Paul Rosenbloom: All right. Got it. All right, good afternoon. Welcome, everybody. Great to see everybody here. And Patricia, we can go ahead and put up the poll. We got a nice small group here today.

So we have a poll just to kind of have a chance to get to know who's in the room. So if you have a moment, go ahead and just fill this out. Let us know what kind of organization you're representing today, and then also where you're from in the state. This is just help us understand who we got here with us. And we can get going there.

And just wanted to say that I did have a chance to hear Mr. Zimmer around 11:30 doing some of the welcoming remarks, and I was really excited to hear that. So it's great to be here doing this presentation with you and just being part of the CAEP program. It was very inspiring.

He was telling a personal story about his grandmother that went back to adult Ed to get her high school diploma at age 75 after working her whole life in garment shops, in garment factories in Brooklyn. So just inspiring to hear that, and to know that the CAEP program has that level of support is really great to hear. So thanks for showing up.

OK, look, so I'm just taking a look. Here we got kind of who'd we expect, adult Ed, community college, and then some folks from the North. I know our team is representing Central Valley/Mother Lode And then welcome, South Central Coast in LA.

All right, well, that's great. I'll put these out here. And for folks that show up late, I guess they missed the poll. But there it is. So you've got a little bit of flavor of who we've got with us, so. We'll head on.

So hey, good afternoon. My name is Paul Rosenbloom. I'll be moderating the session today. I'm going to provide an overview and framing of what we're doing. And then we'll get a chance to hear from our practitioners in the field that are doing all the amazing work.

So today's presentation is called "CAEP as a Catalyst for Developing a Regional Pathway System." Just housekeeping wise, we'll take a pause about midway through the presentation for Q&A, and then at then again at the end. So we'll kind of have two designated moments where we'll check in with folks and see any kind of questions that come up. But feel free as we go along, if you have questions, put them in the chat, and we'll check in and address at those times.

If there are acronyms that we fly through, because there are definitely acronyms in our project, we'll do our best to spell them out as we go. But if there's an acronym that you hear that doesn't make sense or you don't recognize, ask us in the chat, and we'll make a point of spelling it out, so.

The program we're going to talk about today, we are representing the Delta Sierra Adult Education Alliance. So we're the adult education consortium in San Joaquin County. We also serve portions of Calaveras County, and then some slivers of other surrounding counties, including Solano and Alameda.

We've got a dream team of presenters here today that are all working on our logistics, industrial maintenance, and manufacturing pathway bridge program. So I'll refer to that for short as the LIMM pathway bridge. But again, it's logistics, industrial maintenance, and manufacturing. And we're working together to design an industry aligned holistic education and training program for underserved adults in our community.

And we're not only looking to build one course, one program, but kind of an enduring partnership, and collaboration that can adapt and shift as circumstances change in our community. And so today the folks that you see here are going to provide their perspectives and their roles in the program. And what you can see is a diverse array of partners that represent the full breadth of what the CAEP program is all about.

So we have Brad Harrison, the principal of Manteca Education and Training Center, Danell Hepworth, the dean of CTE and Workforce Development at San Joaquin Delta College. And then on the partner front, we have Jose Dominguez, the executive director of Ready to Work, Lourie Subega, and CalWORKs Manteca Site Supervisor at El Concilio, and Patty Virgen, the executive director for San Joaquin County WorkNet, which is our workforce board in San Joaquin County.

My name is Paul Rosenbloom. I'm part of the consulting team. I've been working with Paul Downs since 2014, supporting this consortia and others in California doing the CAEP program. We're mission driven consultants. We do collaborative strategic planning and program development. We've been doing this together for a long time. Our clients have started to call us the Pauls or Paul squared. You can call me Paul. And happy to be here with you today and share with you what we've been doing.

So we call this CAEP as a catalyst because we know that pathways cannot be designed or implemented by any one organization. And the heart of the CAEP program is regional partnership and collaboration. And what you can see here is our vision statement. We developed this recently as part of our three-year planning process.

And I won't read it, the whole thing, but you can see I underlined the key portion here, which says basically any adult, wherever they come into our system, they get access to opportunity. And that's what we've also depicted here in our graphic on the right. We put the adult learner at the center. We have our members surrounding them in orange, and then our partner organizations on the periphery.

