OCGI Future Track Workforce Development Training & Counseling FY27 RFP Pre-proposal Meeting Transcript.pdf

Office of Clean & Green Initiatives

Future Track Workforce Development

Training & Counseling FY27 RFP

Pre-proposal Meeting Transcript

July 9, 2026, 2:48PM

42m 10s

Mary Stitt 3:08

Morning.

Carol Martsolf 3:10

Good morning.

Mary Stitt 3:14

How are you today?

Carol Martsolf 3:15

I'm good, how are you?

Mary Stitt 3:17

Good. Once everyone gets on, we can do some introductions. And we'll be talking about like summarizing RFP and then taking questions.

Carol Martsolf 3:21

Okay, will do.

Sounds good.

Mary Stitt 3:31

Okay, recording and transcription will be happening.

Okay. And your name?

Carol Martsolf 3:37

Thank you.

I'm Carol Marksoff from Envision Consultants.

Mary Stitt 3:42

Okay.

Great. Okay, Carol. All right, I'm going to go on mute until everyone comes.

Carol Martsolf 3:51

Sounds good. Thank you.

Mary Stitt 3:52

All right. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone.

Sam Srolis_Octo 11:32

Well, good morning.

Mary Stitt 11:34

Hello.

Sam Srolis_Octo 11:36

How are you today?

Mary Stitt 11:37

Good, how are you?

Sam Srolis_Octo 11:39

Busy, but good.

Mary Stitt 11:41

Hey.

Yeah, that's good to hear.

Jantra James 11:45

Hi, good morning.

Mary Stitt 11:47

Good morning.

Just waiting for everyone to...

Join.

Give, you know, a minute or so, but we will be getting started quickly.

All right. So my name is Mary Spitt. I'm with the Office of Clean and Green. I don't know if you know much about it, but it is an office that Mayor Sharrell Parker put into place. The goal is to essentially keep the city clean and green.

She has talked about many times.

the reputation that Philadelphia has when it comes to cleanliness. And she wanted to address that and was a campaign promise of hers. We have been able to get some good progress going. I hope that you, whether you live here or whether you live in the Philadelphia area or even further out, that you have noticed that the city is getting cleaner. The other part, of course, is getting green, and that's what we're really moving into now. Tree planting, greening the commercial corridors, and we're actually looking into greening some of the areas that are part of the school district so that our children can have a nice path when they go to school. So that's a little bit about me and about the Office of Clean and Green.

How about everyone introduce themselves in the name of their company?

Sam Srolis_Octo 13:50

I can kick us off if you want. My name is Sam Sirolis. I work at Octo and our offices are on South Street. And Mary, I've actually had like the true pleasure for the past few years working with Carlton and Clean and Green and Kyle Lewis and Crystal with the Sanitation Department. We're doing focus groups right now, actually.

Mary Stitt 14:05

Great.

Wonderful.

Sam Srolis_Octo 14:12 in the neighborhoods and, you know, do green schools and all of those things. So this project is so exciting to be able to continue that work and, you know, love working with our city partners, helping them through our sea grass professional development program, which we just found our brick and mortar, our official location on a

Mary Stitt 14:25

Yeah.

Sam Srolis_Octo 14:32

It's 215 Broad Street. And we do these, like, think about an escape room style experience for teams to practice soft skills, go through challenges. It's really fun and, you know, always follows action plans and things coming out of it. So for all those reasons, this was really exciting for us to see come through.

Mary Stitt 14:34

Well, thank you. I'll call names so it'll make it easier. How about you, Carol?

Carol Martsolf 15:02

Sure. Hi. Thanks for having, you know, this pre-proposal meeting with us. So I'm

Carol Martzoff. I'm at Envision Consultants. And yeah, this just seems like such a fabulous program. And I just think, you know, there are so many people with so much

Mary Stitt 15:18

No.

Carol Martsolf 15:21 talent and energy to actually help the city. And, you know, we were doing some training with the streets department. So, and we just won another contract with another department. So I just love working with the city. And this is just seems like just such a great opportunity. So, so thank you.

