we don't have an actual break between our two partnership sessions but as the
table is getting reset and our next group of people is coming up on stage I
just I'm Terry Deveau from IMLS and wanted to take a quick opportunity to
tell you about another partnership that IMLS has been working on over the last
six months it's a joint funding opportunity known as performance
partnership pilots and it's designed to better serve disconnected youth who are
ages 14 through 24 I am ellesse together with several other federal funding
agencies including the Department of Education the Department of Labor the
Department of Health and Human Services and the Corporation for National and
Community Service issued the first notice inviting applications last
November for this initiative called p3 and we are now in the process of
selecting up to ten groups of partners who will work together to blend existing
federal funds that they receive and to better serve youth through educational
and employment programs and for this they are also receiving startup grants
of up to 700 thousand dollars the idea is to test whether additional
flexibility in the federal programmatic and reporting requirement realm can lead
to better outcomes ultimately for this target population p3 is intended to
break down silos at the local state tribal federal levels and to better
integrate disparate services that you heard talked about up here for this
target audience and as we wait to announce this year's pilots I can tell
you that work is in progress for another round of p3 and that we expect another
notice inviting applications to come out sometime in fall so if you are a library
a library system a community group that is somehow already working with local
tribal state partners especially to serve this population of disconnected
youth then we encourage you to watch for these p3 announcements and to
consider applying with your partners and our contact information for IMLS has
been on the roster so feel free to get in touch with any of us and we can tell
you more now I will turn it over to our panel thank you and thank you terry for
talking about p3 it's an interesting way to start off our panel on federal
partnerships because it is a great example of federal partnerships work
across many agencies to coordinate a notice in the federal register you have
no idea how hard this but one of our pants is going to talk to us about how
hard that is and what it might mean on the ground so good afternoon I'm Heidi
silver piccola I'm from the US Department of Education the office of
career technical and adult education I work in the division of adult education
literacy and so the people that we serve in my division are those families the
adults and the families that we've been talking about all day it's great to go
in the afternoon after so many wonderful examples of partnerships and innovative
practices have already been shared to give inspiration to to art talking
points this afternoon adult education last year served 1.7 million students
about forty percent of them are adults who are taking English classes and
helping adults transition to meet their high school equivalency requirement or
to transition on to post-secondary education training or workplace or
advanced in their workplace and we're proud to serve these students but we
know that we are not meeting the need we are so not meeting the need the OECD
survey of adult skills that came out in 2013 estimates that there are 36 million
adults with low literacy skills and 48 million with low numeracy skills so that
gap between 1.7 and 36 million that's pretty large we released a report in
February called making skills everyone's business a call to transform learning
adult learning in the United States large title
and it lays out seven strategies for bridging the gap between the 1.7 and the
36 million need and however you slice that need it's still a large number so
partnerships alliances cooperative ventures collective impact all of those
kinds of types of work are the first strategy that really underlies all the
other strategies and making skills everyone's business it's the key to
stretching resources and bringing learning too busy adults in ways it is
convenient relevant contextualized and challenging you know adults want to be
challenged if they're going to put their time into something so we've heard today
about so many examples of how libraries are the strategic partner for others to
meet their goals and that's what this panel is going to talk about as well
where our title is called federal partnerships but were not all federals
on the panel and we're going to be hearing from others perspectives of how
they have used federal dollars and some of the lessons they have learned in in
preparation for my talk I thought of some things that make a successful
partnership and things that nurture partnerships but these are ideas that
have all come out already today number one is you start with the personal just
at the federal level is just the same as at the state level is just the same as
at the local level you have to reach out you have to make personal relationships
and you have to start building that relationship of trust so that you can
start sharing intentions pressures deadlines more is talking about working
with the White House let me tell you about pressure and deadlines right and
so if you can share that and understand what your partner is working with you
can sustain through the tough times of getting your work to a line and to start
to find areas of overlap where your work becomes the way that your partner meets
its mission right and vice versa then that's the goal is that we're all
meeting our missions and in many cases as we've spoken about today our missions
are this are very much the same and that's the way it can be sustainable so
and to sustain beyond the grant as we talked about earlier such a great point
so as our panelists speak I want to ask them to share their innovative
approaches that they've used so the others in the field can replicate that