And this is a graphic that we've been showing frankly for years as an idea. But with this pathway bridge program that we're developing and working on and you're going to hear about more today, it's really coming alive.

We have educators working together on aligned curriculum. We have partners working together to figure out how to recruit and support participants as they come into our program in collaboration with our Adult School transition specialists and a resource specialists at Delta College. And then we have employers and economic development organizations that are providing us input on their needs, and we're taking that and rolling it right into our program design. So it's a really nice collaboration, and it's encouraging to see all these pieces coming together after many years.

So why would we do logistics, industrial maintenance, manufacturing, LIMM? Why would we do that. Well, if you take a look at the map, and you can kind of get a picture, and location, location, location. These are priority sectors in our workforce plans and our local workforce plans.

And the Stockton San Joaquin area has been a logistics hub for a long time. With proximity to the Delta, the Bay, the mountains, and then the Central Valley, it's just kind of located right in the heart of it all. And it's been that way for a long time. It's also been accelerated recently due to the growth in the e-commerce industry.

So you can see some of the stats here that we got on the slide, highly connected, major highways, railways, deep water port, for those of you that aren't from the area. There's major container ships that come into Stockton, and they move product around. You can reach 50% of the state within 3 hours of driving.

Interesting report came out a couple of years ago that showed that the County has the second highest concentration of transportation and warehousing employment in the country. So it's significant. And transportation and warehousing employment exceeds retail employment in the County. So it's got a major footprint. Definitely a lot of warehouses.

And right about now, Brad's phone might be ringing, our Adult School started getting a lot of calls with a seasonal hiring rush from warehouses that are looking for seasonal labor. So there's definitely jobs. But the question that we've had is, are these careers, are these quality careers for our students.

And there's definitely some concerns about that. So when we looked at developing this pathway bridge, we wanted to expand it to include not just logistics, but industrial maintenance and manufacturing so that we can be setting up our students for long term opportunities and getting them connected to middle skill jobs that will be available for a long time.

And so you're going to ask, what are these jobs. Well, this is just a very illustrative sample of some of the types of occupations that you might see across the sectors here. In logistics, you could have an order selector, down to a truck driver, a lot of stuff in between.

In industrial maintenance and advanced manufacturing, we see a lot of crossover. And so that goes into our program design that you'll hear Brad and Danell talk about looking at what are the common skills across these different industries that someone can get trained into and then move in and around these different areas and opportunities.

Industrial maintenance, you could be a maintenance professional with specialties in pneumatics, or electrical, you could be an installer, or advanced manufacturing, you might be a machinist, or a welder, or a production supervisor. So lots of different options.

What we're doing here is kind of leveraging, again, we'll go back to the map, the regional reality of where we are in the Central Valley. With agriculture, just as one example, there's a lot of interrelated industries that are happening. You have food that's being grown. Then it's being made into something. So food and beverage processing, manufacturing, packaging, distribution, moving all that stuff around once it gets made. There's a lot of that happening in the area. And so by expanding to a LIMM bridge, we're connecting to a lot of opportunity.

So this map shows-- it's a strong workforce map. It shows all of the community colleges that are in our strong workforce region, which is the Central Valley/Mother Lode. These are all served by adult schools. Part of the CAEP program, what I don't have today is a map of all the adult schools that feed into these community colleges, and that's a presentation for another day.

But what I'll do here is just own the map a little bit. We'll narrow the focus to our specific region. And then I'm going to hand it off now to Danell Hepworth, the dean of CTE and Workforce Development. And she's going to tell us more about this region, and then move in to talking about how our project is organized.

Danell Hepworth: So thank you, Paul. As Paul said, we are a part of that Central Valley/Mother Lode Region. But it's a really large region, all the way from Stockton to Bakersfield, and then you can see that it takes up all the way to the East side of California.

And the reality is, is that while we can work really well with this whole large region, it's really important for us to focus on our smaller region, or what we call our North Central Valley area. And that includes San Joaquin County, Stanislaus County, and Merced County, and then again some of Calaveras and Mariposa. But it focuses on the workforce in that area.

