Here we go.

Yay. Go team.

And go, Dodgers.

They did it.

They did it, after 30 years.

I will say that I'll give them the respect.

Welcome, attendees, as you start to enter our session. If you can hear me, that's fantastic. That means everything is working well. You will be muted as the presentation begins. And I'm just going to allow a few more people to log in, get adjusted, and get comfortable. I will review some quick housekeeping pieces. So I'll go ahead and begin, as people filter in.

So good morning. My name is Mandilee Comstock and I'm with CAEP Technical Assistance Project. And I will go over a few of our housekeeping pieces before we begin. First, I'd like to mention that this meeting is being recorded and all attendees are muted in the webinar platform. Your volume can be adjusted to turn your volume up or down in your system settings.

That chat is enabled, and you will be able to communicate with attendees and panelists. The presenter may ask you to use chat during the presentation. You can open the chat by selecting the chat button at the bottom of the Zoom window. Please be sure to select panelists and attendees to ensure everyone sees your chat. If you only chat to attendees, the presenters will not be able to see what you have written. You may ask presenter questions related to the presentation in the Q&A. This is located in the bottom of your Zoom window as well. And you can ask questions here or upvote someone else's question.

During a presentation, if you wish to exit full screen mode, you can hit Escape or go to View Options to enlarge, reduce, or exit full screen. We also invite you to please fill out our evaluation at the end, when prompted, of this webinar by selecting Continue. It will also be listed on the session agenda. And with that, I believe we are ready. And I will turn it over to Paul Downs. Thank you and enjoy the summit.

Thank you, Mandilee and welcome, everybody. Nice and early here. Some of you have done a session already. But we're happy you're joining us here. So we would like to start off by introducing ourselves. And if you would also introduce yourselves by putting your name and organization in the chat, that would be awesome.

And while you do that, we will ask you to multitask. We have a poll to indicate your role. So you can go ahead and indicate your role with your organization, your consortium. And we'll get a sense of who we are. And we'll also start to introduce ourselves. So I'll ask Carol to start introducing.

Hi. Good morning. My name is Carol Hirota. And I am formerly with Stockton Unified School District and currently the Executive Director of Delta Sierra Adult Education Alliance.

Great. And Dr. Maloy?

Hi there. Yes, I am Dr. Maloy, Heather, as most call me. And I am the Regional Transitions Manager for our consortium. And I work with all the adult schools, and our transition specialists, and counselors in connecting students to services, as we say, the three C's-- college, career, and community. So thank you all for joining our session. I'm very excited to talk about pathways today.

And Mr. Rosenbloom?

Hi. Good morning, everyone. I'm Paul Rosenbloom, a Consultant with the good fortune to work with this adult education consortium, the Delta Sierra Adult Education Alliance, out in San Joaquin County.

And I have the same role as Paul, Consultant with the consortium. And also to provide-- I'm honored to work with this awesome team. And just part of the deep history here is that Carol-- I met Carol initially when she was the Principal of Stockton School for Adults. And she was on a statewide task force to create a strategic plan for the adult ed system for California. And I was a facilitator for that process. And just to say that pathways-- pathway thinking was a big part of that original plan. And so it's very fitting that we're here today to look at the results. And also, the concept of consortium came out of that plan.

By the way, here's another poll for you. So if you would like to indicate what types of pathway projects do you have currently going on. So we'd like to know what your level of activity is with regard to any kind of pathway project. And you'll see we defined that broadly. It could be a CTE pathway, a career pathway. It could be immigrant integration, co-enrollment within the WIOA world or within the adult ed world, the community colleges, all of the above. So why don't you give that a shot?

And also, back to the strategic plan for adult education that Carol was-- Carol and I met working on, the consortium came out of that pathway-- I think it was about that. And just to say that it's been an honor and a privilege to work with Carol for-- off and on for these 10 years, as she rides off into the sunset or I guess rides off onto the golf course, Carol. It's awesome to be presenting the capstone of our work together in the last five years of this team.

Thank you.

All right. So what do we got here? Quite a few. This is awesome. Co-enrollment, some CTE pathways, immigrant integration. Great. And some other pathways. Wonderful.

And I like the co-enrollment with adult education and community college. So thank you.

