there was not a whole lot of one to one connection between industry professionals and actually students in regards to exposure of what they want to be or even hearing about a career.

So one of the things that we look at is essentially how do we support the next generation? When we look at the overall sustainability of the drone industry, what are ways that we can ensure that there's gonna be enough not only students, but enough people of the next generation coming into these spaces to support the way that our industry is growing.

You know, teachers are overworked, classrooms are overfilled, and asking the teachers to become experts in research new fields in autonomy, AI is a little ridiculous.

So as users and developers, what can we do to support them to fill this technology gap?

And the reality of it is we don't necessarily need to be experts in education. We actually just need to be experts in what we do, experts out of our at our jobs.

And sharing your story with your community is incredibly important.

You know, how else is somebody else, whether even as an adult, they're gonna learn about what you do unless there's some point of exposure.

So where do you start? I know we have a couple folks who have very strong education, outreach programs and a couple folks who maybe are just getting started.

What I wanna share though is that, basically, don't worry. We've got you covered. We're here to help.

And that's something that Skydio feels very strongly about and being able to support our customers with any form of outreach to ensure that they're successful and there's good relationships and trust with their community.

Part of how we do this is identifying what either you or your organization could commit to, whether or not that's joining, Skyeo for all hosted events, partnering with, other connections or organizations that you have within your region, or, whether or not you wanna start an initiative of your own, whether it's an individual or an organization that's just getting started. And part of the why part of why we look at it this way is because everyone's resources and bandwidth is completely different.

What somebody might have as far as resources within a public safety agents first public safety agency versus utilities company or as a small private organization would be dramatically different.

One other aspect to keep in mind when you look at this is who's gonna champion your outreach? Is that an individual?

Is there an internal group? A lot of public safety agencies do work with explorer programs to bring in students to work with their officers. Is there potentially an affiliated organization with your company that manages, communications or outreach, such as a public safety foundation that are often associated with agencies, that can help manage and spearhead some of these initiatives.

And then lastly, you wanna keep in mind on identifying local programs and institutions that you can work with because you don't want it to just be a one and done overall. You want it to be something that's sustainable, that has long term impact, but also builds off of the, work that you're doing and is gonna be sustainable, but continue to thrive and grow within your community. And a lot of the ways that we look at doing this is through schools or working with after school programs, whether that's locally, regionally, summer programs, but also looking at organizations such as, like, the Girl Scouts, YMCAs, Boys and Girls Clubs, which are already heavily really integrated within a lot of communities, especially here in the US.

They understand often what students are facing or what, you know, families are facing within their communities. So they have a better grasp on the areas that would be able to we'd be able to plug in not only education programming, but overall support for their community.

To date at Skydio, we've actually had over seven thousand students with hands on flight experiences. And this is a huge I was like, this is a large number, but, this is incredibly important to us, here at Skydio because for a student, if they're able to get that hands on experience, they can then believe that they are capable of going into these careers and going into these fields. So that's something anytime we do any type of community outreach with students, we ensure that every student gets hands on flight time, whether or not that's thirty seconds or thirty minutes. We wanna share with them so that way they develop that belief that they are capable of doing so.

Part of how we go about doing this is through youth fly days.

Youth fly days are these full day programs where we bring in industry professionals to share with students, or local organizations around what they do in their professional life.

We typically provide hands on experience, responsible use talking about, you know, how to fly drones, but also should you fly the drone in this area? How does that work? What are the legalities of it? We talk about use cases, careers, and overall to help inspire the students that this is something that they might be interested in going in later.

I know a couple of y'all have already seen this. This is a little recap. Academy with fellow industry professionals from NYPD, NYPA, New York Power Authority, New York Fire Department, and also Skydio professionals to kind of teach kids and provide a sense of exposure and inspiration for students around different careers within the drone industry, especially as the drone industry is growing and growing. And so we wanna make ourselves available to educators and students for the future.

So the drone is giving us an aerial view to help save people to operate out of fire a lot faster.

