Well you're going to do that right?

What's that?

You're going to respond to that or you're going to call on us as we do that right.

Yes I can monitor that.

Hi, everyone. My name is Holly Clark I'm with the CAEP Technical Assistance Project. I'm just going to get started on some general housekeeping. I know you're tired of it, and I promise you this is the last one you will have to hear for a year. So attendees tend to trickle in a little bit slower in the webinar platform, which is why we do this, to allow time for others to come through that little funnel process and get into the room.

This meeting is being recorded. All attendees are muted of course, on the webinar platform you do not have the ability to speak. The recording of this session will be available on vFair that will be linked to the presentation where you found the Join button today. It will also be added under the Resources tab, and you will find that by clicking program, strand and leadership to find a copy of their presentation there.

The chat is available it's down in the bottom of your menu bar you click on Chat. That's where you're going to introduce yourself, where you're going to chat with each other. If you have questions related to the content of the presentation, we will ask that you post those in the Q&A, and you just click on Q&A and do submit a question.

In the chat it is very important when it opens, it defaults to our panelists. And that means only the members in the presentation can see your questions. We ask that you please change that by using a little dropdown arrow, excuse me, to all panelists and attendees. It would be really helpful if Kathy asked a question and she sent it to the panelist and Kelly answered it I would have no clue what she was answering because I didn't see the question.

So we do ask that you send them to our panelists and attendees. So I think that's everything. We're ready to turn it over so at this point, I'll go ahead and turn it over to your presenters today, which are the members of South Bay consortium and their community partners. Thank you. Kathy you are muted.

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome. Thank you for joining us today. Coming up with the title is sometimes a challenge because you want to be able to name all of what you're going to present in a few short words. The title of our workshop as it appears on the CAEP Summit menu of presentations is a Perspective on Immigrant Integration through Community Connections.

However, with more thought and much conversation with our fellow presenters, I've taken the liberty to rename it, to more accurately identify what we want to share with you. How do we enhance what we do for immigrant students by working with community partners? How do we collaborate so that our students can be successfully integrated into the community? Hence the title Enhancing Immigrant Integration by Strengthening Community Connections.

So those of us on the panel today are going to represent each other ourselves. We're the South Bay Consortium for, remember some of the South Bay Consortium for Adult Education, we represent two schools and our director of the South Bay Consortium, and two of our community partners, Catholic Charities and the San Jose public library.

In a minute we're going to introduce each one, we're each going to introduce ourselves. When we do so, we would also like to know our audience. Who are all of you? As we introduce ourselves, please type in the chat box. Your name, your role, the school or agency you're affiliated with and its location. We'll come back to see who you are after we introduce ourselves.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the final session of the CAEP Summit, we're so glad you're here and you're making some time to spend the afternoon with us. My name is Ilse Pollet, I serve as the director of the South Bay Consortium for Adult Education. Now there are a number of consortia that have South Bay in their title. So we are the one located in San Jose, California.

There's actually a bay and we're actually to the south of it, so that's our consortium. We have among our members five adult schools and four community colleges, and we're actually the only consortium that has two community college districts within their membership. And we serve about 15,000 students collectively each year. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Kelly.

Hi. So I'm Kelle Mason and I'm a transition specialist with Campbell Adult and Community Education, and we just shorten that to CACE.

I'm Cathy Frye, a program supervisor for East Side Adult Education.

I'm Bridget Balajadia. I am the program manager for Parish Engagement here at Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County.

My name is Kyle Burkett, and I'm a senior librarian and a branch manager of three library branches on the East side of San Jose, and I work for the San Jose public libraries.

And so here's Santa Clara County. The South Bay consortium for Adult Education SBCAE is located in the county of Santa Clara, which is also referred to as Silicon Valley. And this county is unique. It's economically diverse, and it's one of the places with the highest standards of living in the country, which also means there's a high cost of living here.

The county has a population of nearly 1.8 million, and is one of the largest in the state following LA, San Diego and Orange Counties. And the largest of the nine Bay Area counties. Its population constitutes about one fourth of the Bay Area's total population. There's 15 cities ranging from Palo Alto in the North, to Gilroy in the South, and San Jose is the largest city in the county with a population of nearly one million.

