How can we build a healthcare workforce that truly reflects and serves our diverse communities? Our host Dr. Salvatrice Cummo, talks with founder and CEO of Futuro Health, Van Ton-Quinlivan. Together, they tackle some of the most pressing challenges in today’s healthcare labor market—from meeting critical workforce shortages to designing inclusive, accessible pathways into stable, middle-class careers.

Van shares her story of escaping from the Vietnam War with her family at the age of six, being a first-generation college graduate, and how she was able to become a trailblazer in workforce strategy.

In this discussion, Salvatrice and Van emphasize how community colleges can become powerful engines for equity, and explore how partnerships and innovative approaches are reshaping the bridge between education and employment, especially with AI on the horizon.

You’ll learn:

• How Futuro Health is addressing both workforce shortages and equitable access to healthcare careers
• How partnerships between education and industry—especially at community colleges—are being reimagined to scale opportunities
• Why AI and technology are fundamentally reshaping workforce structures and what that means for preparing students for future jobs
• How embedding real-world experiences and work-based opportunities is becoming critical for students’ upward mobility in a changing economy

About the Guest:

Van Ton-Quinlivan is the Founder and CEO of Futuro Health and is a nationally recognized workforce strategist and institution builder working at the intersection of healthcare, education, and economic mobility.

As a national nonprofit addressing one of the country’s most urgent challenges: expanding the healthcare workforce while creating scalable pathways to middle-class careers. Futuro Health partners with healthcare providers, education providers, government and community organizations to design and scale talent solutions that strengthen healthcare access and economic opportunity. Van specializes in building durable workforce infrastructure that aligns capital, policy, and industry to solve talent challenges. She brings deep experience in cross-sector partnership, large-system transformation, and workforce strategy at scale.

Her career spans senior leadership and governance roles across the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. She previously served as Executive Vice Chancellor of the California Community Colleges, the nation’s largest system of higher education, where she transformed workforce and career education strategy. Under her leadership, annual workforce investments grew from $100 million to over $1 billion, significantly expanding employer-aligned career pathways.

She is the author of WorkforceRx and speaks nationally on healthcare workforce transformation, workforce infrastructure, and strategies to expand middle-class career pathways. Her work has been recognized by the White House as a Champion of Change for advancing economic opportunity.

Engage with us:

LinkedIn, Instagram & Facebook: @PasadenaCityCollegeEWD

Join our newsletter for more on this topic: ewdpulse.com

Visit: PCC EWD website

More from Van Ton-Quinlivan & Futuro Health:

Website - https://futurohealth.org/

LinkedIn - @vtquinlivan & @futurohealth

Instagram - @futurohealth

X - @workforcevan & @futuro_health

Partner with us! Contact our host Salvatrice Cummo directly: [email protected]

Find the transcript of this episode here

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When we think about the application funnel, if you don't start with inclusivity, you're not going to end up with a group of graduates that reflect the communities that need to be served. So you have to move backwards in the pipeline all the way to how you recruit and how you support those recruits to move through, to persist and complete.

Hi, I'm Salvatrice Cummo, Vice President of Economic and Workforce Development at Pasadena City College and host of this podcast. And we are starting the conversation about the future of work. We'll explore topics like how education can partner with industry, how to be more equitable, and how to attain one of our highest goals, more internships and PCC students in the workforce. We at Pasadena City College want to lead the charge in closing the gap between what our students are learning and what the demands of the workforce will be once they enter. This is a conversation that impacts all of us, you, the employers, the policymakers, the educational institutions, and the community as a whole. This is the future of work.

Hi. Welcome back to the Future of Work podcast. I am your host, Dr. Salvatrice Cummo. Today we're joined by Van Ton-Quinlivan, the founder and CEO of Futuro Health, a national nonprofit addressing one of the country's most urgent challenges, expanding the healthcare workforce while creating scalable pathways to middle class careers. Vaughn is a nationally recognized workforce strategist and institution builder working at the intersection of health care, education and economic mobility. She previously served as Executive Vice Chancellor of the Workforce and Economic Development Division of the California Community Colleges, where she led efforts to align education with industry needs and expand equitable access to career pathways. Today, we'll explore how community colleges can serve as powerful engines for workforce equity, what it takes to build inclusive pathways into healthcare careers, and how partnerships between education and industry are shaping the future of work. Bon. So good to have you here.

Welcome.

I'm delighted to be here, Salvatrice, and to join you and your listeners.

Thank you. Thank you. I always like to start with this question because it helps me kind of understand your background a little bit and our listener knows more about you. Let's start with your story if we can. You had and have had a remarkable career spanning from higher education, workforce systems, and now healthcare. What drew you to this work and what led you to founding Fortuto Health?

