Carol S Hirota: Good morning. Welcome to Community Asset Mapping. This morning, we have a panel of adult educators who will be joining us and sharing their experiences. I want to welcome Ilse Pollet from the South Bay Consortium for Adult Education. Sherri Watkins from State Center Adult education Consortium, and Kathleen Porter from Education to Career Network in North San Diego County.

We are going to do a poll which will just ask you about a quick overview of community asset mapping, and then we will go on to having our panelists share their consortium experiences with community asset mapping. So can we go ahead and put that poll up, please? So there is a yes/no response. Do you know what community asset mapping is? Yes or no. Thank you for responding.

So we can end the poll in a few minutes. So it looks like 71% of our participants know what a community asset mapping is all about. And about 29% 30% do not know. So I'm going to stop sharing this. And we're going to move on to the next slide. So-- whoops. So based on some information from the American Institute for research who did a presentation at the last three year plan-- oh my gosh. It keeps-- they identified the purpose of community asset mapping as providing information that will identify your strengths and resources of a community.

It also tells you that you will create a list of your assets and resources to help you with your goal planning, and create that asset directory. You'll identify your resources that can help with future initiatives. Also to help you with program development. Help uncover solutions once community strengths and resources are identified. And determining what can we do with what we already have to get what we need.

So the other really important information that our colleagues will be sharing is how they gathered their data on their community assets. You can use, and many of you did use this in your previous three year plans, where your data sets, your secondary analysis of education, labor market, crime, census, and housing. And which schools or agencies and members were providing services in which program areas. There's also the neighborhood walkthroughs. What is really in your environment, in your community. Some agencies had interviews, created focus groups, held community forums, and they used a variety of surveys with different stakeholders.

So if you look at the previous three year plans, in 2019 if you go to 2.2 and 2.3 under pre-planning assessments and community needs and customers, you will find information about how a community mapping was done. The asset mapping was done with that consortium. In 2022, if you use this process, you will identify it in section 2 under assessments and section 3 metrics.

So if you go to the CAEP website, there are all the information on three-year plans posted and resources on community asset mapping, as well as previous information from the 2019 three-year plan an updated one for 2022. So I highly recommend that you use those resources. So I'm going to turn this over and let Ilse Pollet share with you about her experience with the South Bay Consortium for Adult Education. Thank you, Ilse.

Ilse Pollet: Thank you, Carol. And good morning, everyone. Greetings from San Jose, California. It's a beautiful day out here. So Happy Friday to everyone. Let me just bring up my screen share. So before we-- before I give you some example of what asset mapping can look like in the South Bay Consortium. And I'm going to share some tools and resources with you.

I wanted to-- let's take a step back and talk about why this is-- why this is important to us. And we really believe that students are better served when a consortium understands its place in that larger ecosystem of education, workforce development and social services. And we really think of adult education in our consortium as but one piece in the puzzle of all the service providers out there in our region.

And that speaks to the system level. But that also really goes down to the individual student level. Because we really want to think about our students as the whole person, taking a whole person into consideration. And they're coming to us for one piece of their personal and professional development, which is the education and training piece. But there are other pieces that need development and that they will go to others for. And so we often serve the same people in different organizations. So we really want to place that student at the center, and then think about it holistically, both at the individual, and at the systems level.

So internally, to our consortium, asset mapping helps us with strategic program development so that we can know what is out there, what we have, how we can connect the dots, and how we can align our programs and add pieces to the map that makes sense. And that are-- that are augmenting what we already have rather than just adding dots to the maps and/or duplicating things that we already have in place.

At the external level, strategic partnerships really help us provide services to our students that we are unable to provide in-house, in our schools, or in our colleges. So that just expands our reach, expands our capacity to serve the student in that holistic manner that I was talking about.

And when we think of asset mapping in our consortium it really takes place at three different levels. One is internally. The internal capacity of our consortium. We are a consortium of five adult schools and four community colleges. The only one that has two community college districts in their membership. So things get complex pretty easily, and there are many programs and services offered.