Represent. Great. OK. So our presentation today, here's our overview. And the major focus is to share with you a framework for developing innovative pathways. Obviously, you guys have already done a bunch of work. So hopefully, this will add some thoughts that you could use and deploy as you move forward.

The framework that we're going to show you is based on our-- this team's experience as well as many other partners that we've worked with in our consortium over the last five years, both on immigrant integration and also sector partnerships. After setting a little context, we'll present the framework to you at around 10:20 or so, and-- well, pretty quick-- and then, at 10:40, we'll go into the actual projects that were the foundation of the work in the framework.

So we really want to hopefully just give you a thought process, a way to do some strategic thinking about major system change initiatives. And we'll wrap up, therefore, by inviting you to give this a try. We'll give you just a little thought experiment to apply this to your context. Yeah.

And why don't you just bang in a few words like, did you have any particular topics or questions that brought you to this session? If you just pop that into the chat. Heather, Paul, Carol, and I will take a look at that. And we'll try to sort in our answers as we present. So go ahead and give that a shot.

So let's talk about our context and overview. As all of you probably have a similar chart somewhere in your PowerPoint decks, here are our members and partners. Some of these are the inside-- the members. As you know, we have our adult schools, Delta Community College. We have two county offices of education and then all of the outer circle.

And some of these we're doing a lot of robust partnering with and, some of it's more aspirational of the future. But you can see we intend and want to embrace that idea of a regional vision. Here's where we are on the map. We are just south of Sacramento and east of the Bay Area. You can see we're in the delta. And we go all the way up to the Sierra. So hence, the name.

An important part of our context is that-- for pathways is that we've really invested in working together collaboratively. It's really an essential ingredient to taking on these pathway system change efforts. If you have a bedrock, a foundation, of collaborative norms and processes that really, really helps.

We started with a very strong history of collaboration when Carol and the prior President of Delta College, Kathy Hart, who was an instrumental architect of this consortium, the two of them, they started collaborating way in pre-'80, '86 days when flexibility happened around getting better aligned about who'd provide services in the adult ed space.

Some of the other points on this chart are pretty intuitive-- team building, shared vision. I will call out two points. The shared agreement decision-making, we've never had to vote on a single thing in our time. We've always-- we've use a structured consensus model that's intended to drive us towards a solution that everyone can work together with. So I think that's an important structural element.

And then also, this dedicated innovation support, what that effectively means is it can be done in any number of ways, but we have set aside regional fund that is-- allows us to invest collaboratively into these pathway projects, so that we're not having to-- we didn't distribute all the money out, and then you had to like pull it back in. There are, obviously, other ways to do innovation support, but it's useful, structurally, to have something in place. So these things really help us do the pathway work.

And why pathways? It may be commonplace where we talk about this so much. But just to go over the critical elements, for me, it's so appealing because of the idea of a strategic plan for both the student and for us as agencies and partners. There's a sense of coherence. There's a sense of direction. There's a sense of structure and integrative services.

It's particularly helpful to have a pathway model to drive the collaboration, because oftentimes, there's this exhortation-- go collaborate with your partners-- but it's like a little bit of head scratching. Well, what are we supposed to collaborate about? We all have shared clients. But this gives us a structure who does what in a systematic way.

And then, for me, the coin of the realm here is that last one, that by having intentionality about getting clearer, helping students get clear on their goals, we're helping to build their self-efficacy. I think we all know that, that that's the real power and motivation of any system changes to get the part-- the participants excited and motivated about their goals.

So I was going to quickly go through some of these system change frameworks. So to complement pathways, it's good to have-- and we'll cover this in the individual presentations-- it's good to have a framework in mind. And this has a lot of the benefits that we just discussed. It gives you a blueprint, a roadmap. I think we're all familiar with career pathways. That's really downtown CAEP. So there it is-- multiple entries and exits, strong integration of support services, and a sequential and progressive experience of educational attainment and experiential attainment.

Maybe less familiar is the system change framework that's the industry sector partnership. And this comes more out of the workforce development world. But it's a natural complement to career pathways. And often, the two are married together. But as you can see, it's-- the idea is that you bring together a partnership around a regional industry to align and coordinate investments in services to solve problems. And it's got pretty much all the same partners that we are encouraged to work-- reach out to.