The county of Santa Clara is rich in its diversity and its ethnicity, and it's peoples backgrounds. There's over 100 languages and dialects spoken here, and it's also known for its artistic endeavors, sports venues, San Jose Sharks and academic institutions.

The county is home to three major universities. Stanford University, Santa Clara University and San Jose State University, as well as excellent community colleges. Members of the South Bay consortium for adult education as Ilse was just noting, include five school districts and two community colleges. We have Santa Clara Adult Ed, Silicon Valley Milpitas Adult Ed, East Side Adult Ed, Campbell Adult and Community education.

And then for colleges, San Jose Evergreen Community College and West Valley Mission Community College. Five years ago, our consortium developed a regional plan for Adult Ed that's catalyzed new and promising practices to support the region's adult learners. The collaborative planning process of which I'm sure a lot of you do, in identifying gaps and services and building bridges between the systems, and among our members has successfully created a regional structure for Adult Ed.

That structure has begun to leverage resources and give an Adult Ed more visibility. While the plan has made adult education more conspicuous to many partners in the community, a need for more authentic and formal connections, and for more outreach to our communities is a central theme to our current three year plan, as well as our annual plan.

In writing both plans we've identified specific actions, and these actions are connected to specific projects. This included going back when we think about community, we did many different things. We visited community based organizations and had dialogues with them. Wanted to make ourselves visible and wanted to learn more about them. We've had community breakfasts, restructured ourselves in such a way that we met less frequently as a whole group as a conservative, but more frequently on specific projects.

One of these projects is community connections. Currently the places that you're seeing in this slide are community based partners involved in the project community connections. And that includes the San Jose Park Public Library, Gardener, Upwardly Global, Sacred Heart, Catholic charities and more. Asian-Americans for community involvement and there's others.

My fellow presenters will share more about how a collaborative group of adult schools and agencies have come together to address the needs of its community members. So this slide right here is asking all of you a question. We're going to be talking about community connections.

While you're listening to us, please be thinking about words or phrases that come to mind, when you're thinking about what would it mean to you, within your agency, within your school, to enhance community partnerships. And write a word or a simple phrase in the chat box.

While you're writing that word, our senior librarian Kyle Burkett, will be creating a word cloud. And he'll be sharing it with us later to show what it is that we can do even just in this group together, today in this hour and a half. So remember to keep on writing as you're listening to us, and stay engaged. Now I'd like to introduce Ilse Pollet again.

Thank you Kathy. So I'll get us started with a bit of an overview of the why of this community connections project. And also some history and backgrounds on immigrant integration in the California Adult education program more globally. So this community connections project that we'll be presenting today is part of a broader immigrant integration initiative within the South Bay consortium for Adult Ed, and within the California Adult education program as a whole.

And of course, it's always about students. So I think it makes sense to start with a picture of a class that I had the pleasure of teaching a couple of years ago. This is an ESL class that was offered at one of our elementary school sites, it was a multilevel class. As you can see all of the students were women. They were parents, they had children at the elementary school, and they came to that English class because they wanted of course, to improve their English. But primarily they wanted to help their children with their education.

And they were, most of them were recent immigrants to the United States. So they also wanted to understand how things work in the US. What does the education system look like? What are the different school options for my children? How does the health care system work? How do I participate in my community as a new immigrant?

So going back a couple of years to when the adult education reform happened after the last recession, a lot of emphasis was placed on post-secondary education for our adult learners, and for transitions to the workforce. And so some of us in the field were concerned that students, such as the women you see in this picture, were at risk of being left out of adult education because of that.

Because not all of them had a goal of finding a job, or transitioning to a post-secondary education, or at least not in the moment. So with a group of practitioners in our region called Allies, and with the South Bay consortium for Adults Ed, we started thinking about how can we add immigrant integration more broadly to the scope, and the goals and the purpose of adult education in California.

