Do you know of an innovative partnership between California employers and educators that is successfully preparing workers to meet the needs of our economy?
In order for Californians to have the skills required for jobs in the 21st century, employers and educators will need to work together more intentionally than ever before. Across the state, visionary business, education, and civic leaders are rising to the occasion. To inspire even greater collaboration, the California Economic Summit created the PIE Contest to identify and honor innovative partnerships achieving success for students and communities.
Alongside our partners at California Forward, SBC is proud to administer this contest in 2020. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, our state and region will require an exceptionally skilled workforce in the months and years to come, a workforce that will rebuild statewide resilience and catalyze economic recovery and security. Strong partnerships between educational institutions and employers have always been critically important to promoting that workforce and are even more so in this time of crisis.
Criteria for PIE Contest includes:
A partnership between an employer (public or private) and a California educational institution (K-12, higher education, public and/or private)
Ability to demonstrate specific success outcomes
More information on the criteria can be found here.
The top three partnerships will each earn one complimentary two-day registration to the 2020 California Economic Summit taking place this December in Monterey. Each winning partnership will be offered the opportunity to showcase their work and share promising practices with peers at the Summit.
The 2020 California Economic Summit takes place on December 3-4, marking the ninth annual event that brings together private, public, and civic leaders from across California’s diverse regions. The Summit’s bipartisan network of business, equity, environmental, and civic organizations is unique in championing solutions that create inclusive, sustainable growth, and opportunity for all. If you’d like to see your favorite employer-educator workforce program highlighted at the event, nominate them for the 2020 Partnership for Industry and Education Contest today.
I grew up climbing on granite slabs at Donner Summit, and the rock formations fascinated me. Everywhere I went in the mountains, I found myself mesmerized by the colors, textures, and stratigraphy lines that painted the landscapes. Having grown up in Northern California in an outdoors family, the concept of conservation was ingrained very early. “Respect the playground; if you want the beautiful places you love to remain intact, then do your part.” At that point in my life, I knew I wanted to do something that allowed me to be outside and in the field solving problems (or something to that extent). Naturally, I began my academic career pursuing a degree in geology.
Fire has always had a place in California. There was a time when the state had a well-defined wildfire season, when homeowners in California’s wildland urban interface could readily insure their homes, when wildfire smoke wouldn’t blanket the entire state at one time. Unfortunately, due to a century of mismanagement of our fire ecosystem and the growing impacts of climate change, that time has passed.
For fear of sounding like a broken record, I will skip over the detailed account of how my fellowship/life is not exactly as I expected it to be, thanks to the pandemic. It’s 2021 but you could also call it December 56th, 2020. It didn’t become a brand new world January 1st, we are still wearing masks, working from home in our sweatpants, and trying to avoid refreshing the news. At the same time, I have been pondering the beauty of my unexpected journey to CivicSpark and SBC.
I know I am not the only one glad to leave 2020 in the dust. At Sierra Business Council we talk a lot about turning challenges into opportunities, about implementing actionable steps that don’t just temporarily solve one-off problems but offer alternative ways of doing business, interacting with the environment, and existing in the Sierra to eradicate what causes those problems in the first place. As an organization, we’re proactive rather than reactive, and our goal is to build a region that is as well.
No one saw 2020 coming, though. Over the course of the last year, everyone has been asked to react to the unexpected, the unimaginable.
Please join us in building a stronger Sierra by helping us reach our goal of $20,000. The money we raise today and through the end of the year will go directly to building economic, environmental, and social resilience in communities throughout the Sierra.
SBC is excited to share that the Resilience Fund-Sierra continues to gain traction in the Tahoe region, having now funded 19 businesses and counting. Founded to save Sierra businesses forced to close down during the pandemic earlier this spring, the Resilience Fund has provided its first wave of clients with loans, coaching, and other valuable services.
