Bay Area Workforce Funding Collaborative

Launched in spring 2004, the Bay Area Workforce Funding Collaborative is a public/private partnership of more than a dozen foundations and the California Employment Development Department. BAWFC is designed to strengthen the workforce development infrastructure supporting the San Francisco Bay Area economy. The collaborative is focusing initially on health care and life sciences, two of the region’s fastest-growing sectors with large demand for new workers. Through grantmaking to help bridge the gap between employer needs and workforce development service provider capabilities, the BAWFC promotes advancement opportunities for, and the economic stability of, low-skill workers, while fostering economic growth in these two key industries.

Funding Collaborative

Foundations participating in the first BAWFC grant cycle are: the San Francisco Foundation, Walter and Elise Haas Fund, Evelyn and Water Haas, Jr. Fund, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Walter S. Johnson Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, California Wellness Foundation, Levi Strauss Foundation, Koret Foundation, the William Randolph Hearst Foundation, and the California Endowment. For the second grant cycle, the Women’s Foundation, Y & H Soda Foundation, and the California HealthCare Foundation joined the BAWFC.

These private foundations and the state have come together to maximize the effectiveness of their resources to create innovative workforce development partnerships. Under BAWFC, foundation grants leverage state resources, employer commitments, and educational dollars. The San Francisco Foundation, which chairs the BAWFC, manages the philanthropic mutual fund; the California Employment Development Department manages the aligned public-sector WIA grants.

The Bay Area Workforce Funding Collaborative contracted with the National Economic Development & Law Center to provide the first year’s support and guidance in management, including planning, development, and operations. Since April 2006, a full-time project coordinator and a half-time program assistant have managed the collaborative’s increasingly complex grant awards. NEDLC continues to provide technical assistance consulting to the initiative on policy innovations and strategies to support the growth of workforce intermediaries. BAWFC has also contracted with Abt Associates and BTW Consultants to design and conduct a multi-year project evaluation.

Key Strategies and Interventions

The collaborative has identified six strategies to strengthen the region’s workforce training infrastructure over the next five to seven years. These strategies are intended to help the workforce development system meet the needs of employers and to improve economic security for low-income people in the Bay Area:

• Understand the unmet skill needs of Bay Area employers who have long term labor shortages by researching current labor market information on economic sectors and occupations with sufficient growth, ease of entry, mobility, and wages;

• Provide adequate support services to job seekers, including career counseling, job placement, retention, and other services that are aligned with the sector strategy;

• Increase the skills of low-income residents, immigrants, dislocated workers, and others by providing specialized skills training and job placement services;

• Provide streamlined and improved services through greater coordination among employers, workforce investment boards, educators, training providers, community colleges, labor, service providers, job developers and other regional stakeholders;

• Provide learning opportunities for stakeholders to inform program designs, service interventions, and ongoing course corrections; and

• Align and increase private and public resource systems to support the above five strategies.

Labor Market Analysis

The following powerpoint provides an analysis of the Bay Area regional labor market.  The analysis is intended to provide a picture into overall employment conditions and structural changes in this local economy, focusing on the period from 2001-2007.  Though this data does not capture changes associated with the  recent 2008 recession, it should still provide useful insights into medium-term demographic and employment changes.

The data analyzed here comes from two major sources:  The American Community Survey 2007 (and 1990 & 2000 Decennial Census for some charts) from the U.S. Census Bureau; and the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

For a full guide to the data content, structure, and how it might be used, please listen to the June 16, 2009, recorded webinar available here.

Bay_Area_Data.zip

Labor Market_Bay Area.ppt