And then, the last system change framework is very, very important, immigrant integration and working with the AB-2098 workforce-- or excuse me-- the immigrant integration metrics committee last year, we worked with CASAS to produce some data. And as we all know, ESL is a gigantic program for us.

But English learners and immigrants are also heavily represented in all of our CTE programs, high school diploma programs. So depending on the numbers-- and we don't have precise data-- somewhere in the realm of 60%, 65%, 70% of all of our CAEP students are immigrant origin. So the intentionality to serve our students, our participants almost brings with it the need to look at immigrant integration. And the definition is there-- a two away dynamic process in a holistic model to facilitate success.

So with that as context, I'm going to go into what is this framework for developing innovative pathways. And we are intending to present something we believe there's no cookie cutter, one size fits all. But this is a flexible model. It's a framework. It's not prescriptive at all. And in fact, as you'll see, we built this framework by doing, by learning, by trying things. So that's very much the spirit of this presentation is that it's a exploratory, generative process of strategic thinking that leads you towards the system change pathways. And so it's adaptable to all circumstances.

And this is just a recap of the projects. We had two immigrant integration projects. And those are relatively new for us. But one focuses on the parents of young children in a two generation model. The other is a more traditional workforce program, the English Learner Pathways to Careers. And then we have two sector partnerships. The Transportation, Distribution, and Logistics is really just getting rolling, no pun intended. And then, the health sector partnership is one that's a couple of years old and has quite a track record on.

This framework has six elements. And the first is, obviously, pretty intuitive, thinking about a major issue for you consortium. And generally, these are going to be things that are of broader scope, not a small tactical thing, but something that's pretty mission critical. And you can look at your three-year plan, talk to your stakeholders. But come up with a big, meaty project. And we'll ask you to do that in a few minutes.

Second element is to definitely be strength based and-- or excuse me-- that is to think about your consortium's collaborative processes. And maybe you need to do a bit of a tune up, recommit to first principles of collaboration, if you want to move in a pathway system change direction.

Next is to think about those system change frameworks, such as I just presented-- immigrant integration, sector partnerships, career pathways. Also, I've heard on other sessions collective impact. That's a very good one to look at, as well, as a way to think about change and bringing together diverse stakeholders.

Number four, embracing CAEP's objective number seven, leveraging regional resources. And that's often described as a process of asset mapping. Who's doing what in the community? Having very proactive community engagement. Both Carol and Kathy are-- who are co-directors were out of the community a lot and got us to tables that really had high impact.

And then, similarly, overlapping there, actively network. We had regularly scheduled stakeholder input sessions. And we also have tried to go to our partner sessions, so the Workforce Development Board. Community based organizations often have a monthly open meeting. It's good to get to know the flavor and culture of our partners by going to their sessions. And then, building on connections. At the of the day, it's all about relationships. So do your members have leadership roles on the workforce board or on in other community organizations?

So that is the model in its abstraction. So let's use the Q&A function and see if folks have questions about this model, how we've developed it, how it applies, anything you might have. Go ahead and pop those in the Q&A.

And then also, if you don't have questions, you might throw into the box, the Q&A, just a statement about are there areas of this-- these elements that you think you have a good handle on, you're doing a good job with, currently? Or are there areas you think you need to particularly strengthen? Just to get a flavor of the group.

So go ahead, folks. Now, it's time for you. I'm speaking too quickly. It's all very obvious and clear. What do we think? I haven't looked at the chat in a while. Team, anything? Good morning in the chat. OK. Well, as we say, hearing none, we will proceed.

And so this is a preview of what we're going to do towards the end of the session here. So not for right now, but just get out a piece of paper, a pad. Can you see-- Oh, I see the disappearing paper pad here. And jot down a few ideas. What's a strategic goal or issue facing your consortium? Particularly, something that's a gnarly problem that you think would require some collaboration.

And you can take these notes down as we move through the sessions, because they may trigger some ideas. So what's a strategic issue? Who are some major stakeholders to that process or ongoing collaborations? We found that to be highly successful. We found existing tables to go-- asked to be at and then take over-- I mean, work with. That was a joke.

[chuckling]

And then, looking for connections. So have these in mind as we move through. So we'll go into the meat and potatoes here and go through our pathway examples. And yes, we can share the presentation. And we have a good handle on immigrant integration. We'd like to do a better-- better with transitions to jobs. OK. And great. So perfect. OK. So we're going to go through our examples. We'll start with our two immigrant integration pieces and starting with Carol.