So it's really important for us to know who is doing what within our consortium and how we can coordinate and align our programs so that they are complementary and not duplicative. And things change. New programs are added, other programs are removed or changed. So it is a work in progress to keep track of all the programs and services that are offered within our schools and colleges.

And the second level of asset mapping is that education-- is the mapping of other education and workforce service providers. Who else in our community is out there offering similar services? Who else is providing ESL classes? Who else is providing workforce training? And how can we partner with those organizations and be less siloed in our operations? We often think of ourselves as a coalition within a coalition. We are the coalition of education and training providers. But there are other partnerships out there, other service providers that we can reach out to and work in alignment with.

And then finally, asset mapping at the level of support services. If you were participating in the webinar earlier this morning, we talked a lot about barriers in that webinar, and all those things that need to be in place before a student can even be successful in our program. So really thinking about those wraparound services that are critical to student persistence, and student success. And how can we-- with our own limited resources, how can we partner with others in the community who can help our students with those needs? So that's our third level of asset mapping.

So I'm going to give you a bit of a reader's digest and examples of all three levels of asset mapping in our consortium. Feel free to reach out in the chat or reach out to me afterwards if you have any questions because this is going to be a quick 10-minute overview. But I hope to share some resources and examples with you.

When you look at that internal capacity, there are two things that we've worked on over the years. One is our CTE matrix. And the other one is an ESL level alignment chart. And our CTE matrix is-- basically what it is, is a big spreadsheet that shows CTE offerings in different CTE pathways in different sectors. And then where programs are offered in each of our colleges and adult schools. And this really allows us to see what we already have in place, and to see where the possible connections are between the Adult School CTE programs and the community colleges.

We can also see if there's duplication. If that makes sense or not, sometimes duplication is not a bad thing when you look at it geographically. Using this matrix has really helped our consortium develop bridge programs, IET programs, onramps to those more advanced pathways in the colleges. So this was developed early on in our planning process and has been maintained by our CTE faculty work group.

And we are working-- this year we've been putting in a lot of work to make this database a little smarter and add more detail to it make it more easily searchable and add some new parameters to that spreadsheet. So this is just a glimpse of what the total spreadsheet looks like. Of course, this is used internally by our steering committee and our administrators. It's also used by our transition specialists who help students make decisions on their pathways. But it isn't very user friendly from a student perspective.

So what we've done is we use this database as the foundation for a student facing tool, which is our open doors CTE Portal. And that's a website that is open to the community, student facing, where students can go and click on any career pathway that is of interest to them, answer a few short questions as to whether or not they have a high school diploma.

How much time they want to dedicate to their education and training. And then it will take them to some options across our member adult schools and colleges. And then it will direct them back to the websites of our schools and colleges framework program information. But this is a way to take that static spreadsheet and make it more interactive and dynamic for users-- for students and prospective students who are looking for their options.

And then the other piece of our internal capacity is our ESL alignment chart. And again, apologies for the small font on this. But this is an overview of our ESL levels across our member adult schools and community colleges. So this really helps us identify what we have in place, and identify key transition points that make sense in that ESL student journey. And what we are trying to avoid as lateral transitions from one system to the other where it doesn't really advance the student's goals or puts that student on a track to four credit ESL or supports that transition from ESL to CTE. So this has been a really helpful tool for us to understand our ESL level offerings.

You'll see at the top there that we're using the below transfer levels as the headers. We have some work to do to adjust that to the new CB21 codes in the colleges and make sure that we use different terminology that works for both systems. So this has just been another tool in our consortium to talk about program alignments and program development.

This year we're working on iterations of those tools. So making that CTE matrix a bit smarter, set up a process for updating and maintenance of the CTE matrix. And for the ESL component, we want to add a tool or a section that talks about intake and assessment since a lot of that has changed, especially in the colleges with the expansion of non-credit and the implementation of AB 705. So we really feel like it's important that we also understand ESL assessment and ESL placement in our different systems.