So if you go to the next slide Kathy, we'll see a little bit of a timeline of some of the activities that we've engaged in, and I'll give you some more detail in the subsequent slides. But around 2018, 2019 that community based organization Allies developed the immigrant integration framework. Which was an attempt to understand what immigrant integration is, to define it and also to understand how it can be measured.

And that group together with others in the field and some of the other professional organizations and advocacy organizations, advocated strongly for inclusion of immigrants integration into outcomes for the CAEP consortia, which were then still called the AEBG consortia. That led to the passage of AB 2098 in the fall of 2019, which does exactly that. Adding, including immigrant integration outcomes to the outcomes for the consortia.

Subsequently this work took off within the California Adult education program, and AB 2098 work group was formed to study more deeply how this could be integrated and implemented. And at the same time the South Bay consortium together with Allies worked on an immigrant integration project, which this community connections work is a part of.

Now that we're here, Fall 2020, you may have seen that immigrant integration indicators have now been added to the CAEP summary report. For those of you who are administrators and track data on outcomes for students, those immigrant integration indicators are now added to that CAEP summary report, and are tied to EL Civics and COAAP.

So I'll go quickly through a little bit more detail, and please don't hesitate to reach out to us if you have more questions on this. So immigrant integration this was the original Allies framework. Traditionally immigrant integration is defined as linguistic, economic and social integration. And what we've done with this framework is expand that to include all the eight goal areas, as we call them, that you see the outer circle. So for each of those goal areas we've included strategies and supporting objectives, and also metrics.

And these eight goal areas may seem familiar, because they were subsequently adopted by the AB 2098 field team, with the addition of two more digital literacy and navigational skills. So you will see those coming up in future AB 2098 implementation. You can go to the next slide.

So this is what the AB 2098 legislation does. As I've mentioned it adds immigrant integration to the outcomes for the California Adult education program. Beyond literacy skills, high school diploma, post-secondary certificates and job and wage outcomes, consortia now have the option to report immigrants integration outcomes. You can go to the next slide.

So when I mentioned the immigrant integration project within the South Bay consortium for Adult Ed, the goal was really to look at the consortium's operations through that lens of immigrant integration. And so one of the first things was making sure that we connect with our community partners, to provide services and wraparound support in those eight goal areas that we've mentioned. So this is the work specifically that we'll be sharing about today.

We also looked at what happens inside the classroom. How immigrant integration can be promoted through a curriculum and instructional activities. We looked at what happens outside the classroom in terms of support staff, transition specialist, cultural competency of staff. And obviously, when we talk about reporting immigrant integration outcomes, we had to look at data collection and metrics, and how we measure immigrant integration.

So today we'll specifically talk about the community connections piece. And you will notice the link inside the classroom instruction, and also with data collection, which we'll all touch upon today. Next slide. So before Kelly will go into the details of the community connections program and how it all started, the overall goals for this community connections project were to build a reciprocal referral network between adult schools, community colleges and community based organizations.

Many of our member organizations don't have the capacity to provide many services on site. So we really rely on our community partners to provide some of these services to our students. By addressing those personal barriers, we're helping students become more integrated into their communities, and we also help them become more successful in their academic and employment and personal success.

We all know that if the foundational support is not there, if folks don't have access to health care, adequate housing or other supports, they tend to be less successful in their education and training programs with us. And finally the goal was to generate referral data so that we could inform our decision making around this project.

What happens when we refer students to the library? What happens when we refer students to Catholic charities? Are we able to track that referral, and are we able to track the outcome of that referral? So with that let me, before I turn it over to Kelly, let me pause and see if there are any questions or comments in the chat that we need to respond to. I think Kyle is monitoring the--

Yep, so far, so far we are good. Feel free to proceed.

OK good, thank you Kyle. So OK. Great.

OK. So again I'm Kelle Mason, I'm from Campbell Adult and Community Ed. I'm going to talk about just the beginning of our community Partners Program. We've called it many things, community connections, community partners. So we started off with two consultants who we worked closely with from the beginning until about four months ago. And at our school and the full time transition specialists, we also had other transition specialists in the school, and the administrators. We facilitated outreach to students, teachers, and potential agencies. And we started with four different agencies.