All right. So as Paul Downs explained, this is basically the definition from ALLIES, which is the Alliance for Language Learners-- Language Learners Integration, Education, and Success. It describes how people can succeed in an American society via the focus on linguistic, social, and integration, and economic integration. And you can see all of the different areas surrounding the linguistic, social, and economic integration. And those are some of the areas that this project will be focusing on.

I do want to give a shout out to Paul Downs who was, I believe, one of the founding members of the ALLIES Board and that participated on the AB-2098 work group, was very helpful in getting this project started. So hopefully, we will get some of those recommendations, and policies, and guidance for implementation.

But in the meantime, Stockton Unified School District has been working in collaboration with the consortium with Migration Policy Institute. I believe they were-- there was a representative as part of the AB-2098 work group. So I think that was very helpful. They know an awful lot about California.

And so what they did do is they have really given our consortium some rich data that is specific to our agencies in demographics, literacy, and their learning, and their barriers. And then, each of the agency data that we have is specific to just only the learners that are enrolled. So this expanded. So that's the difference between the data that the agencies have but what MPI was able to share with us.

And so with their expertise on immigration policy, they also have this policy brief on English plus integration. And I will type that in the box later on. So you can all have access to it. It talks about different-- a model on integration topics and specifically to our adult learners on digital literacy, self-study skills, how to support them, so that their family can be successful and providing that on-ramp to adult education and basic education opportunities with a focus on their children also.

So some of their models addresses some of the key barriers-- transportation, work hours, self-efficacy, child care. And right now, digital literacy, and access, and equity is really, really important, so that we can really support our families in our school districts. So they've been a wealth of information for us. And we're really excited that they are now partnering with Stockton Unified School District.

So on the next slide, it discusses this pilot that Principal Jeff Dundas is working on with the district partners within Stockton Unified School District. And some of you will recognize some of the components might be of the CBET, Community Based English Tutoring, Proposition 227, some of those elements. But we really are trying to create a system change on serving children and parents, children of three to five year olds and parents within Stockton Unified School District.

So Principal Dundas is collaborating with the Parent Engagement office staff, Early Childhood Education where Principal Dundas was the program manager at one point, the English Language Development office, and of course, Adult Education. So how can this system change improve services?

These are four new folks, not the-- not just the parents that are already in our adult schools. But we want to outreach to close the gap of families and parents that are not being served right now. And the whole idea is to close that school readiness gap when the-- when our children of immigrant families enter into school. So that's the key, not only serving families of immigrants but outreaching to students who are not currently in our building now.

And just to note that the intention here is to do a proof of concept pilot with just Stockton School for Adults and then take that model and spread it out to our other consortium members.

Yes. Thank you.

So it's a consortium project.

That's correct. So right now, looking at the six elements that Paul had explained to you earlier, this is part of the three-year plan, immigrant integration, that we are investing as a consortium on this collaboration. The system change framework, we are using ALLIES and MPI, Migration Policy Institute. And to leverage our regional resources as a pilot with Stockton Unified School District, again, working with the Family Education Engagement office, Early Childhood Education, and the English Language Development office.

There is ongoing internal partnership with Stockton Unified School District. I have to say, even in flexibility, we were very fortunate in Stockton that our school board and superintendent always supported adult education. We did not feel some of the cuts that maybe other agencies felt. And we were able to always be a part of the K-12 system.

And they always included us in activities, all the way from professional development to working with ed services, health services, free flu shots, things like that. So that partnership has always been there. And that has been very positive. So we thought this was a good place to start this pilot. And one of the other advantages is Principal Dundas, like I had shared before, was the program manager in the Early Childhood Education Department. So thank you.

Good. And now, Heather will describe maybe something more of a traditional model. And just to back up real quick, the exciting thing and Migration Policy Institute pointed this out to us that this two generation model is a very valuable way of bringing the strengths of adult ed into the K-12 mission space in creating a link that is really a two generation to build the efficacy of the adult, so that they can then build the success of the child is a interesting way also of expanding our scale, as Carol said.