Well, Salvatrice, you know that I had spent eight years driving the workforce mission of the California Community Colleges. I felt that that role was a pay it. In that capacity, I was able to really work on, you know, unlocking Opportunity and transforming lives. I feel those are core values of the community colleges and feel so fortunate that when I had stepped off after eight years with the California community colleges, I was approached by Kaiser Permanente and its partners who are wrestling for the prior two years with how do we grow the generation of these allied health workers. And that's the category of workers that's 65% the healthcare workforce. All your technician roles, your emergency medical technician, your medical assistant, your X ray techs, the community colleges know those roles well. And so they for two years have been wrestling with many different concepts and came to me and said, you know, what would take for you to be CEO and really help us put in place a solution that would not only work at the scale of California, you know, to address the shortage in 500,000 allied health worker, but has replication, has a potential for replication nationwide. And I have to tell you, Salvatres, I had to take a moment there because when I was with the California community colleges, I had started with roughly $100 million towards the workforce Mission was able to grow it to 200 million, to 700 million, to over a billion dollars by consolidating the two apprenticeship systems into one, integrating the two adult education systems into one, and then as you know, regionalizing career education programs through the Strong Workforce program, which really infused quite a bit of funding into career education programs, not only with the community colleges, but also with the high schools and community colleges.

And so I had just come off running a billion dollar system and here I was being asked to do a startup and of course the first thing I thought of was what if I failed? What if I can't figure out the solution that they're asking for? And so it took a moment and I had to reach way back into my background. Many others who may be your listeners, I'm first generation, escaped from the Vietnam War and so came here when I was turning 6. And so in that process, I, like many, had experienced education being open and changing opportunity for myself and my family. And so, you know, fast forward, I've been able to do the many things that I've done because education was open to me. And I really felt like my work in the California community colleges was paying for that opportunity. And so I said yes to this opportunity to found Vetura Health and really pay it forward, unlock opportunities for others in our community. And as you know, in healthcare, if you don't have the credential, you can't even get to the interview. And so how do we unlock opportunity for more adults who normally would want to be in service of others, but haven't had access to the credential in order to be competitive for healthcare jobs.

So, so glad to have this opportunity. I think I said opportunity like 5,000 times.

It's totally okay. Okay. With that in mind Van, it sounds like to me you're addressing both workforce shortages and access. That said, what are you seeing as the most pressing challenges right now in the health care workforce?

Let me answer that question from two angles. One is what are the barriers that adults are facing as they attempt to move into health care? So we had done four focus groups, including one in all Spanish, to ask adults about their interest in healthcare and their healthcare jobs. And of course, the flexibility was one. You know, the instructional delivery was very important because they led very complex life. That's not a surprise to any of us. The other one was navigation. So even if they wanted to get into healthcare, it was not obvious how to go from here to there in terms of getting the credential and navigating a path. And then of course, the third is even if they made it into health care with the level of debt they mostly incurred, they were stuck on the bottom rung.

So when we designed Futuro Health, it was thinking through how do we meet adults where they are and structure an education pathway that considered how do you move them to get the credential debt free, right. So that they begin to have mobility, how did they successfully on ramp back into healthcare and then of course be competitive with both the essential skills as well as the technical skills that are requ for health care. So that's one side of the equation. The other side of the equation, which is what's the demand? Now we're going to have some short term adjustments because of the big beautiful bill and its impact on who is insured and who's not insured. But the long term issues are represented in, I would call these three numbers 12, 7 and 4. And so Salvatrice, if you look at those numbers, basically 12 is 11.7. To be more accurate. Roughly 50 years ago, we had 11.7 working adults for every person over age 65.

Today we have seven working adults for every person over age65. Soon enough we'll have only four. And these four people will not only do the caregiving role, but they have to do all the other roles, like being in the classroom, being the Uber driver. If you. Well, if there's still Uber drivers in the future, baking the bread. Right. So there's so many roles, but given the aging of our state and our country, we need to think about the caregiving workforce, the care and the caregiving workforce that they will consume. And so this is going to be an infrastructure challenge and a workforce challenge that is very pressing, not only for California, but the nation.

It leads me to think about inclusiveness and inclusivity in workforce development. What does that look like in practice through your lens, as you're continuing to build and lead Futuro Health?