So we had Upwardly Global with which maybe some people have heard of, they work with skilled immigrants. Gardener which is Gardener Health Network, so they have a lot of clinics and they even do dentistry. Sacred Heart Community Services which is this amazing agency in San Jose, and then also Catholic Charities which probably everyone has heard of because they're international. OK next slide, please.

So we started off with a health insurance campaign. So one of the consultants was really great because he knew the community really well, he was from San Jose, he had worked at a bunch of different agencies. His wife was a social worker, so he had a finger on the pulse of who we might connect with. So we had an all staff meeting with the entire school, and the consultant, his name was Hymie, he did some interactive activities and we brainstormed about what we thought students' needs were.

And then Stanford had approached us through Allies, Ilse had mentioned Allies, and they have an immigration Policy Lab and they study immigrant integration into different communities. So they asked if they could survey our students, and we said yes. So they ended up surveying about 500 students. The survey was in 20 plus languages, so we had some good data about what students' needs were.

So we looked at it and we saw that 150 students had no health insurance. So we said let's do a health insurance campaign. And we said, let's come up with a number, so we said 100. So we decided we were going to try to get 100 students health insurance. We aimed high. So we decided to do it when we were doing our health COAAP, our EL Civics Health COAAP, so it kind of tied in nicely.

And enrollment counselors came from Gardner, they visited every single class, all the ESL classes, all the ASE classes, and they gave presentations. And students signed a sheet if they were interested, and then they had appointments. So some students thought the sign up sheet was all they had to do to get health insurance, but so we had to kind of clarify that. OK, next slide.

So before they came out we did a lot of prep. So Gardner had this lovely poster that they made and shared with us. We put it up in all the classrooms, we had flyers, the poster was also in Spanish. And then we have this clerk who's really great with graphic design, she makes all the flyers. So she made flyers and then we had them translated into many different languages. And we actually, we have another clerk who's Russian, so this was just the one that was in Russian.

And then the higher level teachers had discussion questions like, what do you do when you get sick, what did you do in your native country when you got sick, and they just, we got students thinking about their health. Next slide. So we also said we have this goal of getting 100 students health insurance, and another talented clerk which is actually the sister of the clerk that makes the flyers, made this.

So we had two of these at our two biggest sites, and it's just a thermometer. And we were trying to get up to 100, and I think at this point we had 20 people signed up, so we would move the little mercury thing up as more students signed up. Next slide. So these are the results of the campaign. So as I said, we worked with Gardner. We ended up getting 36 students signed up, and eight of their family members for health insurance.

And like I said it was embedded into the EL Civics Health COAAP, and this is just kind of a breakdown. So 61% of students were signed up for a program, a county program for low income adults that don't qualify for full scope Medi-Cal or Covered California. So these were most of our undocumented students. And then 19% signed up for Medi-Cal and 17% signed up for both. Next slide.

So it was a ton of work, but it went really well. And so the next year we said, well let's do a food campaign. So we thought about calling it a food security campaign, but we didn't want to have any stigma around it, so we just called the Healthy Eating Campaign. So this time we worked with Sacred Heart, and again they came, they did presentations to all the classes.

So there was a public benefits coordinator and also staff member from their home gardening program. And this time 40 students signed up for a Sacred Heart membership, and they received a range of services, from food, to job coaching. So the focus was food but they also said these are all the other services that we have. And Sacred Heart has this really robust volunteer program, so 16 students signed up to be volunteers at Sacred Heart, which was really cool. And also more students signed up for the health insurance program.

So they would sign their name and the transition specialist would get in touch with them and they'd say, Oh I want the health insurance. So it was just sort of like the more exposure they got to us than the programs, the more they signed up for. Next slide. So here's the data from that program. So we ended up getting 56 referrals from that campaign, and then there were 39 referrals that came from outside the campaign, so it was, we got 95 total referrals.

And this is one of the consultants did all this math, so I'm just reading it to you but, we had 63 successful referrals. So sometimes people would sign up and maybe they were, they didn't qualify for a certain program or things like that, or they didn't follow up, but we had a 66% success rate. So and I think there's one more slide.