And because I don't have anything specific to report, Principal Dundas is just starting this dialogue. They met last week. And so they will be brainstorming and creating their own pilot on how they're going to do this with hopefully some outcomes we'll be able to report at the end of probably next year. So that's our goal.

Exactly. And then, turning it over to Heather.

All right. Thank you. So one of the things in the pathways that I'm really excited that we've been able to do during this time of COVID happens to be the English Language Learners Pathways to Careers. During time of COVID, I felt like we have really come together even closer with our partners. And specifically, WorkNet has been one of them.

And in specific too, the English Language Pathways to Careers that with the support and partnership of WorkNet, we've been able to connect ELs, English language students, to transportation, supportive services, child care. Students are able to then co-enroll into both programs, Title I and Title II programs, as well as just continuing working, continuing that stronger partnership with the Workforce Development Board and the adult schools.

And through this project, through this pathway that we have created, and we have a designated EL navigator that has been working with our transitions team, as well as myself, in connecting our students to becoming clients for the workforce to be co-enrolled. And so he's been attending multiple different meetings with us and making sure he's attending different workshops and getting out there to start supporting our students, to let them know that this is an opportunity for our students to come and receive services while working-- while working towards their degree.

And so with this handout, you'll see just an example. Sorry, Paul. Just go back. This handout is just one example of a product that has been produced that we use to actually send out electronically to our students to let them know, get the word out. All of our transition specialists have been promoting our EL Pathways to Careers opportunity for our students. So this is, I believe, is in your option for a swag bag, if you guys wanted to take a look at that even closer.

The next slide is actually one of our greatest works that I believe so far in partnership with WorkNet and our consortium is our English Language Learner Pathways Career referral process. We were able to really break down step by step guide, specific steps, to co-enrollment for students that are at the Adult School and can receive services through WorkNet. It really has been able to clarify the role of the Adult School, our transition specialists, what their role is, as well as the EL navigator.

One thing that's-- again, I know you cannot see that at the level where I can see, but it really is step by step process, something that I believe many have struggled in getting our students over to WorkNet. There's a lot of barriers that are there that we're helping, through the help of my transition specialists, as well as our EL navigators to help remove. And so this is just one example, one product, that shows the initial assessment process as well as the enrollment process.

And so again, based on the six elements that Paul had just mentioned, we identified in our three-year plan the immigrant integration's and pathway goals as well as our consortium is really invested in collaborating just like Paul had mentioned. Carol and Dr. Hart were something that just really have helped guide and strengthen our relationship within our community. So again, very thankful for their work.

And so another one is identifying and utilizing. We've been utilizing the immigrant integration framework, career pathways model. Again, we've been leveraging our regional resources, our community partners that we have on board, San Joaquin County WorkNet, as well as we are-- been a part of for the last year, year and a half, the San Joaquin Immigrant Integration Collaborative. And so within that group, we have followers and families, Catholic charities, El Concilio. Many different representatives of our immigrant population are at the table supporting each other to help just build bridges for our students.

Again, our-- we're actively involved in working and doing ongoing outreach to WorkNet. WorkNet has-- there's other projects that we don't need to mention here that we're really-- I'm really excited about. So there's the HOPE Program that our Adult School is working with in connecting our homeless youth to services, as well as working with ex-offenders through project Phoenix. But that's another presentation for it. But again, showing you that we have an ongoing great collaboration and partnership with WorkNet.

And again, going back to the strong foundation that has really helped promote immigrant integration in our consortium but is with the assistance and help of not only Paul Downs and-- but also our Adult School Principal Carol and Dr. Hart, because she had a great partnership and relationship with our Workforce Development Board.

Great. Thank you, Heather. So we want to pause. We're going to pivot into Paul Rosenbloom's talk about sector partnerships. But wanted to just pause and see if there's any questions for Carol and Heather about immigrant integration of these two projects. So you can just type anything into the chat, because that's how we do it, or the Q&A. Actually, Q&A would be the way to go. And again, we're rocking it so hard that no one has a single question. OK.

Everyone's in awe.

[chuckling]

All right. So then, but of course, at any point, feel free. There's a chat. Let's see. Great info.

Thank you, Branka.

Yeah. It's like, is this thing on? Tap, tap.

[laughter]

OK. So onto sector partnerships, and Mr Paul Rosenbloom?