like to hear about how federal partnerships have filtered down to the
state level to the local level and how that has resulted in leverage leverage
of extra dollars or leverage of extra ways to serve the population and I'm
especially interested in how federal partnerships can be made visible at the
local level do people coming in your library understand that you're working
with USCIS what are what those letters mean do people understand that you're
working with the Department of Education and what our acronyms and our alphabet
soup means do they understand you're working with the Treasury or with us see
IM tell me yard Dorothy CFPB the Consumer Protection Bureau all of these
federal initiatives get kind of washed away as we make cute names and bring
those names down to the local level but does that really help it expose to the
to your community members and do they know how their federal dollars are
working and how their state dollars are working so with that I'm going to turn
it over to my panelist and I'm joined today by Steve reader who is a professor
in the Department of Applied linguistics at Portland State University and so much
more we've been working with Steve for many years very happily Jamie Marcus who
is at the development manager at the Wyoming State Library and a White House
champion of change so i hope you talk to us about that and denise dombek who's
division chief at the of the workforce investment employment and training
administration region 6 in San Francisco she's part of the US Department of Labor
so all these long federal titles right so Steve will start with you and I don't
have a long federal title Thank You Heidi and thank you all for this event
thanks IMLS I think what I want to do is talk very quickly about my experience
working with federal partners on digital literacy development in different ways
over the years and then I want to try to come back very quickly and talk about
lessons I've seen people learning about partnerships in that process so this all
started a number of years ago when we were fortunate enough in the literacy
language and technology research group to receive an IMLS nlg grant to develop
a platform designed to be a tool for partnerships to support learning and
development and economically vulnerable adults that was called learner web and I
see that in retrospect as a seed for partnership development because the key
piece of learner web is that it has roles to blend for both face-to-face
support of adults as well as technology support and it allows community partners
to adjust that blend and the way it's implemented and I'll come back to that
so we developed that with partners across the country and one of the things
we found out trying to use it with economically vulnerable adults you won't
be surprised to hear this is it was very difficult for many economically
vulnerable adults to use technology many of them lacked what we might call
digital literacy abilities to work comfortably with technology so as the
Great Recession started unfolding and there were more
and more adults finding themselves in economically vulnerable positions we
applied for a Department of Commerce grant called be top broadband technology
opportunities program with a national network of partners in six states each
of whom had an array of their selected local partners and we kind of were you
know like an airplane we were traveling together and load in loose configuration
with an awful lot of moving parts and unlike an airplane we weren't in
entirely sure how we were going to do this and the implementations in each
state in each locale had to figure out really how to do the work we gave them a
tool that we had developed and some content that we had developed and we
were trying to help them learn how to become digitally literate for whatever
purposes they had work family support or whatever and a very important
characteristic of that project was the fact that people were free in the space
they were operating in to innovate and to implement to fail and to be
successful and learn over time how to do that and that's a very important point I
think that was very appropriate fortunately the era funding allowed that
type of grant to happen with lots of variations in local implementation and
overall from my perspective it was very successful we trained over 800
volunteers in 13,000 adult learners in about a hundred and twenty computer labs
each of which self-designed and they looked very different and they use
different community partners libraries were were had different roles in those
partnerships minutes oh boy they range from a small
Baptist Church in Treme the original african-american community in New
Orleans to a large one stop in Minneapolis to a library literacy
program in Richmond California and there was just a wide range of flavors and
outcomes IMLS awarded us a research grant that's nearing conclusion now that
looked at the very large set of system data and observations on the ground
about both how volunteer tutors and learners proceeded and became digitally
literate in these different contexts and I also wanted to mention when I'm
talking about digital literacy something Heidi mentioned a moment ago which was
the PIAA grant that was that's right in the center of adult education policy
development as Heidi was saying but that was unfortunately created in a in a
vacuum of effective partnerships from my perspective because there's no
information in that national and international database about little
library users or library use wouldn't that be nice to have had a question and
I think it wasn't there probably because the right partnerships weren't in place
at the time that that instrument was developed so we applied for a research
grant jointly with Multnomah County Library in Portland that IMLS awarded
last fall to actually go out and look at outreach populations for that Multnomah
County Library is trying to reach use the piac assessment tool to see what the
digital literacy and problem-solving skills of the population are and to try