OK, so I just wanted to share a student story with you. So there was a student named Fernando and I was doing intake, so ESL intake where we give them the courses test. And then afterwards we sit and have a chat with them just to kind of see what they're speaking and listening level is. And I was talking with this really lovely young man and he was from Chile, and he had a bachelor's degree there, and he was kind of tell me about some of his experience. And I was saying, Oh, I'm going to be your transition specialist.

And there just happened to be an upwardly global presentation the next day. And so I said, I told him about upwardly global. He was really interested. He was actually a cyclist, and he signed up for a night class. He said I'm going to ride my bike over there at another site. So he actually went to the presentation. The next morning got signed up with Upwardly Global.

I also told them about our business entrepreneurship class, so it was an IET class between CAEC and West Valley Community college, he got signed up for that. And then he also signed up for level 4 ASL in the evening. So he worked on his employed, employability skills, his English language skills, his resume. And he ended up applying for a job at Sacred Heart which was one of our community partners, and he got the job.

And so when it was time for the presentations, he was working there, and he was one of the presenters, which was really cool. So he was back at the same school where he was he had taken English classes, and he was in a lower level ESL class. And there were a lot of Spanish speakers and he was saying, I used to be a student here.

And he did this really lovely job of going back and forth between presenting in English, and then translating into Spanish. And he had vegetables that he had grown, and he was giving the students the vegetables. So it was just a very sweet kind of thing that came full circle. So he's kind of our rock star, Fernando. Yeah, so that's kind of it. I don't know if anyone has any questions, or if there's anything in the chat.

If we have any questions?

So.

It's what is the Stanford Immigration Policy Lab survey, and can other agencies utilize it?

That's a really good question. I know they've done it with us, and I think, I want to say they did it New York, and some other country. I mean with us we had to keep asking them to tweak it, because for the lower level students. But I think if you go onto their website, you can probably get more information. Yeah, because--

Kelle, if you'd like. So it is the IPL survey, it's a short survey. There's a 12 question version and a 24 question version, that measures an individual's level of integration, and of course that's self-reported. So there's a standard version of the tool, the 12 or the 24 questions, and they were very willing to partner with us, and have us add additional questions that were of interest to us.

Things that we wanted to know about our students, such as access to health information, health care, health insurance, or we also added some questions around parenting. And parenting of K to 12 students specifically. I think they are still eager and willing to partner with other consortia, or other adult schools in California.

So I'll type the link to their website in the chat, and if any of you are interested, you can always contact them directly, or I'd be happy to make a connection if you'd like to do that. Let me go ahead and type that link in now.

Thank you Ilse, that's beautiful. Because she used to be with Allies so that was. And it was just the questions were interesting, some of them were like, have you ever had dinner at an American's house. Or just things that we were like these, Ha these are kind of interesting, you know it's an interesting way to look at integration. Oh. Yeah, Ilse added that. OK so that's my piece.

Kathy, you are on mute still.

Thank you. In the Fall of 2019 the group that the pre-existing group community connections, and I guess that this was always the intention decided that they wanted to expand. And both East Side Adult Education and Milpitas Adult Education were fortunate to join in. At that time these two schools, at the time that these two schools join the project, the existing team was reflecting on which community based organizations would make a good fit for the work that they're doing.

The members identified to the right, were the ones that we came up, with some of them being here. San Jose public libraries and San Jose public libraries, Com-tek which fiber optics, which is actually a program that we have here at East Side, but it's a large organization and deals with fiber optics. Vision Literacy is a program that Milpitas Adult Education linked with.

Asian-Americans for Community Involvement is an organization that I think that many of the adult schools work with, in terms of providing assistance with immigration. Everything from immigration, to domestic abuse, to many different things. But anyway Asian-Americans for Community Involvement also does not just include Asian-Americans, and it provides supports to all students and agents, and clients.

Then Work 2 Future was another organization that one of our transition specialists that's working with adult secondary education here at East Side Adult Ed had wanted to work with. It was initially a challenge, but as they began to be placed, as a true transition specialist here from East Side were placed at Work 2 Future a couple of hours each week, they began to form relationships with the people who worked with Work 2 Future.

