Careshia Moore is the President and CEO of Usher’s New Look (UNL), a non-profit founded in 1999 by Usher Raymond IV and his mother, Jonetta Patton, after being inspired by the challenging stories of Atlanta teens they saw in court.
UNL has supported over 50,000 young people by providing career development opportunities through immersive programs under Moore’s leadership. Recently, UNL partnered with IBM and its IBM SkillsBuild program to offer AI-focused career readiness training to participants for free.
“We serve more than 1,500 youth per year, and all the students we serve will have access to SkillsBuild,” Moore tells ESSENCE in an interview. “AI is being infused into every part of our lives, particularly the workforce. We want to make sure that our young people are prepared for what’s coming.”
SkillsBuild is a free global platform with learning pathways and content in over 20 languages, aimed at providing essential career preparation resources to underserved communities, according to IBM.
Moore states that Usher’s New Look continues to advance Usher’s vision of empowering future leaders. “His ideas are implemented in the work that we do and in fact, he coined this term culture of play that is often heard by our staff, lending to our overall impact. We work hard but we strive to infuse joy into process of problem-solving and addressing opportunity gaps and inequity,” she said.