So again, we have to think about our surrounding counties. Because our employers don't say, Oh, we hit the boundary line, can't talk to you anymore because now we're in Stanislaus County, right? So we have to think about that regional look that the employer needs for our industrial maintenance and our manufacturing skills. And again, supporting through our agriculture, our food manufacturing, our distribution, all of that's going on in this area. And so we want to make sure that we're looking at the region when we're helping develop this project.

So now let's go to our project organization. Wonderful. OK, so we wanted to make sure that as we were working on this, that we had specific teams to have specific work. Because we didn't want overlap. We wanted to make sure that this is bringing the information back that we're collaborating, that we're synthesizing.

So we have the different team members here. So we have the planning committee, right? So the planning committee is the overall planning committee of the whole group. So in that, we bring in together members of our strategy coordination team-- I'll get to that one in a second, but we bring in those members.

This is where we bring in our industry partners. And so we always have at least two or three industry partners, where we've been very blessed so far that it has been the same industry partner, so we're not like jumping from one industry partner to another. But they've made that commitment and they're there. And then two members from each of the teams below. And then our community based organizations and our agency representatives are there part of that planning committee.

And then our smaller teams, the ones that actually do the majority of the work, is our participant engagement and navigation team. This does specifically outreach, career development curriculum, counseling, transitioning, anything that students need for that extra support to get into any of these programs that we're working with.

We also have the Bridge Curriculum team. So that team basically we're looking at incorporating those critical industry skills. So we have faculty from both the Delta College and from the Adult Ed side working together. We're looking at creating dual enrollment curriculum, looking at articulation, making sure that any sort of support mechanisms as far as contextualized learning, right? So we want to make sure that contextualized learning is part of it. So all of that team works together to work on that curriculum.

And then we also have the employer engagement group. This is the group that works with our overall employer relationships. They maintain a database. They are the point of contacts. They maintain who our point of contacts are with our employers. And they work together to make sure that we're following solid partnership steps to make sure that our employers feel like they are an important part of this team.

We also have the strategy coordination team. You see that one up on the right. And basically that is just a kind of a one member from Delta College, the Adult Education WorkNet, and then some of our other stakeholders, just to make sure that we are coordinating where we want to go from here.

And then finally, you'll kind of see off to the left there is just a separate project that's going on in conjunction with this, which is the Delta Pathway Mapping and Design. And we'll get a little bit more into that later on in the presentation.

Paul Rosenbloom: It's great. Thanks. And now we'll have Brad Harrison from Manteca tell us about the pathway bridge design here.

Brad Harrison: Good afternoon. So this slide here kind of outlines-- it's kind of our game plan or our roadmap to what we have been working on for a couple of years now. And it kind of guides us. One thing that's interesting through this whole process is when we started out, we had lots of different partners, Delta College, all the adult schools in our consortium, and our other partners, WorkNet, Ready to Work, El Concilio.

And through the process, we started talking about we got to start seeing this as one program, not an individual standalone program at my particular school, Manteca Education and Training Center, but really developing a program that really incorporates us all in all of our voices in there to make a really solid, comprehensive program. So that was a big turning point a couple of years ago when we started focusing on us being one program together with all of our resources.

On the left hand side where it talks about the participant engagement and navigation group, kind of what Danell talked about a little bit briefly, they focus on getting our students into the program, finding the students that have a desire to be in our program and a need to be in our program.

And that comes from a lot of different areas, job seekers, sheltered, homeless, the Rehab workforce, young adults, CalWORKs, veterans. We've touched all those areas. And it's been building. And we've been getting a lot of momentum as far as getting a variety of people into our program, which has been really a positive.

And we have people at each one of our organizations, our Adult School has transitioned specialists that work on outreach. Delta College has resource specialists that work also in the same area at Delta College. And our partners with their case managers work closely with both of case managers and transition specialists and resource specialists to provide opportunities to their clients. So that's been a really good piece that's been really strengthened as we've been working together.

The Bridge Curriculum team. Like I said, we started out with us and Delta having lots of conversations. In the next slide, we can talk a little bit about it there too, but we just compiled information for a year or so just kind of talking about what that's going to look like, and what the curriculum needs to be, how it's going to benefit that person, what it will look like for job employment, for training, to move it on to Delta College in education or retraining people that are already in current jobs. And so we took all that into consideration. And it's an ongoing reflection and improvement process that we're still going on as we continue to refine our program and move towards full implementation in fall '23.