Mary Stitt 15:41

Thank you. Alec, would you like to go?

Alec Gever 15:45

Sure, good morning everyone. My name is Alec Geever and I am with Trizen and we have several folks actually here today with the Trizen team who will be introducing themselves soon. Thank you for having us.

Mary Stitt 15:55

Okay, great. Well, let's stick with the Trizent team. Is that...

You say it for me. Jandra? Okay, great.

Jantra James 16:03

Yes, yes, that's right. Hi, everyone. My name is Jantra James, and I'm also with the

Trizon team. I am the learning and development manager. I'm really excited to be here and learn more about this opportunity. Our team is so excited. We've been, you know, stirring up ideas and things like this. So it's really great to be able to learn more. So

Glad to be here.

Mary Stitt 16:25

Right, and Greg.

Greg El 16:27

Hey Mary, how are you?

Mary Stitt 16:29

Good, how are you?

Greg El 16:30

Good, it's been a minute. I am also with Trizen, so happy to be here to learn more about this opportunity. I mean, Trizen is a strategy organizational development and training firm, as you may be aware. So we're excited. We are doing some great things with other city departments. And so we're looking forward to seeing how we can continue to help.

Mary Stitt 16:54

Wonderful. How about Myra?

We can't hear you, Mayra. You might be on mute.

Oh.

How about I jump over and you, um...

you know, work on your technical issues real quick. Okay. Please say your name for me, La.

Ron.

LaRoandCo AdminWorks Corp 17:34

LaRow and Co. Hello everyone. Good morning.

Mary Stitt 17:35

Okay. I didn't want to, I didn't want to mess it up. That's why.

LaRoandCo AdminWorks Corp 17:39

No, no, no, you're totally fine. You're totally fine. Hello, everyone. My name is Jessica

Lerota. I am president, CEO of LeRoan Co Admin Works Corp. Sorry.

Mary Stitt 17:43

Up.

No problem.

LaRoandCo AdminWorks Corp 17:53

I currently do trainings for the Department of Human Services right now, and we are training an administrative company, and we are so excited to see this opportunity.

We are green as well, so we want to continue with that. And thank you guys for having me today.

Mary Stitt 18:07

Nice.

Great.

Everything working out, Myra?

Not yet.

Well, I'll start because I have a few things to go over anyway. And then when you have questions, we'll go from there. And you can certainly put things in the chat if you need to.

Okay. All right. So I gave a little bit of information about the Office of Clean and

Green. I will also give you a little bit of background on the Department of Sanitation and the Department of Streets that we work closely with. The Department of

Sanitation, of course, is responsible for picking up our trash.

and waste management and keeping our streets clean. They have...

been such a part of making sure that the city is clean and getting to that goal that

Mayor Parker put out there. Like I said, I hope that you're noticing it. And they have really dedicated themselves to that. The Department of Streets, of course, is taking care of our streets.

I know you guys noticed the potholes in some of the rough streets, but they are dedicated to getting everything done so that we can be safe on our city streets.

Okay, let's just talk about Future Track. So Future Track is a...

workforce development program that went from probably 20 people, maybe 30, and has really ratcheted up over the last couple of years. We now have about 200 trainees that come in.

We get over 4000 applicants.

For those, for those spaces.

We go through an application process and.

We have to.

put things in place to make sure that we pick the right people who have the right fit for the program. It is a vigorous program.

The first things that the trainees do, at least for now, things could change as we're going through the process again. And, you know, we tweak things and update things as we go along. But they go out into the field. And the field is...

Through every kind of weather.

hot, cold, snow, they have to have customer service.

skills because they do deal with our residents and our residents sometimes are not happy. Sometimes they are really happy. So they actually have to be able to take that compliment too and continue to go on.

They usually start, like I said, in the field so that they get an understanding of the challenges that you have in the field. They clean alleys, and I'm sure you can imagine there's a lot of things you find in alleys. They support our citywide cleaning program.

which is a 13-week program that cleans every area of the city. We're actually in that at this time. We're in that project at this time.