And the consortium had invited Work 2 Future to come and speak to them. And some of our members on the consortium actually sat on their board so, Work 2 Future also became a part. And then Next Door Solutions which specifically deals with domestic violence, and then we continue to grow. Next.

So in our meetings and via conversations with each other, we continue to define how we would strengthen our commitment and expand. As a consortium we follow the principles of human centered design, and it encourages us to first go to the people we're serving. So we conducted surveys and this wasn't new, we had conducted surveys and touched base with students before, but it was done in a more in-depth way.

There was what we call the touch points study facilitated the year before. And that study involved the two consultants meeting with students at all of our consortium schools, and facilitating conversations. Also they met with different staff, including classified certificated et cetera in terms of asking, what do you think needs to happen in order to expand and connect more with the community, and address the needs of the students.

We knew that we needed to have measures of success to accurately evaluate our work. That's SMART, specific, measurable, action oriented, realistic and time sensitive. That's where we create our timelines. We wanted to be specific. We needed to have data that could be measured from one time to another. The number of agencies and schools that join community connections, as well as the data Kelle showed us earlier on cases number of referrals, is a window for seeing that growth.

We were always conscious of action steps we needed to take. These action steps were decided as a group, and never in a silo. Some of us had big dreams. We realized that we needed to be realistic, and we created timelines for when tasks or actions would take place. Formalised agreements in the form of memorandum of understanding were created.

Recently this group discussed whether or not those agreements needed to be as formal. One thing that you realize when you work with a group, is that as you build relationships with each other, you develop an internal commitment which might be enough. We promoted collaboration amongst referral members.

Monthly meetings are held and that's really where some of us connected, and really have the green light go on in terms of fully understanding community connections. I remember going through the process of brainstorming with our consultant, the one that Kelle had mentioned earlier, Hymie, with our group here at East Side. And we did a lot of thinking, a lot of brainstorming and sometimes it felt like our wheels just kept spinning, and where were we

going. And then I reached out to one of our transition specialists, Sonia, and I reached out to Kelle and we went out to lunch, and we talked more about, what is it about, tell us? So that we want to better understand. And both through our conversation with Kelle, and then later in the monthly meetings, the green light went on. Aha, this is where we have conversations, this is where we discuss what each agency or school is doing. This is where we can share information with our students or our clients.

Of course, we have to monitor the referrals, and then evaluate the process. And then as we evaluate the process, we continue to monitor it, and revise it as it goes. Another project that our two consultants developed from this, from community connections, was a guidance tool kit. And all of you have access to that in the Google folder that was shared with you.

Hopefully some of what's shared in this toolkit will be helpful to all of you, and it goes over the different phases. Phase 1, strategy development. I'll speak for our school and what we did in this phase of development. The other schools used a similar, if not same, process. At East Side Adult, as the facilitator would come to our site, and lead us through some deep thinking about the theme we thought was most important for school students. Such as immigration, or child care, health services, employment, mental health, nutrition or anything else. Initially the sky was the limit.

Then we narrowed the number of these themes to be realistic about what we could handle. We identified agencies where we were already partners in some way or another. We visited individuals in these agencies, or invited individuals to come to our meetings. We shared the concept of community connections. Our potential partners asked questions and they shared their current work, and they decided at that point or later, whether or not they would join us.

Phase 2 was the program planning and implementation. And once the community partners were recruited, we began to create our SMART goals. This is where I would say this is a cyclical process, because we continue to identify goals we have, our ground philosophy. But then as things change, we change. And such is now with the pandemic.

The goals we had before may continue to change, and that's just part of life. And addressing the needs of our students and our clients. The decisions as to how or what changes are made by all members of community connections.

Phase 3 is when we develop a referral network. When CAEC first began their pilot, they used a Google Doc share with each other. At least that's what I've been told, I hope that I'm correct Kelle? We've been using Community Pro, and there are advantages and disadvantages to this system for this type of group, which Yeah.