And then the employer engagement and transition on the far right hand side. We have several partners that are really strong that come and give us input and work on placement of students as they exit, moving them onto Delta College. We have that built into our model as far as transitioning them to Delta or to the workplace. So that's been great. And we do classroom presentations. We have a resume building session actually this Friday in our pathway. So we're really moving forward with some of those really important pieces.

So now that's kind of an overview. I'd like to go ahead and introduce the people that are in the pin group, Jose Dominguez, executive director of Ready to Work, Lourie Subega, Manteca Site Manager at El Concilio and CalWORKs, and Patty Virgen, executive director of San Joaquin County WorkNet.

Jose Dominguez: Thanks, Brad.

Brad Harrison: You're welcome.

Jose Dominguez: Good afternoon, everyone. Jose Dominguez, like Brad said, executive director at Ready to Work. And my organization is a nonprofit organization. And our mission is to seek to reduce homelessness for people that are homeless, people that are at risk of becoming homeless, and for individuals that were formerly incarcerated. And we provide workforce development, food, and shelter 24/7. So we are similar like the transitional housing for the individuals. So we house them up to 12 months, and provide also, like I mentioned, workforce development.

And when the Pauls reached out to me if I wanted to participate in this pathway, I said yes. Because a lot of times, what happens is the population that we, Ready to Work, serves is they are often left out, and they're part of that marginalized group that are left out for whatever reason. And part of that group is also the reentry population, which I strongly advocated for to be a part of this pathway program.

And some of the individuals that we have in the Ready to Work program have taken advantage of this program pathway. And they have started the curriculum. And they now have an access and opportunity for career which in the past they may have not had.

So we do also provide case management services for the individuals that are in the program. And Ready to Work has been in existence since 2017. So it's a fairly new, in my opinion, organization. There's still a lot of development that's going on. But these individuals that are in the Ready to Work program now have an access to a career pathway.

I'll pass it on to Lourie Subega at El Concilio.

Lourie Subega: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Lourie Subega, and I'm with El Concilio. And we do the CalWORKs program. So we assist individuals that are receiving cash assistance and public assistance in the County. Since CalWORKs is a federally mandated program, everyone that we serve is required to participate. So our goal is to assist them in moving forward.

And a lot of times, they can't see the light at the end of the tunnel. They've been in a position where they're kind of stuck. So the Pathway Program helps them kind of take little baby steps, and then they can move forward from there. And the collaboration between all of the resources that we have available with WorkNet, Delta College, it inspires them to want to do more. So this program is a really great opportunity for them.

Paul Rosenbloom: Thanks, Lourie. And Patty.

Patty Virgen: Absolutely. Thank you, Paul and Lourie. Patty Virgen. I'm the executive director with San Joaquin County WorkNet, and the workforce development entity in San Joaquin County. So I run the WIOA Title 1 program, so adult, dislocated worker, and youth. I have funding to support programs like this.

I also work very closely with my CalWORKs partners, the Human Services agency. I have contracts to do their assessment. I just started doing their job search, which is good opportunities for us to determine what is out there for some of our CalWORKs participants.

And I also have a contract with our AB 109. So it's funding to assist individuals who are formerly incarcerated, which again, another one of the groups that we're trying to work with. So everything on the left side, we can pretty much help through either WIOA, CalWORKs, or AB 109 funding.

One of the neat things about this program is we've worked with our Adult School partners and our community college partners and our community partners, like Ready to Work and El Concilio, but it's always been in silos, right? They identify need, we work on that need, we put together a program, and that's great.

This bridge program brings all of us together to address all of the wraparound services and identifies ways that we can all work together to meet the needs of our shared participants. Because if they come to me, they're probably also talking to Jose Dominguez at Ready to Work, or they're part of El Concilio, or--

So that's one of the things that having these conversations and working together in this bridge program has helped us identify, where we could leverage resources, how we can expand the work that we're already doing and work together. Rather than all of us working in silos, we're one on one with each other, we're all working together. So it's been an excellent program for us.

And then we don't always-- I think one of the neat things about this program is we don't always have to be at the front end of the program. We don't have to be the ones developing curriculum. We don't have to-- That's why we have strong partners to do that.