Well, you know, we founded Futuro Health In January of 2020, three months before the surge in the pandemic happened. And, you know, during that window, healthcare organizations were struggling with are there applicants interested in my roles? Which is, interestingly enough, when I was in the energy sector, many, many, many moons ago, it was this exact same question, and it's the exact same question that the water industry had. Is anybody interested in my roles? And the parts that any of us who are in workforce development and frankly in academia realize is that we may set up artificial barriers to our communities being able to effectively apply. If it's too ambiguous, if it's not clear, how do people even navigate to our front door? And so when we design Futuro Health, just like the community college is designed to not screen people out, but to screen people in, to have a very welcoming front door that begins with a live person to be able to talk them through what is the experience in healthcare, what are their expectations, what are the commitments, and so that they can assess whether the timing is right for them and what program is of interest to them and to begin to remove all the barriers in the way. When we think about the application funnel, if you don't start with inclusivity, you're not going to end up with a group of graduates that reflect the communities that need to be served. So you have to move backwards in the pipeline all the way to how you recruit and how you support those recruits to move through to persist and complete.

We talked a little bit about the shortage, so you kind of mentioned it indirectly with ratios that you mentioned earlier, and forgive me if I failed to remember those, like 4 to 1, basically, right, that shortage, what is actually causing it? I think we've been trying to, as a system, right, and as an industry, we've been really trying to understand where it's coming from. And a lot of it's saying, well, maybe it's coming from, you know, a backlog or not enough space in community colleges and in higher ed in general, or there's not a lot of clinical spaces to do the clinical work. What do you think is truly causing this shortage and what needs to change in how we prepare and support people entering in these roles.

You're absolutely right. It's all of the above. But it depends also on the occupation. So when we had gotten started with vultural health, we were looking at a McKinsey study of, you know, the gap in 500,000. And the second occupation was medical assistant, for example. So medical assistant, you know, of course you have the clinical in there. And so that's going to be one of the gating factors. But it is not well known what a medical assistant is.

If you think about it over the dinner table. Maybe you talk about the doctors or the shortage of nurses, but who's going to talk about, you know, medical sonographer or medical assistant or phlebotomist? These are not occupational titles that roll off the tongue. And so part of it is bringing awareness and having being tapped on the shoulder to say, hey Salvatrice, why don't you consider becoming a medical assistant? And here's the path without debt. So one is career awareness of all of the great occupations in healthcare. That's one. The other one, there's a number of what I call high value occupations that are in short supply. So these are your medical sonographers, your surgical tech. So they make very good salaries with less than two years of education.

But there's a high component of clinical. And so just in case your audience is not familiar, clinical is really like an internship. But doing that internship, you as a student are actually practicing on real patients. And we want that. So because some of these occupations require clinicals that require labs and faculty to supervise them. If you don't have that, that's a gating factor to expansion of those more seats. And then I want to just talk about the highest volume occupation everywhere, which is those that tend to be associated with taking care of the aging. Right.

So it's your in home caregiver, direct caregiver. The problem there is slightly different. It's the highest volume occupation needed everywhere, but it's such a low pay occupation. And so the work done that needs to be done there is not just a training issue. It's trying to figure, figure out how do you change the role itself, the nature of the role, such that they can become more attractive to those who need to work in those roles. And so that's a different question. So sort of you have to solve each of these roles differently. And of course each region has a different level of need for these each of these occupations.

But at Futuro Health, we've now been able to cover all of California and create a field infrastructure that supplements, for example, what existing institutions or partners do. And we have 43 education partners integrated into our ecosystem. Each of them were selected because they offered specific occupational programs that we vetted in terms of their success. So we're able to integrate that and offer also what we call a prerequisite. It's called our human touch healthcare. And that enables adults to be able to ramp into education effectively, build their confidence and get their families ready before they start the career education program. Most adults can't go 0 to 60. And so what we find and what our partners find is that the adults who are coming through us are more ready, more polished, and more committed to study.

And so they persist, regardless of which of our education partners, they're all persisting at 83% and above to completion of their healthcare credential.

That's amazing. That is absolutely amazing.

And Salvatrice, we're so proud that any of those programs were averaging 90% ethnic diversity, 46% linguistic diversity, and average age 31. So it's not some heroic success coach. It's not some outstanding partner. It's a system that is working out in the field to bring people into education again and get their credentials.

Well, it speaks to and underscores the model's ability to scale and be nimble. And Futuro Health has demonstrated that. And talking about the programming and when we dig a little bit deeper on program design, share a little bit, if you can, about how Futuro Health is designing those programs to make it more accessible, both accessible and responsive. Because the scale of the work that you all are doing is absolutely impressive. And I know there's a lot of magic sauce in there. So if we can maybe go into the weeds a little bit on how that design process happens.