All right. Thanks. So we'll just take a look at the graphic we have here to remind ourselves what the sector partnership sector strategy idea is. And it's like escape from Cape Island and join all these other islands together But we're really trying to, as Paul said, do a regional-- regionally specific and industry specific problem solving approach, where you're bringing the supply side, educators, together with the demand side, employers, to come up with strategies to help get people into in demand jobs and make sure that those people have the skills they need to succeed.

Another point to highlight in this graphic is the convener role. So that's one piece that's bold there down on the bottom right, about 4 o'clock. These sector partnerships and strategies need to have a convener, someone or some group that brings everyone together, brings those islands together into that nice ring. And we've been fortunate as the Delta Sierra Adult Education Alliance, the adult ed consortium in San Joaquin County, to play that role and be a convener.

And so happy to tell you a little bit more about what we've been doing here. We've got a couple of sector partnerships going, one related to health and one related to transportation, distribution, and logistics. So we'll go in and talk to you about those now.

So next slide, Paul. Great. OK. So we had our theoretical graphic. We're just looking at the islands. And now here is how we are applying that locally in San Joaquin County. Our health sector partnership is about three years old. And like I said, it's been-- our adult education consortium has really been driving it. And now, it's grown from an idea into a standalone organization. It has an executive director. And there's a number of successful projects.

As you can see, we really-- like I said, supply side, demand side. So our boxes are bigger here in education. That's all of our-- that's our community college, all of our adult education sites, and other colleges, and then the employer side as well. That box is pretty big. We do have a bigger set of players that we are working on bringing in, but definitely strong at this point with education and employers. But you can see there's workforce development-- you've heard of WorkNet; that's our local workforce board there, well represented-- and then other entities as well.

The key to getting this thing started was getting buy in from local hospital CEO. So we've brought in Kaiser, Sutter, Dignity Health, St. Joseph's. We identified the need for this health sector strategy and then did a lot of work to go and talk to folks and let them understand what the idea was and what the need was.

And we knew we had things right when we had done a lot of meetings with those high level folks at hospitals. And we brought them-- we'd talk with them all individually. And then, we brought them all together for a big meeting to really sell the idea and try and get some funding, so we could make it not just a nice idea but something that could get institutionalized and started. And we got through the presentation.

And everyone looked at us, and they said, hey, that's great. We really like that. That's a great idea, but we have a problem. And the problem is that you guys are-- you're not thinking big enough. And we had come in and asked for one year of funding. And they said, no, actually, this is a really great idea. We want to fund you for three years. So we got going. And that's how this health sector partnership got started. And it was nice to have that affirmation from employers to think big and think long. So that's what we're doing. It's become a thing now.

You can go to the next slide. I can give you a little review of some of the projects that the partnership has been working on. So like I said, we have an Executive Director, and her name is Christina Bastida. She's from Stockton. And she's active in the community. And so that's a really important piece. As these things get going, you have someone that's active out there. And we've got some great successful educational programs that have been going.

But we also have a presence in the community. So Christina is receiving inbound ideas and requests. And then, she's also participating in efforts to help raise the profile of the organization and making-- and continue making those connections. She's actively participating in something right now called the South-- Reinventing South Stockton Initiative, which is a community based effort to look at improving economic and employment conditions for people in South Stockton, which is a high need community in our consortium.

Pieces that we've been able to develop in terms of programming and educational offerings, we're doing it across the consortium and all of our educational institutions and really focusing on providing training for upskilling existing workers that are at one level. But with this pathway and the training opportunities, they can continue to expand their earnings and make progression.

So we have an RN pathway for incumbent workers. And these are offerings that are happening across educational organizations. In the consortium area, we have programs and adult schools, also programs at K-12 with Stockton Health Career Academies, and then also at Delta College.

So again, through that pairing the supply and demand, we've got input from employers about what kind of-- what kind of people they need to fill roles. And we heard through partnerships with-- with input coming in from skilled nursing facilities about CNA. So we've expanded some capacity there at Delta College in Lodi and Stockton.

And then, medical assisting, there's a community medical clinics that are-- they are participating and represented in the partnership. They've identified a need for upskilling existing workers. So we put in place a medical assisting program at Lodi Adult School that's been really successful. So it's exciting. This thing gets started and then takes on a life of its own. We can take a look at the next slide. I can--

Before you move on, I just want to make sure that our adult education colleagues understand that when this first started, it was not health force partners. So when health force partners was created, it is now its own community based organization. But it was funded by our consortium initially.

