The Bay Area Workforce Funding Collaborative, the program I lead at The San Francisco Foundation, focuses its grantmaking on community colleges. Many people do not know that the community colleges are the largest providers of workforce training in the State. They educate 70 percent of the state’s nurses and 80 percent of our firefighters, law enforcement personnel, and emergency medical technicians. For the low-income, disadvantaged populations that the 13 foundations involved in the Collaborative care most about, community colleges are an affordable way to gain the skills they need to move out of poverty and get a well-paying job that can support a family.

Community colleges are the portal to higher education and workforce training for 2.4 million Californians. In fact, the California Community Colleges System is the largest higher education system in the country (and maybe even the world!). Despite the tremendous opportunity they provide to Californians—and the benefit to California’s economy by producing an educated workforce—community colleges have been one of the biggest casualties of the state’s fiscal crisis. Since 2008, state funding for community colleges has been cut by a staggering $809 million. As a result, colleges have had to reduce enrollment by 485,000 students. That’s too many young people without access to higher education, especially at a time when there are few job prospects in our still struggling post-recession economy.

Prop 30 will immediately restore $210 million in funding to community colleges which will enable them to serve 20,000 additional students and reinstate thousands of classes that were cut over the past four years. It should also prevent further cuts over the next several years. Californians got it right in this election: it’s time to reinvest in public education to ensure that our young people have access to opportunity, our workers have access to good jobs, and our economy remains competitive.

What makes America exceptional are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on earth, the belief that our destiny is shared, that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and the future generations so that the freedom which so many Americans have fought for and died for comes with responsibilities as well as rights and among those are love, and charity, and duty, and patriotism. That’s what makes America great.”  -President Barack Obama on the night of his re-election to a second term as President.

Elections allow us to look at contemporary issues of our day, soda/sugar and the extent to which it is exacerbating one of the worst epidemics of our time, or whether our moral convictions or confidence in our criminal justice system is so fool-proof that we are willing as a state to continue the practice of human executions, or whether we are ready to accept that who one loves should be honored equally in the eyes of the law.

As neighbors, as residents, as public servants, as social entrepreneurs we must remember that the change we want to see requires discourse and disagreement, and talking to people who don’t always agree with you.  And it requires that we keep working on our shared destiny. The new voter, the first time voter, the registered voter who didn’t vote, the eligible but not registered voter, these are voices we need to find, engage, and bring order to the dialogue.

On election night while watching the returns with friends,  a 12-year-old child asked me rather innocently, “what does this election have to do with me?” The answer of course was “everything.”

As a community foundation working in one of the most diverse regions in our nation, our role in fostering civic participation, civic dialogue, and of inspiring the next generation of civic leadership is work that is not done. It is work that has a long arc. An arc that we hold as an obligation for generations to come. The work is not done.