On my end, sometimes we're right at the beginning enrolling individuals because they need assistance with books and supplies and anything to get them through the training, and other times, that's not a need. The need comes at the end.

Once they've received the training, once they've got certificates, it's helping them with the employment piece, and working with employers to help the job seekers transition into employment and working with the employers to identify resources for them on the job training contracts, which allows us to reimburse the employer up to 50% of the wage if the job seeker is in need of additional training.

We have a lot of other tax incentives for homeless. So we pretty much can do every-- We can work with the employer to identify what resources they have available or they are in need of to support a student coming out of this program.

Paul Rosenbloom: That's great. And then what you're hearing here in terms of different partners kind of sharing ideas and needs is the nature of our collaboration and what we've been doing together over the last couple of years. So this is a look at one Jamboard, and there have been many. I mean, we're still doing a lot of work online. And this has been a great tool that we've used for collaboration and brainstorming and refining ideas.

But this is one look at individual participant requirements for the program, what our students need to have, and then also desired characteristics for intake and screening. So we kind of put this up to our group, and we've got a lot of good input. And then it also kind of quickly went into some ideas around participant incentives and employer incentives. So how do we make this program appealing for employers. So Jose, Patty, or Lourie, anything else that you remember from some of these meetings? But this is a reflection of how we work together and generated some ideas.

Jose Dominguez: Yeah, Paul. Like you mentioned, it was a Jamboard. So any ideas that we had to develop the program curriculum, we put everything on here, and then we prioritized them to which ones we want it to keep on there. But it was really just this like a suggestion or a brainstorming session where we just came together and just threw our ideas, and they're all right on the Jamboard.

Lourie Subega: Yeah. Like Jose was saying, I think the biggest draw is being the support system. We start with the individual, and they're able to move on. So having that support there for them, and having the resources available with the collaboration that we all have together helps move them forward. And I think that's where success comes.

Patty Virgen: Yep. And I will say the same thing. I think just having that open line of communication and having case managers work with one another in the different programs, but also working with the adult schools, transition team, and the community college, it really does open the doors, like I said, for being able to help the individual move beyond just a certificate, looking more towards a career path and opportunities for that.

Paul Rosenbloom: And some of these discussions also go into the idea of targeted recruitment and retention. So we're trying to go from just-- And it's great. We do have programs when people do walk in. But at the same time, we know there's need in our community. We know that there's people in different programs. If we can design our program to meet their needs and layer on the services, perhaps we can get people in that can stay for longer and get the full benefit of the program. So that's kind of what we're doing here.

Patty Virgen: Yeah. And Paul, if I can just add, we talked a lot about not waiting for participants to come to us, but rather for us to go to them. And that's how we started that, how do we reach out to organizations that are serving the populations that are the most in need.

And that's where we started with, OK, let's it's more of a targeted opportunity for us to reach these individuals through our Ready to Work program, individuals that are coming through WorkNet, individuals that are going through El Concilio and CalWORKs. Rather than just saying, OK, well we have a program. Hopefully, someone will show. We're actually targeting these individuals through our adult schools and our community partners.

Paul Rosenbloom: Great. Thanks, Patty. And Patty, if we can just keep with you, we're also targeting employers. So we talk about what the participant needs are, but also employer needs. So we've engaged in-- Danell was talking about some employers that we had on our planning committee.

So you might be able to decipher these logos up here. It's Super Store Industries, and Eco Logic, which is an interesting manufacturing company there in Manteca. They make a paper-based packaging, which is pretty cool. And so we've talked with them about identifying entry and second level occupations, and then what are those skill needs. And so identifying those skill needs has been really helpful to feed into our curriculum design.

But this piece has also been a nice collaboration with WorkNet, which also works directly with employers, and always has got the ear to the ground in terms of what employer needs are.

Patty Virgen: And one of the things that is important in this type of program is really identifying, are we building a training that is going to lead to employment, right? And that's kind of what we, in talking to employers, we wanted to validate, that the skills that we are moving forward are skills that the employers, one, are going to be able to utilize, and then two, with the input from the employers, could we build on those skills and provide upward mobility, either within the organizations, or other organizations within the same industries.