I'm in an area where kids normally would never ever get to probably even touch a drone. So the fact that they were able to get that experience in school, it'll open their minds to say, hey. Maybe I wanna be a drone operator one day.

You get a school. Awesome. Good job.

They think it's obviously a really cool thing to be able to fly this out in their school courtyard. But if you dig a little deeper talking about what does it mean to be a mechanical engineer, a software developer, what does this look like out in law enforcement, what does this look like out in the utility industry, and and even the military when we talk about the x two, we brought all three of our drones here and talking about the differences between them, the design features, and things like that.

They've really been leading it.

One of the things about, you know, school people, they all you should be a doctor. You should be a nurse. And there's so many areas that they don't focus on, and drones is one of them. And so if our scholars know how to do that, they have an opportunity to have a great income and change the trajectory of their family's financial future.

So if you put the right your right thumb forward, do you want to look like We have a station where students get to learn manual flight.

They get it actually hands on flight experience. So we put the controllers in their hands to get them up in the air flying because it's really important for them to see themselves as being capable of doing these types of careers.

That looks so cool. Oh, no. Look. Yeah.

So our visual learners, our auditory learners, and especially are enjoying this. Today, they're able to experience different fields, what else is out there. But if they're not exposed to more, they won't know that there's more out there.

Thank you very much. So that's a recap of one of our youth fly days that we did earlier this year in Brooklyn, New York.

We had over a hundred and seventy two middle school students participate. And as I get mentioned as the video mentioned earlier, NYPD, FDNY, and, of course, NYPA were able to join us to share, spend some time with some students.

Oops. Why is this? Here we go. So with that, I'd love to welcome Peter from NYPA.

Oh, thank you, ma'am.

And if you wanna thank you so much for joining me today.

Anytime, ma'am. I never say no.

Thank you. But I would love, I know the group's a little small, but I would love for you to just share your experience not only working with us on the education side, but also why does NYPA as you guys received your award this morning, why does NYPA believe that it's so important to do the outreach that you have been doing, and why has what has led to NYPA's community outreach being so robust as it is?

It's simple. It's the right thing to do. Yeah. That's it. It's the what we need to do.

Here at the power authority, community outreach is important.

We impact the whole state with the power.

But if we can't impact the young children and their development and understanding the full capability, it's really, it's a failure on our part. So having the ability, having the technology, and it only costs time, why aren't we doing it more? That's that's the overall reasoning behind it.

What has that's fantastic. And what has the community response been to all the outreach that you guys have been doing?

So twenty twenty three, we did nineteen weeks of STEM outreach with me and one other person.

Mind you, that's on top of our day to day jobs.

We go into every community out there in New York State from Niagara Falls to the Saint Lawrence River to the Mohawk Valley to Westchester, the city, Long Island. So wherever we have pilots, we encourage people to do things.

We reach out to our local schools, especially the schools in hard areas, and we offer, hey. We can come and do a LEGO day. We can come do a drone day, get the kids' hands on experience, understanding it's cool to be a nerd, and we keep hammering that home.

Awesome. And one last thing. Any advice you can offer for anyone who's either, hesitant in starting their community engagement program or just starting? What are some some things that maybe they should consider?

So when when we say community engagement, this can mean a variety of things to me.

We help lots of agencies within the state, lots of municipalities with their programs.

And I for NYPA, we have to go above and beyond to help our partners across the state.

For me, it's lacking when we don't apply that same privilege, that same ability to our school districts. We cold call, lots of NYPA employees say, hey. I know the school with the drone program.

And so we helped Madrid, Wantington. Oh, wow. And they came in sixth in, regionals two years ago.

This year, they went to nationals and came in fourth.

You know? Then from there, NYPA actually received two developmental engineers who are now going to school to come work at the plant.

For the utility world, we're seeing a high age gap.

Okay? Average age of, utility employee is fifty four years old, but we can't recruit people to come in. But we can surely show them it's cool to work at a utility.