And then, all of those big CEOs from all of the health field, they are now supporting this CBO. So I think this was just like a thought, an idea. And it became something really huge. And we're just really excited. So I just wanted to expand on that that we are no longer funding this. But this is now a different way that our allied health colleagues are supporting career pathways in Stockton.

And just to add to Carol's observation, it was actually-- it was-- came out of our conversation. So we were the-- and I guess one of the cool things about CAEP is that we're-- we can be-- these consortia can be a truly collaborative table for cross agency dialogue, and for brainstorming, and being creative, because our funding has a fair amount of flexibility.

And we actually a joint funded this project. And the seed funding was half CAEP and half community college strong workforce. So because in a lot of ways this work straddles both adult debt into community college. So it was fitting that it be both types of funding stream.

And also, just to note, as Paul said, it takes on a life of its own. If this goes well, we now have-- we created 25 new nursing positions in our region that's not subject to the community college lottery system. You probably know that you can't go to your local community college and be guaranteed a spot. That's a state wide lottery.

And so it's hard to invest locally in folks. But now, through this structure, we actually created a whole new-- 50 people of both the incumbents and the K-12 system of new RNs in-- for our region. And that's what you get when you get that employer leadership. And I think Paul is going to cover some of that territory right now.

Yeah. There's some impressive numbers in the programs. And if we connect it back to the pathway elements, there's some seeds of success that we can see here. So major goal or issue, health is a priority sector in the region. It's showed up in all of our planning documents. So we knew when we started that we wanted to do something related to health, investing in the collaborative processes and tools.

Collaboration's like a muscle. You really got to use it and keep using it. And collaboration builds collaboration. It's not to say it's easy. And definitely, I'm sure many folks here experience a lot of stop and start, some confusion along the way. And in the early days, we were trying to build out an allied health pathway. And it was unclear where we were going.

But again, we invested in that collaboration. So we were able to take advantage of an opportunity as it came up. I think that collaboration bears fruit not necessarily when you're expecting it. But when it does happen, you've got to be in a position to make the most of it.

So a little bit of story on that. We were in a health course curriculum planning meeting with Adult School teachers, with folks from Delta College. And the dean of CTE and Workforce Development at Delta College, Salvador Vargas, heard what we were talking about in our vision. And he said, this is really-- this is really important. This is exciting. You need to talk to the Community Health Leadership Council. So that's where we see items number four and number six on this list, leveraging regional resources and also leveraging consortium connections.

The Delta College President Kathy Hart, our co-Chair, was on the Health Leadership Council. So she was able to represent us and get us a seat at that table to start talking about health sector partnership and what it could be. And the sector partnership was a good model to build with. I think that's the point here is invest in that collaboration. And when you get your opportunities, make the most of them.

Great. Thanks, Paul. And just to-- yeah, to as Paul just did, to strongly acknowledge the work of the Community Health Leadership Council, which brought together many of the hospital CEOs as well as county health and county government. And leader Wallack was the facilitator of that for many years. So we really benefited from all that work. This would not have happened, frankly, if that level of-- if that table hadn't existed.

And as Paul said, by doing strategic planning and scanning we learned of that and luckily had Kathy Hart, the president, as part of our member universe, if you will. And she was able to get us to that table. And then basically, that-- now that council has-- is evolving and merging somewhat with this health sector partnership. So it's making real institutional change out there.

So the next is our transportation, distribution, and logistics/ and we're trying to-- we're working to have the longest acronym possible in all sectors everywhere. So Paul, you want to lead us into this?

Yeah. Yeah. I think we've done a pretty good job here, so, with that acronym. What we're trying to do with this pathway is develop career ladders for upward and lateral career mobility in-- here it is-- transportation, distribution, logistics, and advanced manufacturing. Again, the idea is to have a pathway for our students to get into career opportunities.

So it's not-- Right here, we're emphasizing career ladders and lattices. So we want to make sure that we develop a qualified workforce for our local employers. We also want to make sure that our people, our students, get into living wage jobs and career opportunities.

