The Future Is Human: Inside the Towson Growth Summit and the Bold Workforce Ideas Taking Shape

From the opening minutes, organizers pushed back on the idea that “workforce” is a dry policy term. Steve Simons, CEO of Restyn, the parent company of The Towson Torch, and moderator for the evening, reminded the crowd of over 200, that “we say workforce and it sounds very dry, but workforce is people and we’re invested in people and we’re creating careers through people and lives for people.” That human-centered framing set the tone for a 75‑minute conversation that ranged from trades and tuition-free college to AI and mental health, but kept circling back to the same core: expanding real opportunity for Towson residents.​

Towson Torch founder and publisher Chris Forhan opened the event by tying the Summit directly to the publication’s mission “to amplify stories about positive growth happening around us every day.” He noted that panelists “come from some of the biggest employers and educators in Towson and Baltimore County” and “all share the same goal, driving workforce development as the center of growth initiatives, with training and education serving at the centerpiece of bridging the gap between available jobs and skills currently available in our workforce.”​

Each panelist drew a straight line between their institution’s history in Towson and concrete steps they’re taking to build talent pipelines.

Jon Howland of Stanley Black & Decker described the company’s Grow the Trades initiative as a national investment with very local origins. “From a workforce development perspective, Stanley Black and Decker is committed to providing assets, monetary assets and product assets to the next generation of the American worker… to skill and upskill men and women from different communities, different backgrounds, veterans,” he said, noting that the building trades “need about probably a half a million workers” right now. The program began as a 30 million dollar commitment and “we had so much success that three years later we actually doubled down and have recommitted another 30 million dollars to the cause. It’ll take us through 2030.”​

Community College of Baltimore County President Dr. Sandra Kurtinitis underscored how central workforce is to CCBC’s identity: “Our phrase is “everything we do is workforce development.” Serving roughly 55,000 students across eight sites, she estimated that “somewhere between five and 6,000 of the Towson area residents are now registered to come to CCBC this spring.” Her focus, she said, is ensuring that “those 300 programs and certifications that we offer, every one of them has to be offered at the absolute top level of delivery,” from curriculum and facilities to systems, so “when we’re graduating a student… that student is ready to come into the workforce that Towson needs [and] Baltimore County needs.”​

Goucher College President Kent Devereaux highlighted the college’s evolution into the “fourth most diverse liberal arts college in America” and a “net importer of talent” to Maryland. About 40 percent of Goucher students are from Maryland and 60 percent from out of state, but “10 years after graduation, 54 percent of our students stay in Maryland,” he noted. For Devereaux, Goucher’s signature 100 percent study‑abroad requirement, offered “at no additional charge” and built into tuition, is both a global experience and a workforce strategy: “as the world has changed, post the internet, we find that it is one of the best ways to really expose our students to different cultures and also develop a true sense of independence by actually spending time overseas and then coming back” with new ideas about where they can contribute.​

Towson University Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Dr. Melanie Perreault framed TU’s role through both tradition and transformation. Towson has long been known as a teacher’s college, and she proudly noted that the university still produces “the most undergraduate teachers in the state.” But she pointed out a lesser-known fact: “we do produce the… highest number of undergraduate majors in the health professions of any university in the state,” alongside booming STEM programs. “Our biggest major on campus is computer science. Our cyber areas are booming. We just opened the Center for AI on our campus,” she said, adding that Towson offers “over 7,000 internships every year,” most in the region.​

Whiting-Turner Senior Executive Vice President Jonathan Hess described the contractor’s approach as “creating a safe environment for our people to really positively impact the built environment in the communities that they live.” That starts with heavy investment in early-career talent: “we’re heavily invested in our internship program; we had over 1,200 interns last summer… about 250 of those work right here in our Towson office.” Interns, he said, gain pragmatic context for their studies while Whiting-Turner gets to know potential future hires.​

One of the clearest themes of the evening was how closely Towson’s colleges collaborate with each other and with employers.

Dr. Kurtinitis pointed to the Degrees to Succeed initiative linking CCBC with both Towson University and Goucher. Under that program, “a student comes to CCBC as a fully fledged student, but also then is sort of conditionally accepted either by Goucher or by Towson.” Instead of losing credits or entering as “a second semester sophomore,” students now “enter these senior institutions as full juniors and they get full credit for their associate’s degree because we have worked together.” Calling the arrangement “pretty phenomenal” and “pretty special,” she said, “you don’t find it in many other places,” and added, “I’m feeling really proud to be sitting with all of these people for that reason, because they support us and they care.”​

Perreault echoed that sense of collaboration, especially around the trades. While TU is not itself a trades educator, “our partners over at CCBC are leaders in that”. The university recently launched an internship program where high school students “who are interested in maybe joining the trades come and do some workforce shadowing for folks in the trades on our campus.” The idea is to provide “career exploration in areas where we wouldn’t educate, but we would pass off, of course, to CCBC.”​

Hess, meanwhile, emphasized Whiting-Turner’s habit of embedding in high schools and K–12 career days, as well as multi‑year partnerships with programs like YouthWorks and Cristo Rey to bring teenagers into the company for real work experience. Workforce development, he urged, is “lifelong,” and businesses need to collaborate with educators at every level.​

That spirit of partnership also extends to the broader shape of Towson as a place. Devereaux described Goucher’s decision to invite Whiting-Turner to build its new headquarters on six acres of the college’s campus and to enable nearby Edenwald Senior Living to expand on three more acres as a deliberate bet on long-term institutional neighbors. With 300 acres and 180 of them in protected watershed, Goucher is looking at upgrading walking paths, lighting, and connectivity so the campus, Whiting-Turner, Edenwald, and downtown Towson become “much more connected” physically. “We see the same thing in what Towson University is doing,” he said, pointing toward a more walkable, integrated Towson.​

When the conversation turned to the pandemic, the panelists described very different operational realities but arrived at similar takeaways about connection, flexibility, and mental health.