The goal of the referral network is to engage in reciprocal referrals. For example, if a transition specialist would refer a student to an agency for an identified need, other agencies are referring their clients to the Adult School. And now I'd like to introduce one of our community partners Bridget, from Catholic Charities.

Thanks Kathy. Hi, everyone. So we decided, Kyle and I decided to be on this presentation to kind of give more context for what a community partners look like, that you could potentially partner with if you decided to replicate this model in your own school district, or what you might find useful from this. So Catholic charities like Kelle mentioned is a pretty large agency. I would love to say that we're international, but we're not. We're only national but we are still pretty big.

So in our county in Santa Clara County we've got a pretty large agency. We have over 40 programs, all of which focus on a variety of different things. But really are targeted at alleviating and eliminating poverty. So we're looking at the populations that we serve. We're heavily invested in families, but we also serve single folks. We serve people who are formerly incarcerated or homeless, people who are pregnant, people who are elderly, people who are experiencing different intersections of poverty.

So what I mean by intersections of poverty, are people that are experiencing multiple different barriers to achieving their goals at one time. So when we're talking about this kind of consortium, when I initially heard about it a little over a year ago, I was really, really interested. Because I've been a social worker in Santa Clara County for over 10 years, and I've seen the struggles. I felt the struggles as a provider on my end of wanting to connect my clients to services, and not ever knowing if my clients ever really got those services.

So I came in with this program, which at the time was a pilot program, and I had this idea of what would that look like if I were to join this consortium. Just my tiny program and be able to speak with providers on the other end. And when I say providers, I mean yes, more people from community partners.

But also folks from Adult Schools and community colleges that I could say, if I had a client who really needed to be enrolled in an ESL class, or they needed to be enrolled in a certain program within one of the Adult Ed programs or colleges. That I could actually go back, and I could circle back and say well to the provider, what program exactly did they get enrolled in? And there's an end to end communication.

So I know that the client that I'm working with is actually receiving the services that I intended for them. Having that is really invaluable as a community partner, and I know that a lot of the community partners who are listed in this presentation, but aren't here physically today, would attest to that as well. So I'm talking about all the social workers from Sacred Heart, from Gardner, from AACI.

They all feel very similarly that having the chance to meet monthly and interface, and talk about what's going on with the populations that we serve, is really invaluable. The other thing that's worth noting is that we're all serving the same kind of populations. So the people that are coming to adult schools are often in need of a lot more support services to keep them in Adult School right.

And so when we're able to have that connection, provider to provider, and really seal that deal and provide that kind of a holistic comfort to that student, and say we got you, we're holding on to you in this space right now, and that there's multiple people who care about you, and are going to ensure that you're more likely to continue your education and therefore more likely to be self-sufficient. That's a really beautiful thing.

And so for us as providers within social services, that's our main motivation. Is to be able to have that communication and to know that our clients are getting the support that they need and demand. And I'll start, I'll pause really briefly here before I pass it on, and just acknowledge just this picture that I added in on your screen right now, is a picture of our parish.

So my program specifically trains volunteers in trauma informed awareness, and mind body connections, and service navigation. We work with over 500 volunteers who follow clients or accompany them in difficult times of their lives. And what you're seeing here is a picture of our community market.

And this is a market that we have weekly, we serve over 1,000 clients every Tuesday night. People who are coming to get and support with their dinner, get their groceries for the week. But how this market started was actually in part due to the consortium, and because I was able to interact with Gardner.

And I was able to, who is a medical provider out here, and I was able to say monthly, hey how are you guys doing? I was wondering, I'm thinking about starting this idea at my parish. Would you guys be able to bring your services. And so for a year now they've been coming to our parish, and they offer up support with a doctor, or substance abuse counselor, they have a nurse. And in the middle of this pandemic we've been offering COVID testing.

And none of that would have happened if we hadn't had this natural connection through the consortium. And through these monthly meetings. So I cannot say enough how grateful I am for this, and how much I feel strongly that this is a model that can really work, regardless of where you are. It really just takes a lot of talking, which I feel like everybody on here, education wise, can do just fine.