So we've been using this for program alignment, program development. And it's been used as a tool by our transition specialists. For this year's planning process, we plan to use both documents as a common ground to start our strategic conversations. So we don't have to guess or speculate about what is offered where and didn't so-and-so have a welding program. Now, we can go and look and check that with the data that we have.

We also want to pull some data for our pathways and look at student journeys from a data perspective across our pathways. Preliminary plans for-- to include in our preliminary strategies to include in the next three year plan is to improve these tools, establish a process for maintaining and updating them. And then disseminating them and increasing use so that everybody knows that they exist. Everybody has easy access to those tools in our consortium.

So that's for the internal capacity asset mapping, which has been very helpful and a work in progress as always. When we're looking at education and workforce provider mapping, we started with an ESL provider map that was developed by ALLIES in our region that mapped out all the ESL providers in the County, not just at the adult schools and that were in the colleges. But also ESL programs offered by community-based organizations, libraries, churches.

So that was a really helpful tool in our planning process to identify who else is out there offering ESL. And then we complemented that map with our workforce boards, partners that our schools were already partnering with. And then the partner list from the original AB86 planning process that involved a lot of stakeholder engagement.

In the previous planning period, the 2019, 2022, we interviewed each of those providers. So we started with individual interviews. From there distilled some themes that were consistent across the individual interviews. And then brought the individuals back together for a focus group to bring those themes back to that group and get some deeper input and reflection from that group. That led to findings that we incorporated into the plan and then actual strategies into the plan as well.

That was a very helpful process, especially for relationship building with our partners. Taking the time to sit down, have a conversation, listen, get to know their programs and services was really helpful. It was time intensive, but we feel like it was worth it just to establish those relationships.

Challenges with that have been sustaining the engagement with our partners. Once we get into plan implementation, there's always the risk of engaging your partner in a planning process and then not interacting as much with them during the three years. And then three years later, it's time for another planning process, and then you knock on their door again. So that has been a challenge to just be consistently engaged with our partners.

And then of course, there's program changes and staffing changes at those agencies and in our agencies as well. So keeping that relationship going, that can look very differently when somebody new comes into a position. And then that personal connection-- you're going to have to start over again with building that connection.

So for this year's planning process, we will again engage our key stakeholders. Our workforce boards, libraries, community-based organization, training providers. Probably not doing the individual interviews this year, but rather doing focus groups, or small group conversations, or putting out surveys to our community partners. We want to develop and include specific engagement strategies in the next three year plan for our partners just to remedy what I mentioned earlier about the challenge of sustainable engagement with our partners.

And then importantly, seeking alignment with our partners strategic plans as well. Because if it doesn't work with what they're planning to do then that becomes a challenge, and then that becomes a bandwidth and capacity issue within our partner organization. So the more we can understand the strategic plans of our partners, the more we can align and have common strategies across our different regional plans and strategic plans. And then finally our support services. And this could be a webinar in and of itself. So we'll post some links in the chat that can give you some more detail about what I'm about to share.

So going back to looking at our students in a holistic manner, and supporting the whole person, we use the Immigrant Integration Framework to map out service providers in each of the framework goal areas. And goal areas are things like legal service, about family support services, health services, employment and training services, civic engagement opportunities. So we wanted to look at each of those categories and map out service providers in our region who could address those needs.

From that map we did a needs assessment of our students to understand what the most urgent and most pressing barriers were for our students, because you have to start somewhere, and it starts with understanding what the needs are of your students. And then once we had a good understanding of the most pressing needs, we went out and selected partners from that larger map of service providers that could help meet those needs and help address those barriers for our students.

That led to us developing a referral network with our community partners that included targeted referral campaigns. So a referral network is a group of about 8 to 10 partner organizations that meet monthly to share information about programs and services, and then-- that are referring students and clients back and forth between partner agencies, and schools, and colleges.

