UNT Dallas Celebrates Opening of 4315 Innovation Center

We share the space in the building with Dallas College, another strong partner of ours, because we believe the way to increase educational opportunity at UNT Dallas is to partner closely with our school districts, with our community colleges, business and industry and even other four year universities, which we initiate most of those partnerships.

I toured here in December for both DC and Dallas and we are very impressed with what’s going on. I have seen many phases of education. This phase is one of the most important aspects of education for where it is because it is related to skills where jobs are available. I work a lot with the community colleges, especially the one in Lancaster, and our goal is to have what we call blue collar STEM majors because we have a great need for those skills.

The best is yet to come. When you think about UNT Dallas, this campus has the ability to get 35,000 to 40,000 students here in this area. You no longer have conversations about the north and the south. The fact is that we should be looking to the north as just one standard of how we want this university to be and how we want this community to be.

And I can assure you, now’s the time. We have the economic dollars through the city of Dallas. We have workforce dollars. And most of all, we have the federal money. Thank you, Congresswoman Johnson. So we’re going to take advantage as much as we can.

I’m so grateful that we had a vision to not just transform this building into something commercial, in terms of retail, etc. This happens to be an epic center for opportunity for kids to come in and get STEM work opportunities to partner with UNT Dallas and also Dallas Community College and many others. Out of this place we expect the birth of a nation of the right caliber and we expect people to come from here and go into the community and transform the community in a different way.

My challenge right now and my challenge going forward is to continue to encourage all of you and to encourage individuals who are developers, residential developers, multifamily developers, investors, and engineers, to participate in this organization.

We now have a continuum of services that serve students as young as six years old to some of our more seasoned individuals now in their late 60s and beyond. That’s powerful for a university of our age. And so we ask you all to continue on this journey with us.

I believe this center will be a catalyst for so many young people opening doors and blazing paths to greatness. And sometimes the greatness is living a life full of love, provision, confidence and determination; all of which leads to generational wealth! Together we work to prepare our students to be agents of positive change with a commitment to excellence and community collaboration.