Chamber outlines long-term business-education initiative
Goal: Better prepared workforce!

It’s been more than two years since Chamber leadership began discussion and review of the Chamber’s role in positioning our students to be better prepared to work and find success in careers upon graduation. The outcome of strategic planning in 2006 was that the Chamber was THE organization in our community best poised to be a link between education and businesses. Thus began planning and preparation for a long-term initiative of the Chamber.

“There are many programs that link education and business,” stated Chamber CEO Debbie Moreno. “The problem is there is very little information available that gives a comprehensive look at what’s out there, what’s working well, what programs could be strengthened through synergy and where the gaps are. It’s our job to find out, and then to pull the community together to build on our strengths and shore up weaknesses.”

PartnershipsPlus Goals
A key goal this year is to strengthen secondary and postsecondary career and technical education by:
· Completing an updated asset map of educational and business resources that could promote and support career and technical programs at the high school and postsecondary levels;
· Surveying local businesses to assess current involvement with the educational system;
· Matching career specific programs with business partners to promote program development and implementation;
· Increasing students’ opportunities and awareness of careers, especially within local identified industry clusters;
· Linking students to available career and technical education offerings.

Our Work So Far
The Chamber’s PartnershipsPlus Program “linking business & education” is already making a significant commitment to our business community and our future workforce. In the past several months the Chamber has:
· Established a relationship with the Kern Community Foundation, which serves as our fiscal sponsor for this program. In this way we can accept funding from both business and charitable funding sources. The Chamber is working toward establishing a foundation and that decision was made based on the business-education initiative of PartnershipsPlus;
· Hired a full time Program Coordinator dedicated to this initiative. Diana Davey has vast background and experience to make her an excellent choice to coordinate this program for the Chamber (see sidebar). Diana began her work part-time on this project but as of March 2009 she is working on this program full time for the Chamber;
· Been meeting with school officials to gather information on their current career based educational programs.

Funding
We could not have started on this project without the upfront support of our business community. Through Chamber member support, we were able to raise $50,000 in a relatively short time and even in a difficult economic climate. Because our local business community showed their support of our idea through these financial contributions, we were able to secure support in the form of a planning grant from The James Irvine Foundation. The Irvine Foundation was impressed with the level of support of our business community. We will be submitting a request for Implementation Funding at the conclusion of our planning year.

The Chamber would like to thank those member businesses who stepped up when asked to provide start-up funding for PartnershipsPlus. They are:  San Joaquin Community Hospital, State Farm Insurance Companies, Brighthouse Networks, Kern Economic Development Corporation, Chevron, Gregory D. Bynum and Associates and the GBCC. 

If you have any questions about or input for our PartnershipsPlus Program, please feel free to contact Debbie Moreno, dmoreno@bakersfieldchamber.org, or Diana Davey, dldavey@gmail.com at any time.