The referral campaigns have been really successful because then we can just pull out one barrier, one need, and work with one partner who can address that need. So we've done an example of a referral campaign was one we did around health insurance, because many of our students were lacking health insurance, and weren't aware of their options. There are options in our County for undocumented persons. So we were able to partner with a community health provider who could help students enroll in health insurance plans. So that was really successful because we just pulled out one issue and went deep into engagement with our students and our partners.

Of course, once the pandemic hit, all of us were overwhelmed. And the schools were overwhelmed, the colleges, but our community partners as well, especially the ones who provided social services. So we were able to maintain the effort with our community connections referral pilot and were in touch with each other on a monthly basis.

It became a wonderful support network for practitioners who were all dealing with their own challenges and providing services during the pandemic. And it allowed us to quickly pivot and identify the needed resources for our students such as hot spots, laptop loans, technology, devices. We were able to partner with our public library who had hot tub-- hot spot, excuse me, and laptop loans available for our students. So because we already had that good relationship going with our library, that was an easy transition, and something that was easy to implement for our adult learners.

In the planning process coming up this year, we are going to engage that group of partners in our planning process through conversations with them and targeted questions when we meet with them at our monthly meetings. And then one thing that we want to do again, is that needs assessment and partner with our community agencies to develop a client survey. Or do a human centered design process to really understand how the needs have changed, what the impact has been of COVID on the community that we serve, because we cannot assume that things look the same as they did two or three years ago when we did this first.

So maybe that way we're going to learn some new high priority barriers, some new high priority needs that we can address through our targeted partnerships with our community partners. So this is an example of that service provider map. It's basically just a Google map where you put markers for service providers, and then it's color coded by goal areas of the framework. So one color would be education providers, legal service providers, health care providers, et cetera. So no shortage of service providers in our area as you can see.

And we also partnered with our County of Santa Clara who maintains a database of service providers and ESL providers on their immigrant info website. So that was a helpful partnership, again, allowing us to not having to reinvent the wheel, but working with partners who are already maintaining that database of service providers.

So I'm going to end with some findings, some lessons learned, some things we learned along the way. I would highly encourage you to not reinvent the wheel and think about where databases of service providers may already be out there. So there's a 211 helpline that has a lot of agencies listed. Check with your County office of Health and Human Services. They may maintain resource guides as well. CalWorks has a directory and inventory of service providers. And there may be a council of nonprofits or other organization coalition of nonprofit organizations in your area. That usually is a good place to start and ask about service providers that serve your populations.

As you can see on the map that I showed you in the previous slide, there's not-- at least in our area, there's not necessarily a lack of services. But there is a lack of coordination between those service providers and the lack of navigation services for students, and community members to navigate their way through those services.

So when I hear people talking about the under served populations, I don't necessarily like that term, because at least, in our m it doesn't seem like there's under service. But maybe we can rephrase as students being under supported in navigating that service and persisting in the services that exist. So that's something to think about as we go into this next planning period.

A lot of people want to collaborate and partner. People care about the clients that they serve. People care about the students that they serve. So there's a lot of goodwill to come together and work collaboratively to serve clients and people that we all have in common. But we found that to be sustainable, those collaborations have to be supported at the systems level.

And that can be simple things like writing, participation in a referral network into somebody's job description so that it's not at the goodwill of somebody who was going above and beyond to participate in those networks, but make it sustainable and having that as part of somebody's job. And then, of course, there's a lot of policy levels-- policy levers that we can pull to make that to encourage those collaborations as well.

It's important to take the time to define, identify, and approach good partners, and think about what it means-- what a good partner looks like. What does that mean for a partner organization to be a good partner. Just because an organization offers a service, or because you know someone at that organization, it doesn't make them the ideal partner for your consortium.

Some things to consider are service area, or eligibility criteria. Does that organization have the capacity to support the 50 or the 100 learners that you're going to refer to them for services. Do they have the staff capacity to deal that. Do they have capacity to track some data on the number of referrals that come in. So there is a checklist of good partnership definitions that we'll share with you in the chat as well. There's a toolkit that we've developed around our community connections referral network that has some tools that can be helpful in identifying those partners.

