October 13, 2011

Understanding the Impact of Safety Net Services

Please join us on Thursday, October 13 when we convene our 2011 Safety Net grantees for a discussion on “Understanding the Impact of Safety Net Services.”

Understanding the Impact of Safety Net Services

8:30 a.m. Registration
9:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. Program

Learning from organizational and program investments can be a useful tool for making good management and board decisions. This convening will provide an opportunity to discuss the various ways of measuring program effectiveness. Our hope is to allay fears about the burdens and costs of measurement, and reinforce how gathering and analyzing data can be a useful tool for nonprofit staff, Boards and funders serving their communities.

Topics to be discussed include:

  • What is the difference between evaluation and program monitoring?
  • What outcomes and activities do you currently measure and track?
  • What methods and tools do you think should be used to evaluate the effectiveness of safety net services?
  • How to weigh the benefit of gathering evaluation data on safety net services with the cost of collecting and analyzing it?
  • How do you balance internal learning with the expectations of funders and other external stakeholders?
  • What role do safety net services play in an economic downturn?
  • How best to tell the story?

Clare Nolan, vice president of Harder + Company Community Research, will discuss basic evaluation concepts using case studies to demonstrate how evaluation can help nonprofits better understand their impact. There will be an opportunity for program staff to learn from colleagues working in the same field of service.

8:30 a.m. – Registration and light breakfast
9:00 a.m. – Program begins
12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. Working lunch
3:00 p.m. – Program concludes

For questions about who from your organization should attend, and to RSVP, please contact Emily Rosenberg at err@sff.org or 415.733.8529.

Start: October 13, 2011 8:30 am
End: October 13, 2011 3:00 pm
Venue: California Endowment-Oakland Conference Center
Address:
1111 Broadway Ave. 7th floor, Oakland, CA, United States

September 20, 2011

Winning the Future: President Obama’s Agenda and the Hispanic Community

The Latino Community Foundation and the San Francisco Unified School District invite you to join them and the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics, for a San Francisco Bay Area Latino Leaders Conversation on “Winning the Future: President Obama’s Agenda and the Hispanic Community,” on Thursday, June 9, 2011.

In his State of the Union, President Obama made it clear that the most important contest this country faces today is not between Democrats and Republicans, but with competitors around the world for the jobs and industries of our time. To win that contest and secure prosperity for all Americans, we must out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world. The Latino community plays an integral part of that plan to win the future.

We can win the future through innovation: creating the jobs and industries of the future by doing what America does best – investing in the creativity and imagination of the American people. We must win the race to educate our kids in order to meet the demand over the next five years when nearly 90 percent of new jobs will require more than a high school degree. We must rebuild America, attracting new businesses to our shores by having the fastest and most reliable ways to move people, goods, and information – from roads and airports to high-speed rail and Internet.

In the last two years since taking office, the President and his Administration have worked to lay the groundwork for America to win the future, stopping the freefall of the economy and beginning to set the foundation for growth and prosperity. Every issue has been of vital importance to the Latino community, from promoting job creation and ensuring that every American has access to quality healthcare, to implementing reforms that strengthen education for all students, and fighting for comprehensive immigration reform while standing up for the civil rights of all Americans.

The White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics has been working with Latino leaders to help develop public-private partnerships aimed at community education reform initiatives that increase Hispanic education attainment levels, thereby contributing to President Obama’s 2020 goal of once again being number one in the world in the percentage of our population having a college degree. They cannot achieve this goal without significantly strengthening and expanding education opportunities for all Latino students, from cradle to career.

Please join us as we discuss the Obama Administration’s strategies to increase Latino students’ access to a quality education and improve their rates of education attainment to keep the U.S. competitive in a global economy.

Please join your fellow Bay Area Latino leaders for a conversation on what the Obama Administration is doing to help Latinos win the future. The White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics wants to hear how, by working together, we can solve the toughest challenges facing the Hispanic community.

Start: September 20, 2011 9:00 am
End: September 20, 2011 12:00 pm
Venue: The San Francisco Foundation
Address:
225 Bush Street, Suite 500, San Francisco, CA, 94104, United States

September 16, 2011

Using Data for Success: Fostering an Outcomes-Driven Culture in Workforce Development Organizations

Please join us Friday, September 16th, for a discussion on evaluating the effectiveness of workforce development programs and building outcomes-driven organizations.

In February 2011, the Bay Area Workforce Funding Collaborative hosted a convening on evaluating the effectiveness of workforce development programs.

Participants expressed overwhelming interest in more opportunities to explore the challenges of evaluating workforce development programs. This day-long convening will delve deeper into these issues and provide an opportunity for workforce development providers and funders to explore how they can work together to build capacity to collect and use data.

The convening will address these topics among others:

  • What constitutes “good” performance in workforce training programs?
  • How can we expand definitions of success to capture more robust workforce development outcomes?
  • What does it take to create an outcomes-driven organizational culture?
  • How can funders and workforce development providers work together to foster accountability and promote learning in the workforce system?

The discussion will be led by Public/Private Ventures, the organizers of The Benchmarking Project: Putting Data To Work, an exciting national effort to identify meaningful outcome benchmarks for the workforce development field.

8:30 a.m. – Registration
9:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. – Program

Breakfast and lunch provided.

RSVP by September 9, 2011, to Kolieka Seigle at kseigle@sff.org or 415.733.8540

Co-sponsored by The Bay Area Workforce Funding Collaborative, The San Francisco Foundation, Tipping Point Community, and REDF.

Start: September 16, 2011 8:30 am
End: September 16, 2011 3:00 pm
Venue: California Endowment-Oakland Conference Center
Address:
1111 Broadway Ave. 7th floor, Oakland, CA, United States

February 2, 2011

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Workforce Development Programs

Experiences from the Bay Area Workforce Funding Collaborative, 2004-2009

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Please join us on Wednesday, February 2nd for a discussion on evaluating the effectiveness of workforce development programs. We will present the findings from the recently released evaluation of the Bay Area Workforce Funding Collaborative’s (BAWFC) first five years of grantmaking, conducted by BTW Informing Change, and discuss the challenges of measuring outcomes for employment training programs.

We will also hear from BAWFC grantee Jewish Vocational Services (JVS) about its experience participating in the Benchmarking Project, a national initiative led by Public/Private Ventures to identify meaningful outcome benchmarks for the workforce development field, so that practitioners, funders, and policymakers can be better informed about what constitutes “good” performance.

The conversation will touch on the role of funders, workforce development providers, WIBs, community colleges, and public agencies in developing and implementing measurement systems designed to foster accountability and promote learning to strengthen the region’s workforce system.

When:
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
9:30 a.m. – 12:00 pm
Breakfast provided

Where:
The San Francisco Foundation
225 Bush Street, 5th Floor
San Francisco
Directions

RSVP:
By January 28th to Shanthi Gonzales at sgonzales@sff.org or 415.733.8540

Start: February 2, 2011 9:30 am
End: February 2, 2011 12:00 pm
Venue: The San Francisco Foundation
Address:
225 Bush Street, Suite 500, San Francisco, CA, 94104, United States