For Devereaux, the crisis struck at the heart of Goucher’s model. As a president who arrived in 2019 with “a lot of upside” ahead, he suddenly faced the challenge of bringing “250 students plus in 40 different countries” back to the U.S. and then persuading families to enroll at a college that sends “all of its kids overseas in the middle of a global pandemic.” The financial hit was “enormous” for a small private college, and he noted that some peers did not survive. Yet the forced shift online had an unexpected benefit: faculty who once worried he would “move us online” instead “turned to each other,” “helped each other,” and “figured it out.” Today, Goucher “mixes and matches modalities” and uses remote work to avoid needing new administrative buildings.​

Hess said construction simply could not stop. “Thank goodness we were deemed essential,” he said; projects required people on site, even as “the rules were changing every day.” Technology like Zoom and Teams became indispensable, but perhaps the biggest long-term shift was around checking in on employees. The company “really put a spotlight on the importance of mental wellness,” going so far as to have staff “call every one of our employees… just to make sure that they were okay.” He believes that emphasis on mental health and a slightly more patient culture are important outcomes to keep.​

Kurtinitis told one of the evening’s most striking stories: CCBC never fully closed. When the governor ordered shutdowns for three weeks, the college quickly realized that “by April of that spring, we had 4,000 people who just disappeared” because many students had no computers, no wifi, no quiet space, and no support to study online. Instead of accepting that loss, CCBC “remained fully open for the eight to 10,000 students who could not study online” and invested federal relief funds to make on‑site learning safe, from “space suits” for faculty to severely reduced classroom capacity. As a result, she said, “instead of our enrollment dropping like 25% the way it did with so many of our other community college colleagues, ours went down maybe by 7%.” “I think we were the only community college, maybe the only college in Maryland actually to remain open,” she added, calling it “hard to do” but the “right reason.”​

Perreault shared what she called the biggest delayed lesson from the pandemic. Walking through the Towson University union in fall 2024, she heard “this roar” and realized it was simply “a room full of students talking to each other. They’re not on their phones, they’re talking to each other.” After years of isolation for students who missed homecomings, proms, and graduations, that sound convinced her that “being with people matters” more than ever. It also shapes how she thinks about technology: “Everybody’s freaking out about AI. Don’t freak out about AI because of the roar of the students in the union. Because people matter.”​

The night closed on a forward-looking note: how should Towson think about AI and the jobs of tomorrow?

Perreault leaned on a metaphor any Stanley Black & Decker fan could appreciate. “AI is simply a tool,” she said. “Maybe once upon a time, a rock got the job done,  then somebody came along and said, let’s have a hammer. But at the end of the day, you still had either a caveman or somebody else swinging that thing.” In the same way, artificial intelligence is “only as good as the person using it.” Towson University, she said, is committing that “every single student is gonna be educated on how to use artificial intelligence. Doesn’t matter what your major is… how to use it, how to use it well, and most importantly, how to use it ethically.” Ethics, she stressed, is something “only humans can do.”​

Kurtinitis admitted CCBC is “not as far” along but said the college is in its own “dark night of the soul” on AI, even as staff are already embracing tools like a new CRM to automate “dull and boring” mass communications and free up time for “one-on-one student to staff, student to faculty” relationships. Faculty, especially in writing-heavy disciplines, remain worried about cheating, but she suggested hearing more from Towson’s experience would help CCBC “move in that direction.”​

Devereaux took the long view, tracing his own exposure to AI back to a California community college professor who had studied with AI pioneer Marvin Minsky and once dragged him to a microcomputer conference where he met “these two guys, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.” Fifty years later, he said, some things haven’t changed: most graduates still don’t end up in the field of their major, and future workers are likely to cycle through “3, 4, 5 different industries,” all of them being reshaped by AI. He cited a collaborator at Penn who believes that within five years, vaccine development will be done entirely on computers, with only final testing in labs, as one example of how rapidly work is changing.​

The real frontier, Devereaux argued, will not be technical but moral. He pointed out that the heads of AI at Google and Apple both majored in philosophy and warned that “the great challenges of the future are gonna be ethical and moral, not technological.” That reality, he said, is “where I think higher education has to wake up and really embrace” its role: preparing students not just to use AI, but to navigate its implications and to reskill over a lifetime through certificates and programs at places like CCBC.​

By the time Simons thanked the panelists and invited attendees to grab dessert and beverage, a rough playbook for Towson’s workforce future had emerged.​

It starts with seeing “workforce” as neighbors, students, veterans, apprentices, and returning citizens, not spreadsheets. It relies on institutions with deep Towson roots—Stanley Black & Decker, CCBC, Goucher, Towson University, Whiting-Turner, choosing to collaborate rather than compete. It insists that labs, classrooms, and shops stay “state of the art” so no nurse, tradesperson, or technologist trains on yesterday’s tools. And it treats AI not as a threat, but as a hammer,  powerful in the right hands, but still just a tool.​

Or, as Simons put it in his closing, “the future really is human.” In Towson, that future is already being built.​