Of course, data matters, starting with that needs assessment, understanding the needs and the barriers of your community. Being able to understand, to track what happens when we send out a referral to know that that referral has been received. That a service has been received. That requires data infrastructure that we're still-- that we're working on developing. We've made progress, but that continues to be a challenge on tracking that data and being able to report on that.

Relationships matter. Again, taking the time to attend meetings to sit down with your partners and understand their services, understand their funding structure, understand their eligibility criteria. Relationships are the currency of collaboration. So that has been very important for us to be a good partner ourselves as well.

And then finally, especially in an area like Silicon Valley where there are so many-- so many agencies, so many service providers, one thing that we're going to try to do in our next two-year plan is to be very targeted. And have a targeted focus on the highest need services in the highest need areas. So one map that has been very helpful for us is called the Healthy Places Index. And I'll post a link in a chart for that as well. But that allows you to dig-- to really drill down by zip code to identify what the highest needs regions are in your area or the highest need neighborhoods are in your area.

When you look at Silicon Valley or think about Silicon Valley, where we are, it may look like a high income, a very wealthy region. But within that region there are pockets of poverty. There are pockets of neighborhoods that look very differently from the rest of Silicon Valley. So that map has been really helpful. And as we were just starting our planning process to look at those regions, those neighborhoods, and those areas that we can be more intentional about serving and more intentional about finding partners that can help us serve those communities.

So with that, I'm going to ask Carol if she wants to facilitate a Q&A now or if we are moving on to one of my colleagues?

Carol S Hirota: Before we move on, if there is anyone with a question that they might want to unmute and ask Ilse if they have anything, or you can place it in the chat, and we will also fall back on that. We wanted to do a Q&A after each one of our presenters that are sharing their experience. So if anyone wants to unmute I'll give you 10 seconds. And otherwise, we will move on to Sherri. Thank you, Diana. Absolutely great resources. Thank you.

I've given people some time to unmute or raise their hand, and I don't see that. So let's go ahead. Thank you, Neil. Absolutely. What is really going on at the regional consortia is really amazing. So we wanted this to come alive for our colleagues who are on this session today. So let's go ahead and move on to our next person who will share her experience from State Center Adult Education Consortium, Sherri Watkins. Go ahead, Sherri.

Sherri Watkins: Good morning, everyone. The first slide here just tell us a little bit about who we are here in State Center. Obviously, we're right in the middle of the state-- of the state. We have now 15 adult schools, four official community colleges, a community college center, two regional occupational programs, and then a new young adult and corrections program, probably some of you are dealing with that as well, now that the California Youth authorities have closed. All those inmates are coming back to our area. So we're kind of working to see how that's going to work out.

Our websites, if you have an opportunity to visit. The first one here is just the basic website, we probably all created in the beginning. Just has all of our reports and everything, and tell us a little bit more about our consortium. And we have a new created-- newly created website for student and teacher website. So we have a team of transition specialists and students are able to go on there and make an appointment to see a transition specialist and get all the community resources, college resources, and support services access all on that website.

This is just something we created for marketing because when people say who's your adult schools? And I would have to try to do an alphabetical list of who all of our adult schools were. So we created this to make it a lot easier. And we also have our transition specialist information. So if a student does happen to take a look at this, they can actually call, or again, make an appointment with the transition specialist. This one is a little bit old. We have-- now we have Madera Community College as its own college. And we have added another adult school. So we definitely need to update this.

So since our consortium is so large and geographically as well, we felt a long time ago that it would be best to put everyone in sub regions based on the community college that's in their area. So as you can see from this list, we have our central region. And all the schools in yellow are listed all the adult schools, and those schools feed into Fresno City College, same with Clovis Community College and Clovis Adult School.

And then we have our South Valley sub region and that includes Valley ROP, which is pretty awesome because all of those adult schools listed in the South Valley subcontract with Valley ROP to do the CTE programs at their sites. So that's a great partnership we've created there. And then we also have the North Valley sub region, and that tends to be the smaller sub region out of all of them, but still doing a lot of good work there. And this is just my third grade version of how our consortium looks. So as you can see our boundaries. One of our schools actually sits in Tulare County, but they feed into Reedley College. So that's why they're in our consortium.