Sure. The original task for us was to design a solution at the scale of thousands. We know that you can build an effective workforce development program at 25, 50, 100 and several hundreds. Right. But to tackle a 500,000 problem, could we actually set up a field infrastructure that begins at the thousands? So it came down to just three component parts, which each of the component parts are available to any partners that we work with, but in combination, it creates a signature education journey that is producing this kind of great ethnic and linguistic diversity as well as completion rates. Right. So the first is that we have very, very intensive success coaching, so enrollment coaches, success coaches as well as career coaches, so intensive coaching and wraparound services along the way, and they can Complement whatever program you have on the ground. The second is how we on ramp.

So in year one, we were underwriting tuition and just sent the students directly to our education partner. And that did not serve us as well. We added success coaching, but we were using a third party to do that. We didn't love that as much because we didn't have as much insights into our learners, whom we call Futoro Health Scholars. So in our third year, we actually insource all of the success coaching. And in the first six months we had more touch points with our learners than the prior two years. So we began iterating with that formula. And then we added prerequisites, academic prerequisites, like medical terminology, for example.

So academic coursework. Well, it turned out that the academic coursework didn't actually improve the efficacy of the students once they got into the career education. We substituted instead our human touch healthcare. And the students love it. Not only employers love it, but all the learners love it. Because no talking heads, no lecture point. It was very experiential. And the best thing it did is build adult confidence to reenter education.

And we did all sorts of configuration. Do we do it concurrently, do we do it after, do we do it before? So all of those were experiments. And so now we figured out the combination of sequence and altogether all of these combine. No matter what that career education program is, we now have 15 programs across our 43 education partners. So no matter what they select, we know that they're going through a journey that is highly supportive of what their needs are and that's how we're able to create a system.

That's what I love, absolutely love about the private startup nonprofit space. You know, you name it. Just the ability to have iterations to a model, to a formula, until you tweak it just enough that it makes sense and that it's working, that you're seeing deliverables and then you start to do additional iterations to scale. And this is just a personal note. I love being in that space. Love, love, love being in that space of building and tweaking and iterations and figuring out what works. I have the privilege to be in a space right now through our division of economic and workforce development, where we can have a little bit of play, a little bit of building and figuring out programmings that do work with our partners in instruction, with our partners in the community, and also within some of our economic development partners as well. So we have that, but not at the scale.

It's those outside of academia, but definitely Here and what I'm always fascinated by and the question that I like to ask myself constantly when we, when we are building programming is how are we positioning community colleges as a critical partner in workforce? That's always the question, how are we doing this? But for you, through your perspective and having been a chancellor for seven years at the California Community College system, what makes community colleges such a critical partner to this work, specifically within healthcare workforce?

Well, I need to just demote myself. I was not chancellor, but executive vice chancellor.

Executive vice chancellor, but it was for

eight years and not seven years. So let me give you example. So you could, for example, take component parts of what we do and then integrate our success coaching, for example, you can launch a program, integrate the success coaching and the human touch healthcare, to deliver a broader group of students who normally wouldn't come to the community college door and increase access that way. Right. So then you're increasing enrollment into various programs. And the current chancellor of the California Community College, Sonja Christian actually worked with us in our early years and she saw that we were not competitive with the community colleges and that we could actually create a another door for learners that normally wouldn't knock. And so she began working with us with one of her local colleges. And we actually in collaboration began creating a medical assistant program that was more for rural colleges.

So that rural college that was the host ended up getting enrollment from a different region of California than it normally would serve because of the collaboration with us. And then they went on to create another program, the licensed vocational nursing program for rural California. And the design has to be slightly different because people in rural area, as you know, are so distributed. And so these are the sort of the design work that we can do. And we went to co advocate with them to the licensing boards so that they could get approval on new programs. But this is sort of the explore and design work that we're known for because every situation is slightly different in terms of the needs. And how do you build capacity of local institutes?

Well, that said, how would you advise an institution like ours, Pasadena City College, to better align our programs with healthcare employers while still maintaining accessibility for our students?

Salvatrice, you said that your continuing education side of the house has been growing at a rapid clip, like 5%. If there's anything that, you know, Futoro Health can offer in terms of our component parts that are helpful to you serving your employers, just please reach out again. We're making available our field infrastructure. Oh, and, and one thing that may be of help is that we have very Sophisticated data science backbone. This is how we scale now. We're in nine states and Washington, D.C. and taking enrollments in there. So wherever there's a sponsor for the career education program, which wouldn't be an issue for Pasadena because most of your career education programs are free or with the California Promise scholarships, we would love to figure out how to intersperse some of the component parts.