So this pathway did start out as purely TDL-- transportation, distribution, and logistics. And we've recently expanded it to include advanced manufacturing. Definitely in the warehousing industry, there's a little concern about what the career opportunities are and also concerns about automation. So as we're developing this pathway, we want to make sure that we're building opportunities for our students to get yes, to get a-- to get a job, to start working, but also to get into-- to find-- get a-- be made aware of career opportunities and find ways to get into something and then continue on.

So I think that's a point that we're-- we really want to emphasize in this piece. And it's important to us. And why would we be doing work in this sector? There was a report that came out a couple of years ago called The Dynamics of Good Move-- Goods Movements in San Joaquin County. It was put together by the Center for Business and Policy Research at the University of the Pacific, which is a liberal arts, a important college institution-- four year institution in Stockton, but also has a research outfit that we've gotten connected with. They do economic research.

Their report indicated that in this area, in arts, in our metropolitan statistical area, Stockton, Lodi, that transportation warehousing is the second-- that it's the second highest concentration of this transportation and warehousing employment in the country. Over 10% of the employment activity is in transportation and warehousing in our area. So it's important to have a pathway opportunity to connect students to these jobs, because they're out there.

This is interesting to note. Why is this happening here? Well, you know that in the last-- and this just happened in the last two years-- this explosion in e-commerce. And that's really happening in our region. We showed you a map earlier, but it's important to highlight where we are in the state-- Stockton, San Joaquin County, very centrally located.

So there's a lot of elements that make this a great place for logistics and warehousing employment. So it's really strong here. The area's been actually described as like a logistics heaven. You have the port of Stockton. And you have the inland port, so it's served by waterways, highly connected to rail, and the freeway system.

Also, strongly connected to the Bay Area and the base of consumers in the Bay Area. Stockton, San Joaquin sits right over the Altamont Pass. So it's close, but you have cheaper land. So that's a big reason why that industry is growing out there. And then, this rapid growth in e-commerce industry.

And a piece that the researchers at the University of Pacific highlighted was that the population characteristics in San Joaquin, you actually are, in terms of workers, are actually favorable for this industry, in terms of being younger and lower skilled. So for employers, there's folks out here that can fill these jobs.

If we take a look at the next slide. That's a little bit about why we got into it. And we've been at this a little bit less time than the health sector partnership, just over a year. We looked at designing a couple of pilots with our adult schools. Those were successful in the fall of 2019 training programs that got students a couple of certificates, industry recognized certificates, and got some participants into jobs. Also, we've got connections with employers through job fairs. And we definitely-- we had a COVID pause in terms of our course offerings. But we're looking to ramp that back up.

In terms of employer outreach, this is really strong in this area. We've got a lot of connection with-- and with our sector partnership, with economic development specialists from the cities-- from all the cities in the county. And then, we're also looking now at doing a labor market analysis with WestEd to understand employer needs and understand skill needs.

A big piece of this project is our connection with Prologis. And I'll go into that a little bit in the next slide, where we talk about some of the elements. But out there in Tracy, Prologis, which is a global real estate-- global logistics real estate firm, they have just completed something that's called the International Park of Commerce. And get this. It's an 1,800 acre facility that when it's completed, it's going to have a million square feet of warehouse space.

So Prologis is not a direct employer. Like I said, they're a major real estate-- logistics real estate firm. But they house employers that are in our area. So they have employers including Amazon, Smucker's, BMW, DHL, Kraft, Clorox. They have connection to many employers. And they have something that's called the Community Workforce Initiative. And what they're trying to do is partner with local communities. They want to train 25,000 workers by 2025. So they have many-- they have direct connection to many employers. They want to work to make sure that there's a skilled workforce to fill the jobs that these employers have.

The Community Workforce Initiative is an exciting project. Our consortium in our area, we're one of five sites that are working on to be a part of it. And there's a few different things that are happening in working in coordination with Prologis and other employers. One piece that we're working on right now, which is nice given where we're at with remote instruction, is developing a virtual learning-- online learning platform that Prologis is going to help deploy, and we're going to help deploy to get out into the region.

And what's exciting about that is that that training opportunity, it might take people straight to employment. But by virtue of being at the table, we'll be able to advertise and talk about our programs. So students might be able to go right into employment, but they'll also be learning about educational opportunities. So that's something that's-- we're-- we're working out right now.