So when we started last three-year planning cycle, we used all the resources that the CAEP office gave us. We used that asset mapping inventory, the inventory worksheets, and trying to figure out from that survey questions. So we put a community partner survey, student survey, staff survey, employer survey. And we depended a lot on our transitions specialist who are placed out in those sub regions to remind people to do those surveys.

We actually did really well to get a lot of results back from that. And part of it was because of our relationship with the workforce. We were having a difficult time getting the community partners to participate. So we sent our survey and the workforce send it out for us, which helped a lot and that's how we were able to get a lot of results. But our transition specialists are amazing out there. They are the liaisons for connecting all the pieces, the adult schools, the CBOs the workforce in each of those areas.

And the reason we have transitions team is because a lot of our adult schools are small, and they do not have the resources to hire a full-time counselor. So they never had the-- they don't have the opportunity or never had the opportunity before consortia were created to help their students with the next steps. So that's really been an integral part.

And this is our list. And you can see-- again, if you want to see this in details, you can go to our main website and take a look at our three year-- our last three year plan because we have all those listed in here. So we have our North sub region. And these are all of our community partners that our adult schools currently work with. And South Valley and Clovis. And then, of course, our central sub region is downtown Fresno, basically. And these are all the partners. So it's definitely a huge region.

That is all I have. Do we have any questions? I think the next time around, I will definitely include a heat map. I do like the idea of having a regional, maybe a monthly regional CBO meeting because of our ability to do it virtually. I think that will help a lot this time. So I think that's my plan for this next cycle.

Carol S Hirota: Sherri, so you're broken out into regions. Do they meet as regions, and then sometimes as a large state center consortium? Or how does that-- how does that look when they're working on their different resources and community partners?

Sherri Watkins: Good question. We do meet-- they do meet usually monthly or every other month by sub region, and that's really where the work gets done. And that's where all those connections happen. Sometimes it's more difficult to get them all together. So we've really been working on that, and being virtual. And then even our board meetings. We have such a better turnout because people are able to just to jump on wherever they are. They don't have to drive anywhere as we all know. So that seems to work.

Again, the transition specialists meet usually once-- for sure, once or twice a year with the CBOs, the larger CBOs just to keep the connection with them. And again, it's all about those relationships that we started building in the very beginning with AB86 planning. If we didn't have those, I mean, you don't have that relationship, you don't have-- you're not comfortable to call somebody, or to text them, or-- but that relationship just really helps all the way around.

Carol S Hirota: Thank you. And you list them out as education partners as well as community partners. So that's how they meet, is together, right? Here's one from Neil. Given all the services and resources, how are you moving forward with goal setting and targets? It seems like with so many members and partners, the task is enormous.

[laughs]

Sherri Watkins: Yes. Some people have said that it's like herding cats with all the members that we have. But we plan to do the sub region work and then try to bring it back together and tie it in. Just like we do our annual plans, we do an annual plan meeting with them, may or June, and then we meet with them again, mid-year, to find out where they are. So we'll probably take a similar approach to this-- trying to get all those partners together. But sub region is the only way that it can get done.

Carol S Hirota: Yes. Thank you. Are any of your members in a small rural community?

Sherri Watkins: Yeah, we have. Gosh.

Carol S Hirota: Yeah.

Sherri Watkins: Probably eight, for sure. 8 out of the 15.

Carol S Hirota: Right. Thank you. Thank you. And Ilse also said that monthly partner meetings have been very valuable, Zoom makes those easier. But we miss visiting with each other's agencies and having lunch together. And of course, that's the impact of the pandemic. So yes, thank you. Thank you so much, Sherri. Are there any other questions that our participants would like to ask or place in the chat at this time?