And so this was important for us to get the employer input. We were very fortunate to get these two employers that were very much willing to participate, attend our meetings, get information, meet with our educational partners to say, Yes, this works, this doesn't work. And also to let us know what else they needed.

One of the things that was common was the work readiness or the soft skills. It's one thing that employers said that that was very much needed. So it gave us an opportunity to go back and think, OK, how do we do that, what do we have to be able to do that.

So as we move forward, we we're looking for more employers. Right now we are in talks with additional employers. We currently work with Tesla and are hoping to get them on board. We have Dollar Tree, also a manufacturing facility here that is always in need. And so not only are we looking at their skills needs, but also what can we do to help them keep their workforce. And so that's an ongoing conversation that we have to keep having with these different employers. And then how we as an organization can meet those needs.

Paul Rosenbloom: Excellent. So a lot of stuff. So this kind of brings us to kond of-- this is halftime. Or a little bit over halftime. We want to take a pause here for any questions, comments, just here from you folks that are here. And then what we'll do when we go into the second half is we'll hear from Brad and Danell a bit more about the detailed curriculum and program design that's happening on the educational side of the house. So feel free to either throw a question in the chat or come off mute if you want to ask a question or make a comment. I'd love to hear from folks.

Patty Virgen: So Paul, if I could just add one of the other things that we are constantly talking. And these are trainings that don't have-- they're kind of they can start, go to work, and then come back. So there is opportunity for them to continue. When we work with these populations that have barriers, there's a need, and sometimes it's, I need to go to work, either because they're dealing with requirements for their programs, or-- Oh perfect. Here's the next slide.

Paul Rosenbloom: Yeah. All right. We're right on cue.

Patty Virgen: What it is, it's not a linear you have to go from start to finish.

Paul Rosenbloom: Great. Yeah. So I mean, this is our pathway kind of model that we've been using. But what Patty is telling us about is the ability to stop in and stop out based on where you're at in your life, and recognizing that when we're working with adults, that's what's going on. So the pathway design here is set up to have just that, so.

Yeah, we can charge ahead. So feel free. If you've got a question or comment, please jump in.

Dana Galloway: Paul, I have a quick question. This is a super impressive program. I'd love to do that in our consortium at the level that you're doing it. Have you been keeping track of any statistics, any numbers on this program? Students who are successful, get jobs, that sort of thing?

Paul Rosenbloom: Yeah. So yes, we're tracking that, and we're just getting started. We've been doing a lot of planning, and we're just getting to the point of implementation where we're starting to get participants in, so. And Brad will share with you kind of what the current state of enrollments are when he talks about what's happening at Manteca.

Dana Galloway: OK, great. Thank you.

Paul Rosenbloom: Yeah. And we're keeping an eye on that too. As things get rolling, we're asking ourselves, how do we track referrals, how do we track participant, transitions, completions, all those kind of things.

Jose Dominguez: Paul, there's a question in chat.

Paul Rosenbloom: Yeah. I don't know, Jose, if you want to take this. I mean, we're considering that, and we're talking to employers to understand what their requirements are, or restrictions are, in terms of working with employing people with records or formerly incarcerated. So we're starting to talk about that.

Jose Dominguez: Yeah, whereas Ready to Work, to answer this question, is we have had success in our individuals who are formerly incarcerated get jobs. And these are jobs with Caltrans, Amazon, Home Depot. So they're good companies that would be having success.

One of the reasons we're having success is because our workforce development program, where we actually put the individuals to work, and they get paid work experience. And that's helping them achieve that employment. And some of the employers that we're working with there are working with us, and depending on what background they have, what conviction they had, they will work with us and kind of bypass that. But it really depends on the conviction and what's on the background.

Patty Virgen: We also just recently had a job fair with our AB 109. We had over 12 employers. We could have had more, but the facility that we were doing it in couldn't accommodate. So a lot of employers are willing to work with formerly incarcerated and are willing to give them that opportunity is what we're finding.

Brad Harrison: And I can chime in a little bit. I know Jose kind of talked about it a little bit, but as our students are exiting specifically the logistics piece of the LIMM, we refer all those students to Home Depot, among other places. But Home Depot will interview every student that comes out of our program. Because we have a Home Depot warehouse real close here in proximity. And several have been hired out of there, including ones from Ready to Work with Jose. So we've had some success there.