They also support our district residential program, which is something that is near and dear to our council members because it is split up into the councilmatic districts.

So those are some of the main things. You may have seen them out there during snow.

Their focus was to clear the ADA ramps. So they really have had a lot of experience.

The trainees that are currently in place have had a lot of experience.

The.

Areas that they move on to are occupational tracks, and there's nine occupational tracks. That starts with neighborhood beautification, Rd. maintenance, construction inspection reports, traffic inspection support, sanitation code compliance, survey support, traffic safety compliance, the skilled trades, green infrastructure. And we have a new one. Public property has jumped in and they are going to be working with them to clean lots. We have partnerships with many, many departments throughout.

The city.

We are right now, we've expanded our relationships with PPA. So they have been involved in getting positions for the current trainees, which has been wonderful. And we are going to look and branch out to other organizations, both public and private.

Future Track was really put into place to close the gap for underemployment and unemployment, specifically for those who have had challenges getting into employment. Some of them just need second, you know, second chances.

Some of them have been involved with the legal system. Some of them have actually actually already attorney citizens. And we really are dedicated to making sure they can become a really good part of the city and be successful.

for themselves, for their families, and for whoever they might care about.

Let's go into the timeline.

First of all, are there any questions at this at this point?

Okay, great. So let's go into the timeline of the RFP. So

Darf P. was posted on June 30th, as I'm sure all of you know.

We are having the pre-proposal meeting now and thank you to everyone who noticed that it had to be changed. So I appreciate that you were able to

Change your schedules to be here.

Questions. So we're going to have a, you know, we have questions here. We're going to answer some of them. But I have to say, not many of them.

because we want to post them. We want to make sure that everybody has a fair chance. This proposal meeting was not mandatory. It was strongly encouraged. But to make sure that everyone is on the same playing field, we're going to post many of the questions. And of

Of course, post those answers.

All your proposals are due July 17th at 5 P.m. Philadelphia time.

We may have more than likely applicant interviews and presentations.

That could be in July or August, so that you can start setting up your schedules.

The applicant selection, our goal is August. Once again, that's open to changes depending on how many proposals we get, the time that we may need to review them and get back to everybody.

We're hoping that the contract execution would be in October. That may move up because after speaking to everyone and understanding what they need, If there's preparation that has to be put in place, that would actually be the beginning of the contract.

Okay.

Um...

Some of our goals.

So our goals for the program is career readiness. We want to prepare them not only, I mean, first to have a career within the city. We would like them first.

But also to be successful outside the city, if that's if that's necessary.

We need to make sure they understand professionalism.

The importance of being on time and coming to work, it's huge. That's the number one thing that our departments look at when they're interviewing them, hopefully for a permanent spot within the city.

We have had struggles in that area. So you all, we're going to depend on making sure that they understand that. Even when they come to class, making sure that they're one time and that they are punctual.

We want them to understand productivity and getting the job done, just making sure that they're focused on getting the job done.

We want to decrease their barriers. Many of these people, because they are returning citizens, or they may have had challenges through their life, there are barriers that they have, and we want to help them with that. And that could be something like transportation. As of now, the city gives out a key card.

for free to all of its employees, including future track employees.

We want to teach them.

If it's going to take you, if you're late by three minutes every day, the van leaves and you don't go to work that day. And that's counted against you. If you have to get there half an hour early, so you're not 3 minutes late, that's something we need to talk about.

And to extend to them.

We want to talk to them about childcare, if we can help in that way.

Mental health. That's another thing. It can be a taboo. It can be something that people don't want to talk about. And we're not, of course, going to push anyone. But if they need those services, we want to have those services in place.

One of the things that we really want to do is engage them.

be relatable, approachable, making sure that.

They are motivated.

That they.

are interested in coming to work, that they're excited to come into work, that they're excited to come into class. So those are some of the things that we would like you to extend to them.

We will review retention levels.

Last year, we had about around 130, maybe 132, something like that, retention. This year, it looks like it's going to be a bit higher. It looks like it might be around 145, 144, somewhere around that. So we're very proud of that, that the retention is going

up. We want to make sure we find jobs, though, for everybody. So that can sometimes be a challenge since, you know, your retention is actually going up, but we will work on that and I am dedicated to making sure everybody gets a job.