Thank you. Sherri has also placed some student and teacher resources with State Center Adult Education Consortium. So thank you. So let's go ahead and go to our next presenter. It's Kathleen Porter. She's from education to Career Network in North San Diego County. And she's going to share her experiences on how they use community asset mapping. So thank you, Kathleen.

Kathleen Porter: Thank you, Carol. When Carol first asked me to present on this panel, I thought us. Are we good at community asset mapping? So I think what I'd like to do is just start out telling you a little bit about what it is that we do. What some of the structures we have in place that I think have lent themselves to just creating process and systems that make a community asset mapping just part of what we do.

And so first of all, I'll tell you a little bit about us. So as Carol said, where the Education to Career Network, and we're in North San Diego County. And so we consist of two I would say larger adult schools, Escondido and Vista. I would call Poway Adult School where I work, a medium Adult School. And then we have two very small adult schools, Ramona and San Marcos. And then we have Palomar College. And Palomar Community College.

So our region covers about a little over 2,500 square miles in San Diego County. And so we have suburban areas. Not really urban areas, but we definitely have rural areas. And there are a number of school districts that are represented in that region that don't have adult education services. So one of the things we started to look at very early on is how are we bringing adult education services to parts of the region that don't have an Adult School, a local Adult School.

And so those are regions-- if you're familiar with San Diego County, that include Borrego Springs, Fallbrook, Julian, Valley Center, Pauma, and Warner Springs. So I mentioned that I wanted to talk a little bit about the structures in place that just support other things happening. So I look at things that we-- initiatives that we take on. That maybe you're going to put something in a structure, bucket, or maybe you're going to put it-- you're going to focus on instruction, or maybe you're going to focus on the culture. But ultimately, those things start to create synergy.

And so I think when we formed our consortium initially, we really focused on a lot of the structures. And the structures help to influence the culture. And then of course, the culture help to influence the instruction that we offer in the instructional program.

So we do have, and I'm going to talk about some of these things in a little bit more detail. We do have some shared positions across our consortium. We have had a community forum. We hold a community forum every two years, at least every two years, I should say. We do student surveys. And then we usually follow up our student surveys with student focus groups so we can make sense of what we're hearing in survey data from the students' perspectives.

And then we've been lucky enough in our region to have representation on some of the other regional planning efforts that are going on. So by that I mean our local workforce development board, and also our strong workforce program in the region. So we get together as a super region. So those are all the adult Ed consortia in San Diego and Imperial counties. And then that super region has become one of the work groups for the strong workforce program in our region.

So we know that K-12 adult education has a voice in some of these other planning efforts. And then we keep each other informed. So locally working on the WIOA, MOU with our local workforce development board has been something that we've been able to do at a super region level. We have the Workforce Development Board represented on our super region. And the Super region is meeting monthly.

And I think our-- this year's super region chair is actually in the room, Kelly Henwood. So good to see you. Shout out to Kelly. So I think I'll move along here and just talk a little bit more about our consortium structure. So we have really tried to work on shared commitment ownership reciprocity. So one of the structural ways that we have done that is the chairperson for our consortium rotates every two years. And so I'm now doing my second tour as chair of our consortium.

We've identified priorities for our consortium. So if we ever have any-- if we ever have any disputes, we can go back to our priorities and our guiding principles and use those to help us-- guide us along what we might-- what we might believe and move forward from there. We have very defined Leadership Council responsibilities. And one of those responsibilities is actually-- describes attendance at meetings. That we want people to be present at meetings.

And we've asked for our school districts boards of education to approve the designated representative to serve on our Leadership Council. And we've asked for the board to approve that MOU or MOA, the memorandum of understanding or agreement, that sets forth the expectations of what the Leadership Council members are going to do. So it's all a way-- these are structures that support this idea of collaboration and shared ownership.

I'll talk about the shared positions in a minute. But one of the things that we've done in our meetings-- we introduced this quarterly review of our goals and our progress toward goals. And then we also have adopted a data dialogue protocol. And so we're looking at our consortium wide data with all of our staff members once a quarter. And doing that in light of our goals. So we can measure progress toward the goals.