Paul Rosenbloom: Great. Thanks for that question. So Brad will tell us a bit more about what they're doing right now at Manteca. And just to build on what Patty was sharing with the pathway design, it's a series of trainings with the opportunity to stop in and stop out based on what's happening in your life. And what Brad is working on specifically right now is what we're calling the Bridge Design at Manteca Education and Training Center specifically.

Brad Harrison: Yeah, so back to the slide that we kind of live by. So the Bridge Curriculum. We've put together three unique pieces, the logistics piece, which includes warehouse and logistics background training, and the forklift and equipment piece that we give certifications to five different pieces of equipment as they leave, along with safety OSHA training as well . The events manufacturing, which is fabrication and welding and just metal shaping kind of those, and everything that encompasses that.

And then electronics and pneumatics, which is really a popular piece of the whole bridge. Our enrollment in that class is full ongoing, and as we've been doing it about a year now with all these pieces. And so as they're coming together, that's a really much needed training piece with our area partners and industry around us. So that's been really valuable, putting those things together. I think the next one, Paul.

Paul Rosenbloom: Yeah, OK. We can go back. Let's see here.

Brad Harrison: Go back to, yeah, that one. Now back to the one they were talking about the Jamboard for the employer engagement group. This was a really valuable piece as we put together the important concepts for bridge. Because it involved a whole lot of people, instructors from Delta, instructors from the adult schools just kind of throwing out what they thought was needed, what students really, really needed, what was really, really important. And this is kind of the end product.

The Jamboard is much more full of stickies all over. And passion came out from people that really were talking about the importance of this program, how it worked, and also talking about not just a starting point, but ending point, not just providing that basic training so they could get a job at Amazon as a warehouse worker, but as they progress up to the living wage, career job, or Delta College for a degree. So I think that all those things were considered, and all those things helped us build the bridge to where we are now.

And this is kind of a snapshot of what we have going. This is an example of the logistics three-week course, which kind of outlines what kind of-- They concentrate on the piece of equipment, and the Prologis online is our curriculum for warehouse information, background, kind of the curriculum piece, and the counterbalance, the narrow aisle, and the pallet jacks or pieces that are learning how to operate during that week.

And newly, this fall, we incorporated our Delta logistics presentation. They do that on Fridays. Resume building's coming up this week, I talked about that earlier, with employer influence. So they talk about what it takes to go through the interview process, what are elements that employers are looking for in a potential employee. And then lastly, as the course ends, we take a tour of Delta College. And so we kind of push them towards what's next for them. What's the next step for them careerwise or employment wise. So we're always thinking about the next step for our students.

Paul Rosenbloom: And Brad, you want to share what the current enrollment numbers are, including referrals from El Concilio?

Brad Harrison: Yeah. We have currently, in our logistics one, we have six in there right now. I think half of those are from El Concilio CalWORKs. Our electricity class is full. But it's an 18 week course, so it's been full since the fall, and we have several students from that in there as well. But that's been gaining ground, especially within the last month or so.

So we're kind of navigating-- like we've learned about each other. So we've kind of eliminated barriers and roadblocks for students to get into our program from WorkNet, or from CalWORKs, or from Ready to Work. So we can fund them, get them into the program. And so we've learned a lot there. But the numbers are growing.

And I know that they asked a question about tracking. And we have been tracking numbers as they move into employment. I don't have that with me right now. We have an outreach person that works on our CTE and organizes our information, and I can get that.

Paul Rosenbloom: Great. Yeah. And definitely I think a hallmark in this has been you've got to be willing to test things out, try them out, tinker and adjust. And so Brad's attitude has been really fantastic on that. Just getting this thing going, and then seeing what works and making refinements.

One of the insights that we've had as we've gone along is, OK, we're doing a lot of work at the Adult School, and we're bringing in Delta College faculty to figure out program design. But as we're going along, we've realized, hey, we might need to refine, or update, or make sure we've got really current programs at Delta College so it's a bridge to a very specific industry-aligned up-to-date program.