And then you can begin doing experiments with how to attract community members who may not naturally come onto the campus or may not already knock on the door and take advantage of your career education programs.

Thank you. Happy to explore and experiment that more. Absolutely. Yes, to all of it. Now, let's think about the other component of this work is we talked about the instructional side, the training, the programming. But one of the biggest challenges, as you know, is securing employment and then placing our students into jobs. It's one of the largest challenges we have as a system because we're not technically employment agencies. We don't do placement.

But, you know, so it's always. It's a delicate dance. It's a delicate dance, of course, because we want to ensure, and we do ensure that our students are well prepared for the workforce. But it's very difficult for us to guarantee, if you will. Right. Placement and jobs. And so my question leans into that bridge between education and employment. What does that need to look like today? Like if we had.

If you had a magic wand and you said, Salvatrice, this is what it really needs to look like, education to employment and what our role is in it, what would you say that be?

Well, I'm going to zoom back out. Outside of healthcare, I'm just going to go more broadly. I think the challenge is not just today, but it's going to get greater. You're not asking me a question on AI, but one of the effective things that I will do is change the shape of the workforce. Right. So traditionally, the shape of our workforce has been a triangle. You know, maybe the smaller number of leaders on top and then the vast majority are at the, you know, the bottom wide part of the triangle. That's where most of us started.

We were analysts or we were assistants or. Right. We were coordinators. Right. We were learning the ropes at that bottom rung. Well, effectively the volume in the bottom rung is going to shave off and we're going to get a shape more like a diamond. Right. So I think this is a big structural issue that we're going to have to wrestle with all of us who are in the education space.

Because if you don't grab successfully into that first rung and now there's going to be less seats on that bottom part of the workforce, then it really hinders your upward mobility and career. So I had a podcast guest who said, how do you begin your career at the middle? How do you begin your career at the middle? So the middle is where you judgment. Yes, your judgment, your context, your know how that becomes more valuable than the specific tasks that can be done with the AI tool. Yet all of us need to get started somewhere. So I think we're going to have to really think about the work experience, the embedded cooperative experience, all sorts of configuration that is not natural today. But we're going to have to figure out a way because all of us very much care about creating opportunity for our students and our learners, no matter what their age. And we're going to have a structural challenge with the economy that is shifting.

That said, you mentioned AI and thank you for saying that. I know I didn't ask that question, but it's a very important real variable. I'm gonna call it a variable and a reality as well. In all of workforce. What do you see in the next three to five years healthcare workforce evolving to with AI maybe being one of those variables and other variables that we may not be paying attention to right now?

Well, you know, someone said to me, you know, we're gonna have more bots than people. So each of us people will have multiple bots that will be deployed to assist us or to prod us. Let's change the trajectory of that future by taking agency and actually learning the tools right Instead of being done unto even I with my organization, we're practicing everyday AI. What are use cases where we can apply these AI tools and just begin to play and see if we can improve work workflows or we can improve an output or just make our lives easier. And so my encouragement is that not only healthcare will evolve, but all of our workplaces will evolve. And if we can take agency and begin experimenting, begin playing, then we're building our resiliency in the workforce. So I'm looking forward to myself building some bots in the future.

I love that. Thank you. Then what a great way to sunset this conversation and building. We're going to sunset this conversation by the ability to build and the ability to make significant changes within the workforce when partnering together. And thank you so much for your time. If our audience would like and our listeners would like to connect with you, what's the best way they can do that?

Well, absolutely. Find me on LinkedIn, but I also have a podcast, it's called Workforce Arts, available wherever you listen to this podcast. So please look up the podcast. We feature innovators and thought leaders who are at the edge working on workforce issues.

Love it. We will make sure to put that into the show notes and be accessible to everyone. Thank you so much for your time and your conversation and your thought leadership. And also most importantly, through our lens and through a lens of future students is thank you for being such a great role model for our first generation students.

Well, you too Salvatrice.

Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. You know we have to you lead by example and you are the most impressive role model that I've seen thus far for first gen. So I really, really appreciate all the work that you're doing.

Well, we'll have to do something together.

I would love to. Absolutely love to. Thank you so much and we will chat again soon.

That sounds great.

Thank you for listening to the Future of Work podcast. Make sure you're subscribed on your favorite listening platform so you can easily get new episodes every Tuesday. You can reach out to us by clicking on the website link below in the show notes to collaborate, partner or just chat about all things future of Work. We'd love to connect with you. All of us here at the Future of Work and Pasadena City College wish you safety and wellness.