We would like you to analyze how much this is costing you, how much this is costing you per student, because that's something that we want to look to as we go further.

Um...

We'd like you to put job readiness plans together for them.

and allow them to have.

a plan in place so that they can be successful.

At this time, the maximum.

pricing or cost is $275,000.

That's something that...

can be talked about.

But we really want to stay close to that. As you know, the city has limitations as a government entity. So we're doing the best that we can when it comes to that.

Any questions at this time?

Well, I think that's good because I must be giving you good information.

Let's see, I'm just trying to see what else we need to review today.

There will be 100, so there's 200 trainees. They will be split up into two groups, 100 each.

Once again, this could change. It depends on your proposals. So I'm telling you information about how we've done it. That doesn't mean that's how you need to do

it. Quite frankly, we'd be happy to see you come to us with plans.

that might be more efficient, might be more engaging.

might keep the morale up, whatever that might be, and teach them the professionalism that they need to have. So right now we have two groups of 100.

They're separated into cohorts.

You take 100 for 16 weeks.

And then you take another 100 for 16 weeks. You teach them once a week, 25 people at a time. So you're teaching four times a week.

Okay. It is out in one of our northeast.

Areas.

And that's where our training center is.

We have.

Mock interviews.

At the end of their training.

We expect them to be ready.

And that really depends on you.

Then eventually they will be interviewed by the departments, including beautification, which is the cleaning and greening.

These are departments so far, survey, highways, public property, suite, which is our education and enforcement unit. So they go out and make sure that you don't have too much trash out, that

Ah.

dumpsters aren't overflowing, things of that sort.

I think those are the ones at this time. And then, but departments, like I said, are coming on board. We're really reaching out to departments to see if they can host. If they have vacancies, look at Future Track first. They're going, they're getting trained.

They're ready to come in.

And be a strong employee.

It's A nine-month program.

take it, you know, around nine months. They have a graduation at the end, which we would want the...

to consultant to be a big part of.

Um...

This year, it's going to be at the...

Fairmont Park Horticultural Center, that's where it was last year also. This year, there have been some other things put in place like caps and gowns and they got certificates before, but certificates. The mayor will be there. She was there last year.

Of course, Director Williams will be there.

and we'll have some other speakers.

Thinking about speakers, that's another area we would like you to look into, having guest speakers. We've had some this year. We would like to hear from you who you might think would be able to engage in.

And B.

Relatable, really.

Touch them, and we've had some speakers where...

Some of the trainees came up and said, thank you. And this is the information that really stuck with me. That's something that we would like to have again. Sometimes we have them at other venues, which I think helps them too, because it shows how important they are to us.

That they're not just at.

you know, the training center that we have pulled together venues, city owned venues that are really enjoyable to be a part of, to be in that space.

Um...

I think that's really all that I have at this time.

So, let's see if you've come up with any questions yet.

Anything that you've seen in the RFP that you may have a question about? If not, you certainly don't need, oh, please.

LaRoandCo AdminWorks Corp 35:59

I have.

Sorry, everybody. This is Jessica from LeRowe and Co. I do have a question. It might be a silly question, but no question is a dumb question. So how many trainers do you guys think you would need for this opportunity?

Mary Stitt 36:13

Yup.

Nope.

So that is something that I think has to be in the proposal. I think that's something that...

LaRoandCo AdminWorks Corp 36:28

Mary Stitt 36:31

You need to decide.

Based on your curriculum, how many people?

LaRoandCo AdminWorks Corp 36:41

Mary Stitt 36:44

Are needed.

LaRoandCo AdminWorks Corp 36:47

Okay, I'm sorry. I got another question too. Sorry, guy. You said separate cohorts, 116 weeks, 116 weeks. You said something else, 25, something else. Can you tell me what? 25 each, 25 students each, trainees each.

Mary Stitt 36:49

Sure, sure.

Mhm.

25 each.