to map those on to the skills that people need
be able to use information technology offered by the library so that's a way
of partnership is going to try to fill fill a vacuum that's I think very
important so very quickly the lessons learned from all of this and I'm sorry I
had to go through it so quickly our innovation really needs to have an
appropriate operational space to develop
collaboration and partnership mean different things to different types of
organizations we saw this over and over again they mean different things to to
library culture than they do to employment and training culture than
they do to adult education culture or social service agency culture and it's
really important to keep those differences in mind and work with them
as constructive opportunities and finally it's really important in our
work to position everyone all the partners as learners it's not just the
the end user who needs to learn in order for this work to be successful everyone
needs to be positioned as a learner particularly with respect to the new
technology is being used I'll stop there Thank you Thank You Heidi thank you
everyone my name is Jamie Marcus and I'm the library development manager and
Library Services and Technology Act coordinator for the great state of
Wyoming I've been involved in state libraries and state federal partnerships
for over ten years now in fact this last October I was named a champion of change
by the White House for promoting libraries as essential partners in the
Affordable Care Act outreach and but today I really want to speak on the role
that state libraries can have really as connectors for these federal
partnerships state libraries are in a unique role in terms of library
partnership opportune these on one hand we are the state level
partners for many organizations be top IMLS grants to States Laura Bush 21st
century grants national leadership grants and even a few of the grants on
the museum side of I MLS's portfolio you will see libraries and state libraries
as as key stakeholders and partners in those opportunities and don't even get
me started on irae some of those wonderful Bill and Melinda Gates grants
that are still trickling there's money available every now and then MacArthur
grant and any of the other grants that we've heard about this morning and the
Department of Education and other partner organizations that are here
state libraries often form one of those first-line partnerships for those
organizations however i would say that state libraries strongest role can be
and it really is for many state libraries is that whenever we act as
informed intermediaries for these federal and local partnership
opportunities I say informed intermediaries because State Library
agencies can both promote federal projects to libraries in our area but
then we can also promote the use of libraries to those federal projects and
those other entities that are out there seeking to do activities seeking to
disseminate information within our areas when state libraries are generally the
experts on the libraries in their states for example here a couple years ago when
the Institute of Museum and Library Services put a call out to state
libraries to do whatever it is we could do to help push information out to the
public about the rollout of the Affordable Care Act we in Wyoming did a
couple of different things first and foremost we did some training for
libraries in our state to train the library staff so that they kind of had
the broad strokes and kind of knew that the Affordable Care Act was rolling out
and what kinds of questions they would receive from the public what sorts of
tools websites references that they could use to answer those questions we
also put together a couple handouts that those local libraries could then give to
those patrons who had those questions and in that sense we helped the lie
very become the partner and do the actual activities and many libraries in
Wyoming and I know across the u.s. did varying forms of outreach activities
just depending on their locale the neighborhood the folks that they serve
in their state and area but state libraries help prompt some of those
activities and then on the other hand I worked with the Department of Health and
Human Services region 8 which is out of Denver and they held weekly
teleconferences and other trainings with various stakeholders who are also
putting out information on the Affordable Care Act and I went to every
one of their teleconferences even though many of those were for insurance
providers insurance sellers and then I also found other teleconferences or
other in person meetings AARP for health care workers and then whenever grants
were finally awarded and there were health care navigators on board I made
sure to talk to them as much as possible to disseminate one key piece of
information and that is remember libraries and remember that public
libraries exist in nearly every location of any size or there are bookmobiles or
branches we are everywhere most public libraries have some sort of community
meeting room they have some sort of public internet or technology that's
available to anybody especially these outside partner organizations to use and
that free Wi-Fi is a godsend and i also told these these organizations the key
fact that i think we all know and remember that for the most part
libraries are thought of as safe places to go to get your information especially
for something as interesting as the affordable care act and so those partner
organizations then hopefully and i know they did at least in wyoming they
remember to use the library and start holding a lot of their outreach events
in the libraries community rooms and then started partnering with the
libraries and in many cases this was not an entity that was on their radar as
much as we all would have loved it to be you know the first thought in their
minds so and i would say that Wyoming is not alone in what we do in fact I know
that there are but at least four Chiefs here in the