And so Danell Hepworth is going to talk a little bit about that project, we're calling it Pathway Design, to look at the full pathway. So Brad shared with us the bridge, then as we move forward onto further training, the broader pathway, the Delta College is doing some work there.

Danell Hepworth: So as everybody has said, we can't do a one size fits all for everybody. So we need to make sure we have this pathway design so that there's multiple entry points, multiple exit points so that our students can come in or can leave depending upon what's going on in their lives.

And so an important part of this LIMM pathway design team is that we're defining the full spectrum, courses, certificate, degrees, all the way from the adult bridge into a four-year program. We're reviewing the offerings that we have at Delta College. What are the best options for the students as far as the course of study. What do they need to be successful today and in the future. And so as you can see, part of our project purpose is to create that strategic plan. What are we doing. What are the certificates. What are the degrees. What are the transfers.

So one of the important parts, again, like we talked about, is engaging our industry leaders so that they're part of this conversation. Doesn't do us any good to develop a program that's not helpful to our industry partners to be able to be accurate for our labor market information. We're building upon what we already have at Delta College. But some things are going to be new. Some things are going to be different. Basically, again, focusing upon the needs of our industry partners in the future.

So again, strategic plan, vision, goals, overall implementation phasing. We want to make sure that this pathway is visual for our students so they can see what they can do now and what they can do in the future. So maybe they need to hop off the path now because they've got to go to work, but they need to be able to see that, hey, I still can come back later and do the next steps, right? So that visual map.

And then this is not, again, a one-time thing. We want ongoing industry engagement. We want to make sure that as we move forward, we continue to improve and adapt to the needs of our industry partners. And so we'll see on our next slide here-- Thank you, Paul. --we've started that by doing some data diving, right? Looking at what industry partners do we have out there. So looking at specific occupations.

And looking at whether or not it's defined as a good job. Meaning that this is a job that somebody can have as a career that they can support a family, right? So a good job, what type of education, what type of on the job training is needed for those jobs. And so we've basically started gathering this data, gathering which industry partners fit into some of these jobs that are out there, and so then that's going to be our next step is to invite those specific industry partners to come in and talk to us about these jobs that are going to be good for our students.

Paul Rosenbloom: So yeah. And this is a really exciting piece, and it has it supports program design, but also it kind of goes to a pathway map that's student facing piece. Once we've done this analysis, it's almost like a holy grail to have a nice clean chart where you can show students you do this training 1, 2, 3, and you can get this wage, and it's locally, regionally relevant to San Joaquin County, so it kind of tailored to our area. So we're kind of working on both those things simultaneously.

Well, great. This is kind of what we had prepared. And I see we got a couple of questions in the chat. So we can just go to that. In terms of-- Yes, CAEP, funding. So Lourie some CAEP funding and then some leverage funds as well. Danell, I don't know if you can speak to some of the funds that are being used for this project? And then Patty, if we have any other kind of reference on rated funding or how we've leveraged different funds.

Danell Hepworth: So correct, we are using some of our CAEP funding. We are also using some of our strong work funds to support this to develop these pathways.

Patty Virgen: And individuals that qualify are able to be enrolled in WIOA through our adult program. So we do have funds. So I have funds not only through WOIA, AB 109, and CalWORKs has their own training, although if they're CalWORKs eligible, they're going to be WIOA eligible. So we could pay for it.

Paul Rosenbloom: And Jose's put together-- We've got fingers crossed. Jose and his organization has put together a grant application for the Breaking Barriers to Employment Initiative. So if that comes through, that would be a funding stream. And just to say, this partnership, it sets the region up to unlock funding streams.

When we can show we've got adult Ed, we've got community college, we've got workforce board, other public agencies, human service agencies all coming together, it makes for a very compelling set of partners working together. And we have fun working together. And we're starting to get results too, which is really encouraging. Jose, any updates on that grant application?

Jose Dominguez: Yeah, I think we're making progress. They haven't announced the award, but I think we're making progress. We did get communication from them. So I think it looks promising that we will get that awarded. Cross our fingers.

Paul Rosenbloom: Great. Well, thanks to everyone for participating, and thanks to all our partners for being part of the presentation. OK, here we go, Neal.

Patty Virgen: There was one other question, Paul. They wanted to know where the information they get, who gathered this data for the occupation rank by income, I think that was the question?