25 trainees students each, one each day, which will be Monday through Thursday.

LaRoandCo AdminWorks Corp 37:06

Mary Stitt 37:09 for the 16 weeks. And that's how it's set up now. Once again, we would love for you guys to come up with ideas. I'm giving you background, but we would love to hear from you what you think makes sense, what you think will be more successful.

LaRoandCo AdminWorks Corp 37:09

Okay.

Okay.

Mary Stitt 37:30

You're welcome.

Anyone else?

Alec Gever 37:35

Mary, could you talk about the counseling services piece to this?

Mary Stitt 37:39

Sure, the counseling will be, you'll probably be working with the city more. Now, counseling can be helping them find their childcare.

giving them wraparound services, working with us to get those services.

Identifying that someone.

may need counseling. Obviously, not jumping in with someone when you may not think that they're open to that, but if they come to you, that would be the counseling services, especially mental health, but all of it, all the wraparound services that are needed, all the challenges that they may.

And I think in your teaching.

Perhaps, at the same time.

LaRoandCo AdminWorks Corp 38:34

I have another question. I'm sorry. Will we have to create some materials or are you guys with the city supply materials? Are we creating our own lesson plans and things of that nature?

Mary Stitt 38:36

Sure, don't apologize.

Your own lesson plans.

Yes, and we would work with you on that. Whoever the...

Whoever wins the RFP.

put out a lesson plan to us, and then we will give you feedback. The project team will give you feedback, and then we will work together to make sure it is the best one that we can get to these students.

LaRoandCo AdminWorks Corp 39:01

Okay, perfect.

Perfect. Thank you so much.

Mary Stitt 39:17

You're welcome.

Anything else?

I see someone put something in the chat.

Okay, let me see.

Sam Srolis_Octo 39:43

Mm.

Mary Stitt 39:45

I'm not saying it for some reason.

But was it basically, Myra, that your technical issues are still going on? Okay, that's fine. These questions can be posted. You know, you can send in questions, okay, and then we'll get the answers back out to you.

Okay, so if you had any Myra that you weren't able to communicate this way, we can make sure that they get answered and everyone will see the question and the answer.

I see you are typing.

Okay.

All right, great. No questions at this time. I appreciate it.

All right, everyone, thank you so much for coming.

Sam Srolis_Octo 40:28

Mary Stitt 40:32

Nice group. You know, I didn't know what to expect. I'm really new to this. This is the first year transitioning and making sure that the barriers and the bumps in the road we were able to solve. And this is the first RFP out in a few years. It may be 4, I just can't remember exactly.

And I didn't know who was out there and who would respond. So I'm really happy that a nice group responded. And I hope that you, you know, send in a proposal.

Sam Srolis_Octo 41:07

Thank you, Mary. I, before everyone, before everyone hops off, I did pop in an invite to our upcoming Seagrass event in the chat. Kyle Lewis and Commissioner Jacobs are actually coming, Mary, but I think people with like your backgrounds and specialties would just have a blast. It's free.

Mary Stitt 41:08

Well, thank you.

Alec Gever 41:08

Mary Stitt 41:15

What?

Sam Srolis_Octo 41:26 food, refreshments, escape room, professional challenges. So if you guys want to come, the invites there, you can register and it's just kind of a great time. Other people in leadership positions from other like Philadelphia companies, things like that will be there. So it's a good group of people to network with. It's fun.

Mary Stitt 41:29

Wonderful. Thank you for doing that. Appreciate it, Sam. All right.

Sam Srolis_Octo 41:48

Of course, yeah, of course.

Mary Stitt 41:52

All right, we good?

All right, so everybody have a great day. And once again, I'm so glad you came. No problem. Thank you, Mary. Appreciate it. Thanks. Bye.

LaRoandCo AdminWorks Corp 41:55

Absolutely.

Carol Martsolf 41:57

You too.

LaRoandCo AdminWorks Corp 41:58

Thank you so much, Mary.

Carol Martsolf 42:01

Mary Stitt 42:02

All right. Have a great day. Bye-bye.

Carol Martsolf 42:03

Hi.

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