Oh I would also advocate for a free lunch. I know that in times of COVID we can't do that anymore. But what we used to do is get together and bring a lunch and someone would sponsor and everything, I tell you people start talking a lot more when there's free lunch on the table. And that's a wrap for me.

Thank you Bridget. You would advance to 5.

Oh man.

So as I mentioned, my name is Kyle Burkett. I work with the San Jose Public Library. I am a branch manager for three library locations. And these are in the district 5 area. It's kind of a lie, district 5, we actually serve district 3, some populations in district 8, so not quite just district 5.

But when I started at the library, I've been in California for going on three years. One of the first things I noticed was that the programming that we had at the library was all predominantly volunteer led. And volunteers are great, there's a ton of things that they can do and things that they do well, but I didn't feel like the programs that we were offering were as high quality as they could be.

So-- our involvement with the SBCAE grew from a partnership that we had with the East Side Adult Education on the East Side of San Jose. The district 5 area is a very high needs area in San Jose, even before the pandemic hit. And so to be able to offer a higher quality curriculum to those people, that was sort of my first goal. So we created, we had 2 ESL classes that were hosted at two different library locations with instructors from the East Side, Adult Ed.

And those were very well received, and they also kind of gave us a platform with which we could interact, to just kind of disseminate information from the library. So the library is a big connector of organizations just naturally. So we eventually, we had the MOU that we put together with East Side, and we settled on this kind of model where East Side provides us with the instructors. And then SJPL, we assist with recruitment to boost that enrollment.

And as this partnership sort of developed and as the SBCAE sort got bigger and was looking for more partners, it seemed like a natural fit. So at San Jose public libraries, we have in 7 of our different locations, areas that we call family learning centers. And at each of those libraries, we have a position that's called a literacy program specialist.

And these people function essentially as liaisons to the community, liaison to both immigrant populations, and to ESL learners, or ELL learners. The kinds of work that those literacy program specialists do, is parenting classes, they set up nutrition workshops. We have our ESL conversation clubs, they would run citizenship classes. We have an entire collection of resources that are specifically sort of directed towards immigrants and ELL learners.

And then we also offer computer instruction in a variety of different languages. And also Cultural and Informational Programming in multiple different languages. It's part of our goal as a community connector, to not only provide educational resources, but also give people the opportunity to come together as a community. A lot of people I think, when you just come to this country, it's really kind of hard to meet people, to build a community. So the library has a role to play in that as well. Go ahead next slide, please.

So the thing that we immediately saw that was advantageous with the partnership with the SBCAE, was that it could act as an information clearinghouse for immigrant integration services, just generally speaking in the South Bay. It allows all of the administrators and the instructors, educators and all of the partners to come together to easily identify gaps and redundancies and services.

Sort of an example of this is, we do a lot of work towards bridging the digital divide in San Jose. And so one of the things that came about from these conversations, was that there were opportunities for our learners to maybe get some computers, computing devices, personal devices. But they were sort of pockets of this everywhere. And nobody was really addressing the connectivity piece. So like getting people actually connected to the internet.

This was a barrier to our learners. So the consortium, it allows us to identify those barriers. It encourages the effective cross promotion of partner services to the different stakeholders or residents in the area. It allows us to establish direct lines of communication, and just rapidly disseminate that information. And it really helps foster an inter-sectional or comprehensive approach to eliminating the barriers that we all face.

We all know that there's a whole litany of these issues and problems that these populations face, and you can't just pick and choose which ones you're going to address. So I think it gives us a comprehensive sort of power to address all of these things as best we can, more simultaneously. And something that happened, and especially with the COVID-19 pandemic, I think it really allowed us to communicate and just rapidly adapt and develop the strategies that we were using to address this sort of emerging crisis. Next slide, please.

So just a bit about that. So digital equity in the response to COVID-19. So as I said before, the library one of our missions is to help bridge the digital divide. And that is, it's incredibly bad on the East side of San Jose, people are not connected. We were able to create sort of a digital equity map of the city of San Jose, that showed the district's 5, districts 8, district 3, they're all in bad shape in terms of what they have access to.