And when they start how do I get a job to work at NYPA? How what is an electrician? What is an electrical engineer? Yeah. What is code? Why do you have drones? Why do you have robots?

Just that question of why and how do I do it is very impactful. The communities love us.

We feed the kids, which is like a big thing, and we teach them where we can.

Which is amazing. I love that. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story a little bit. Really appreciate you being here.

Ma'am, thank you for the opportunity for us to go down there.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Of course.

Thank you so much, everyone.

Does anyone have any questions or anything at all so far?

No? Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming. Very much enjoyed having you here.

Did actually have a couple of questions. This has been really exciting for me to sit and listen to because I haven't really had a chance to be super close to the Skydio for all program. There are actually a couple questions for you if if that's okay. And you don't have to stand. You're totally welcome to sit if you want or you can return to the stage, whatever you prefer.

I'll give you this mic.

Yes, mate.

I was just wondering, you know, the fact that you guys were able to partner with other organizations, how how was that received by partnering with, you know, NYPD or whoever else is able to step in and kind of So on October twenty six, we're doing young women in STEM, at White Plains office.

And I got Christina from the NYPD to now be a keynote speaker there. So we are, I'm ruthless when it comes to getting people to do this, and it's the right thing to do.

And and yeah. So it it it works really well. FDNY, NYPD, three way authority, MTA, all state agencies are are collaborating where we can.

Yeah. So is it usually you then kind of initiating these programs because you know that this is something that's, like, really close to your heart, and so you're going out of your way to kinda make those connections and chase those people down?

I don't like the word chasing down. I do prefer twisting worthless.

I I I prefer the way of, twisting arms Oh, okay.

And not taking notes.

It's really hard it's really hard when when we do so many things right with your technology, not to go that extra little step into showing kids.

There were two young girls with, Down syndrome, I believe, who were at the event, and they started talking to me about electromagnetic interference and the polarity of the motors.

And I was just blown away.

And and and we just started talking to them. And and I heard some kids making fun of him. And I turned around. I was like, you don't understand.

And I know people who have certain problems, who work in high-tech, and make way more money than I do.

That is not a hindrance.

Yeah. Okay? And those two little girls were were blown away. They're following me on LinkedIn. It's it's it's it's amazing. But all they talk to me about is how they wanna come and work for for for robots.

Go go ahead. It it there's nothing wrong with you me wasting an afternoon because I'm I'm not. Yeah.

NYPA leadership has never once said, wait. You're doing nineteen weeks.

What about your regular job? I can do my job, and we can do this. This is one of the benefits of working at the New York Power Authority.

Yeah. That's amazing. Whenever whenever you guys are obviously, you are seeing these kids following you on LinkedIn and all of that sort of stuff. So you've you can physically see kind of the impact that you're making. I'm curious how the people above you at NYPA kind of receive this, and how do they measure the success and the value of this program? Because that's something I've actually had other Skydio customers ask me about is, you know, we want to do these sorts of things, but even just talking about our drone program, like, our higher ups are nervous to, you know, community maybe not being as receptive.

Last weekend, we did a thing in, Bronx Science High School.

I don't want to measure how successful we are.

Okay? That's not the reason why we do it. We do it because it's the right thing to do.

Even if my bosses tell me we're spending too much time on STEM, well, now that's the time for me to start finding another job. Okay? No. But but at the end of the day, the success is one child smiling. Yeah. One child saying, how does that work?

Explaining how heat from buildup is friction, which just explaining to kids and watching them their light bulbs going off Yeah.

For one kid out of that one hundred and seventy two peak kids that were there, we had two kids who really took it to heart. Yeah. That was worth it. Totally. If if I could pen spend ten thousand dollars to get that same reaction, I will. It it's worth it.

That's amazing. I am just blown away by your program and everything that Mira has been able to do at Skydio and seeing and getting to talk to the customers that are actually helping execute that stuff has been really awesome. So thank you so much for joining us and being willing to come up and speak. This is really great.

Thank you,