room state librarians and a few other library development managers and we have
staff in every state library whose sole job is to provide that background and
for libraries in their state and to be able to do the outreach and connect the
libraries to projects that would make the most sense and I would actually say
if you want to have some fun go ahead and ask any of these Chiefs about any
one of your your your projects one of your partnership opportunities and I bet
that can tell you at least two library library systems that would love to be a
partner in that project and they can tell you to who would say they would
love to be a partner but will never do anything about because state libraries
we know our libraries and without a doubt I can tell you right now in
Wyoming for any of these projects who your best partners are going to be and
in fact I can probably come pretty close by telling you exactly which activities
they're going to participate in and how what kind of output you're going to see
from partnering with them and and that goes nationwide so I guess really in
closing I just want to remind everybody that state libraries really are
excellent connectors for partnership opportunities because again we can both
connect libraries to the project and the project to the library Thank you Thank
You Jamie this is why you need to know the people right because the people know
what's going on so that's a great example of my first point and right is
make the personal connection with your state librarian so you know where you're
gonna get a good toehold Thank You Denise looking forward to hearing from
you is this on it should be okay until I don't do use mikes a lot as Heidi
indicated my name is Denise Tom back I'm out of the San Francisco regional office
of the employment and training administration of the Department of
Labor is that my six minutes okay um I was asked to come today to share a
little bit or talk to you a little bit about the new law passed last July the
workforce innovation and opportunity act or the opportunity act we couldn't come
up with good acronym with Wi a so we've we've
just been calling it the opportunity act in the office but talk a little bit
about how the library system can be a partner or actually continue to be a
partner and maybe that you weren't aware or you weren't involved under the old
law the workforce investment act so we'll looked and it was expanded under
the opportunity act so what I'd like to do a little bit and just to back up a
little bit the employment and training administration for those of you who
don't know we receive the money from Congress that's that's a lot it
allocated from Congress for the formula grants primarily the formula grants that
the states receive the states and territories receive for employment and
training services and activities states receive it and then it's based by
formula down to the local area so that's how it gets down to your community from
Congress on down even the workforce investment act of nineteen ninety eight
that was only supposed to last for a couple years but Congress just extended
it from of ten it also had the partnerships in it and it required a
seamless service and partners through the one-stop system is everyone does
anyone have association with the one-stop systems now couple okay well
maybe when I'm done you'll you'll look up your local area and maybe start to
develop a little better partnership and this did include the libraries but it
wasn't really enforced and it just kind of SAT there and went on the nice thing
with the opportunity act is it substantially changes the focus from the
the workforce investment act it requires a lot more partnership and it builds on
the partnerships and it returns the let's say the more control the more
service design what's needed to the communities to the local areas things
are not necessarily happening at the state as much
as they were under the Investment Act so what I'd like to do is kind of start a
little bit high level the opportunity act itself and we're working my way down
to the local area and then where I'm hoping when I'm done that you'll see the
connection with the library system so the opportunity act itself it it's
focusing on the evolving nature of the work force and the economic needs it's
moving as I said that responsibility to the local areas to have their pulse to
have their finger on the pulse of what's going on with workforce development with
employers with the community at large it replaces the limitations in training
funding and service delivery design so there isn't the the strict confines on
what can be trained there aren't the strict confines of what the funding is
per program there's more flexibility in moving the money around for where it's
needed in a community and the service delivery design is different there isn't
where they must go look for a job and then maybe they qualify for case
management and then maybe they can get to training the new law took that away
if somebody walks in and they need training they're going to go to training
it aligns workforce education and economic development it responds to
economic and labor market challenges okay it allows for increased flexibility
and requires regional collaboration this is what I'm saying again it brings it
down to the local area those that know what's going on in the community that's
what the law did now in in the way the money comes down with the law there's a
each state has a State Workforce Development Board they are like the
overseers they have oversight on the local workforce development boards but
it's the local workforce development boards who are actually developing the
strategies and implementing securing the one-stop operators selecting providers
that's happening now at the ground level more the the local Workforce Development
Board and just to give you a sense California has 49 of them Nevada has to
Alaska doesn't have a knee they just have the state I don't know if you know
what Wyoming has bed 11 and I think Portland's up to 12 now so it really