We do an annual planning retreat. I think I'm not alone. I think a lot of us do that, where we set goals for the year. That's how we work on our annual plan together. That's how we look at gaps and needs in our community. We look for leaks in the pipeline in terms of where are we losing students. And we strategize about how are we going to shore up those gaps. How are we going to figure out what to do about the needs that we've identified.

And then we also have an annual audit. So we've paid an accounting firm every year to come in and do an audit for us, and for each of our member districts specific to the grants that we receive. So we have applied for WIOA as a consortium, and also for our CAEP funding. And I think those are just structures that we put in place that keep us accountable to one another, remind us of our commitment to a larger purpose, to our students.

And so I'm going to move us along. I'll talk a little bit more about these shared positions and contractors, because again, I think these are ways that we've just built in through the structures. This opportunity for asset mapping. So we do have a position of data coordinator and that position supports our whole consortium.

And that person was hired by Escondido Adult School. And then we have a partnerships coordinator, and that person was hired by Poway Adult School. We have a support counselor for students with disabilities. And that person was hired by vista Adult School. We have a tech integration specialist, and he was hired by Poway. We have an accountant who is hired by our fiscal agent, that's Vista. We have an administrative assistant also hired by Vista. And then we have a consultant who helps us with planning and curriculum. And we have a market marketing firm that we work with.

And so again, I think having each partner or each member district have responsibility for one of these shared positions. Bringing those folks to the table. They come to the meetings. And that's how we're able to all have this joint ownership. The data coordinator, what I wanted to talk about with him is he's actually the person that has been helping us with a lot of this work that we'll talk about next.

So I mentioned that we have had a community forum every other year. And we actually had one as a super region, which was really nice. Because there were some partners that we thought each one of us, each one of the organizations in San Diego and Imperial County have been asking these partners to come. And so we decided that with those large partners, we would do-- we would have a community forum as a super region, and that was really helpful.

We invite our business and community partners to this forum. We review our goals and our progress toward the goals with them. We also together analyze labor market information, and we try to personalize that labor market information. So in other words, what I mean by that is we would look at data. This is what the labor market report says, and then we ask our community partners, is this what you see? Help us make sense of this. What does it look like anecdotally? And so that we have a chance to really listen to them and hear a little bit more about what's going on.

Our partners also help us identify the gaps and needs. So as they look at our performance data, or when they talk about experiences that they're having, either trying to transition students to our services, or as a business trying to hire folks in the community. They can help us identify those gaps and needs, and help us identify the leaks in the pipeline, and then things that we can do to shore up those links.

So I talked about our data coordinator, and this data-driven dialogue. And so I mentioned that we have quarterly planning meetings, and we're using a protocol that comes from the school reform initiative. And it is a very prescribed process to look at data. So basically it asks you to suspend all of your beliefs, and all of your judgments, and just first make sense of the data itself.

And so I think two years ago, we implemented this process that we as a consortium-- so Poway Adult School has been using a data-driven dialogue protocol for a long time. We as a consortium said, hey, we really ought to do this together and do it more frequently. So that's when we implemented these quarterly reviews of our data. So you might think, well, what kind of data do you look at? What are you doing when you look at data?

So we're using CAS data for student performance data primarily. All of our member districts report into TOPSpro Enterprise because we are all partners in our WIOA-- our WIOA contract or WIOA grant. And so we paid early on to research firms to do some studies for us. One research firm did a report for us about what are the most lucrative entry level jobs that our students might want to transition to?

And then we had another firm that actually did a map of all of our services, and an overlay of where residents and populations of need might live. And so then we could see are we offering the right programs in the right areas? So we have employers here. We have students here. How can we work on those things?

So then as a consortium we decided well, we don't need a research firm. We don't want to hire a research firm every single year or so. Are there some ways that we can keep these reports up. So now we know what to look at. What are the data that we can use to keep those reports up every year? So Emsi is one data source that we purchased a consortium membership to Emsi. And that's basically labor market information that comes to our region.