varies in California step 52 we got them to cut it down just a little bit but
anyway when I talk about the local Workforce Development Board and their
responsibilities they are to serve business and seekers collaboratively
increasing the opportunities for the most in need so when I heard earlier
today where it's those most in needs that the library is reaching out to or
that are coming into the library this is a great way for you to connect them with
the literacy skills or the training that they need with these opportunity act
dollars it's also to asset assess the services that are being provided to
those with barriers for job training and education so that they can secure that
job they might be able to secure that credential I think I need to move a
little faster oh my goodness okay um the local Workforce Development Board I
didn't think I read that much um ok so I'm going to let's get down to where it
gets down to you all ya know you're hearing you've heard enough that they
select the one-stop operator they're looking at labor market information for
skills training they're identifying training providers which the library
system can be a training provider they're coordinating with educational
providers and they have the flexibility for training option so I know I said
those really fast but with those roles this is how it would highlight and this
is how it would connect with the library systems because by law the library
system can be an eligible provider of training it can be a one-stop partner
now I'll tell you there's costs involved but you can be a one-stop partner you
can also receive statewide funds we when we provide money down to state
there's a pot that the governor can reserve it's called state why he likes
to call it the governor's reserve but it's actually statewide reserve you're
also the library system is eligible for those statewide funds so what we what
I've seen and I kind of did a poll in our state's and we have on eight states
in region six what still seems to be going on or more job search activities
helping someone get on a computer to access a job bank helping them with
their resume helping them connect to a workshop but what I'm seeing two in
talking to some is that it's growing there's more grant partnerships going on
Idaho specifically has instituted they receive I heard it earlier the gate they
had received a gates grant and they're working with the one stop for service
delivery they just received a grant from Microsoft and they're looking to do
computer training and they will take on the WIA participants so they will again
be partnering with I'm sorry the opportunity act participants for service
delivery so what I strongly just want to suggest in my last time up but can I go
vers what i really suggest is that you find out where your local area is where
your board is when they meet get to know your local board members get to know
your staff to the board each local area has a one-stop comprehensive center
which has which will have all the partners and activities in it as well as
affiliate sites get to know them you'll find out that there's there's ways for
you to get money be a part of the entire system and partner thank you
so thank you panel we've had the federal view down to the local view lessons
learned looking forward to some questions from all of you about federal
partnerships and how they play out at the local level hi there Miguel figured
oh I'm from the American Library Association and I believe strongly in
partnerships and I'm sorry to give this question to you because I think it's for
you and the the previous panel but partnership initiating partnerships i
think is really easy but increasingly as organizations are more niche and focused
managing partnerships can sometimes be really difficult so i was wondering if
you all had thoughts about how managing partnerships perhaps might be getting
easier or how it might be getting more complex especially as we move from
national partnerships to local partnerships and in light of the
collective impact and other types of models that are great but their
execution can sometimes be a challenge I think absolutely and collective impact
is a whole approach that requires a lot of setup and work and time to really
align everybody's agenda so it's a great question very fair question partnerships
are just as much work at the federal level as they are at the local level and
I'm sure that's true at the state level two so choose your partners wisely so
that you can go the distance and really meet your long-term goals with people
invite people to come on and join those long-term goals but i would say limit
the number of the short-term projects that you're doing that aren't all
driving towards your long-term strategic goals or you will spend a lot of time in
partnership nurturing but i'll see what the panelists have to say about that as
well Jamie do you want to take a crack at that I can I don't know if you like
the answer my answer for Wyoming library directors is we have them call the State
Library when they have questions about potential partners and our honest answer
is always to get them truly understand what the partner is
asking them to do and then what they can agree to and if they can't agree to you
know come to some really true understanding than not to go through
with whatever the project is and on the other hand we tell them that they just
have to hold fast so if they really want to participate in a certain project
because it's really of the needs of the community but they can't do steps four
through eight then say you can do steps one and two and then that's it and I'm
sorry we can't help you collect the data at the end but maybe in the end that'll
have more impact than not doing the project at all Stevie why I I just offer
the observation that what what worked among the partnerships that we observed
in be top work was having a common metric but freedom to innovate to to
implement the way they needed to and that has something to do with the way in
which funding is is offered and allowing the contributions of different partners
to be visible doesn't solve all the problems but that that helped a lot well
this might be not be really fair because it's the law but but I can say that from
the investment act to the opportunity act what we've seen is that it's more
open there's more partner buy-in and each partner has this a and everyone's
working together whether it's regulations or its performance
accountability how the money is going to be spent everyone's at the table this
time in the investment act there was only one entity workforce at the table
and and yet all these other people were required but nobody was really at the
table being allowed so I think what i see this time even though it's law is
that there's more openness and and true partnership in developing the whole
service design everything
that question other other questions here are on Twitter hi ho one alpha C
Hartford Public Library I have a question from Heidi Anthony some a lot
of people are graduating with their high school degrees and they're not ready to
transition to college they're using financial aid as you know for medial
courses I think this is a wonderful area where our libraries can fill a big gap
and I wanted to hear from both of you if there's any direct funding to support us
with some kind of program to help with the math reading and writing oh it's a
good one I have an idea partial ability today just it was just announced the
guidance for the ability to benefit pell grant money from the department of
education is one thing that i can put on the table from our department it was
rescinded and after much successful advocacy so thank you to all the
advocates in the audience it was restored partially to allow people who
do not have a high school diploma to get some bail money to help with early
college courses if they show ability to benefit so that guidance has just been
released it's quite complicated guidance but hopefully going forward it will be
more straightforward in how that gets released by community colleges and
elsewhere to help students so they're not burning through could I just make a
postscript comment on that because that's something I've been looking into
it for that partially restored ability to benefit criterion the the the
training will have to be sort of an on-ramp into a career pathway and so
that's going to be require and hopefully strengthen local partnership
requirements so and the other thing I wanted to add is unlike funds
appropriated to we oh yeah which is what in my shop we call
new opportunity act yeah that just rolls right off your tongue yeah that that the
the Pell Grant funds are more they're printed more like money okay it's not
tied to a programmatic appropriation the way many other programs are so the more
people who can qualify for them the more funding will be available to deliver the
services to them so it's not a fixed pie that you know if one one party gets more
funds for to deliver services for someone else is necessarily going to get
less so it's actually centered in the learner in the adult so in career
pathways is a great place for us to talk about this group of learners who need on
ramps into education on ramps into employment GC want to add about Career
Pathways one if I heard you right to you said that they were a high school
graduate but still basic skills deficient and and if once the final
regulations come out for the opportunity active that follows the workforce
investment act that int that youth would still be considered an out-of-school
youth so still eligible for a lot of the services partnering like if you do the
Career Pathways with education you could be partnering with the opportunity act
for additional remedial services supportive services all the the elements
and I believe they're up to 15 elements now of services and activities that are
available to the youth and congress also took a look and and said for the
opportunity act required seventy percent of the funds be spent on out-of-school
youth so even though a high school graduate if there's still basic skills
deficient they're considered an out-of-school youth under the new law
correct if they were 24 and 364 days you've got him big but then their adult
dead students right and then but they could still be Pell Grant eligible if
they didn't have a high school diploma and we're 25 or older it just would so
correct right yep so there are some new funding possibilities out there and I I
think strong local you know collaboration with a career pathway
system would be really really beneficial you know to access some of those
opportunities even though I think all the mechanisms aren't in place yet but
there's a lot of federal guidance on Career Pathways and a new tool k renewed
toolkit is coming out later this summer so you can watch for that that is a the
three agencies department of a department of labor and department of
HHS Health and Human Services put that together I have time for one more
I don't know that my Susan McVeigh State Library in Oklahoma I don't know that
much about the investment act but I know that the opportunity act has also
included adult learners or adult literacy organizations as eligible
applicants is that something Denise that your agency and Heidi's agency are
working on together or what shape is that taking will they simply be an
eligible in that applicant and apply to their local workforce is that the way it
clicking yeah the responsibility in that role is back to the local workforce
development areas so absolutely to be a provider you would be going through them
and there's two ways to be a provider one you can be an eligible training
provider to the department of labor system or an eligible provider of adult
education and libraries have always been so we are hoping that you know that is
renewed energy and also housing authorities have always been but we've
lost a lot so time to renew that energy around partnering with housing
authorities and libraries and I think we're at time all right well thank you
again panel