this is the way that i look at it, i'm just fascinated about folks that talk publically about this whole issue, and they seem to take one side or another. they are either focused on workforce, or they are focused on business. there seems to be this dichotomy in america on who you're rooting for in this thing. it just seems ridiculous because you've got to have both to do it. as many of you red tim collins, he says you can accomplish it. i think our voters elected us to be geniuses not either-or sort of folks. i don't believe we come up with a good solution unless we come up with a solution for both of these sectors. i don't mean small business or

large business or this sort of business, i mean business business. workforce or people jobs want to go home and have a good time on the weekend. all right. so what does the workforce need. i think first and foremost, it needs to have an environment for business growth. economic environment, public policies, technological infrastructure. i think also a workforce needs to be prepared. we'll talk a little about that later this afternoon. we need basic education. it's critical in the united states. it's definitely critical in dallas. we're working hard on that. definitely training program, some of the things you heard from the secretary and other things. higher education, the role that plays to make sure we don't outsource our important jobs to folks overseas or folks overseas here. lastly, a portfolio of workforce

ability -- one job does not fit for everybody. we have to have a portfolio of solutions to make sure we make this work. i do know we need organizational catalyst from time to time. business needs them and i think we need that in the public sector as well. we want to make it easier for businesses in the workforce, not harder. we need knowledge and data to drive decisions. we need strategies as well as tactical programs that we need to look at. in our case workforce solutions greater dallas is that catalyst. i don't know from the eyes laurie does. i look from the eyes of business. you have to have these five things things.

not better work harder but something specific. something that differentiates you versus the competition and takes care of your customer. third, a sustainable operation platform. something you do that makes that value proposition better. fourth, an ongoing drive for efficiency, taking the cost out of the system and making that value proposition better constantly. then you've got to be able to measure it, clear metrics for success to decide whether you're failing or succeeding. secondly the marketplace with news, innovation. things you come up with this year that didn't exist last year. so as i look at that, when lie at businesses, i looked at that with workforce. i was pleased to see it was there. first of all, they have got clear, bold goals. 115,000 jobs each year is what

their pass/fail is. a competitive value proposition, we want to be employer focused. one-stop shopping here. we do not -- we want to combine all the different phone calls you have to make so an employer gets to make one phone call and deal with all the federal and state beaurocracy there is. federal and state issues that there is. that is i think a clear difference. second, our sustainable operating platform is to break down the silos, we have to cross train people, there are too many people out there that have their one niche and their one silo and they are not cross trained. all they are doing is trying to solve their little niche. the customers and businesses want to make it simple. so we have got to be able to cross train them. an ongoing drive for efficiency. laurie's thing is to constantly reinvent the bottom line. how do we zero base this and provide more service was with

less dollars all the time. our metric is we talked about getting jobs. we don't care about getting "as" on forms we care about putting people to work. that is the most important metric here. and lastly, we believe in technology. we have an online workforce center that brings all this into a one-stop shop to make it a reality. so laurie has pa examples of it and i think it will bring it to life. thank you, laurie. [ applause ] >> thank you, mayor. working with the mayor has been really, really an eye opener. working with someone who comes out of the business perspective and you say, workforce is all about employers, workforce is about business, we are here to serve. he is asking the right questions and he is asking a lot of questions that that don't normally come up in a workforce setting. when we talk about workforce programming, we tend to talk

about all the rules that come from washington, all the things we know. our vernacular. it's nice to see someone that wants to put it in perspective. it makes it interesting for the two of us. going over the sheet he just presented with you just very quickly, add a few things to this, 115,000 jobs, i want to point out that the dallas program is benefited, as all the programs are, by being part of the texas model. as most of you in the room do know, in texas the system operates on more funding than most states. there may be five to six states that has funding at this level, it's extreme in texas. we have the big five. we have the workforce investment act. temporary assistance to needy families. food stamps. employment training program. and the snap program. we use the staff from the employment service. not the money. but the staff, the human talent, the human resources as part of our workforce center and low and behold the biggest sum of money and it's the most incredible

shift for all of us is child care for working families. if you don't have child care that is ready and available and affordable, the workforce doesn't show up. the workforce doesn't come. so we will be talking about how we've managed the child care piece of what we do as well. the bottom line, for anyone in the nonprofit, and we are a stand alone nonprofit, business leg, for any of you in nonprofit, if you go by, gosh, we got in under budget, no, that doesn't work. that doesn't work, you have to challenge yourself i ever day to say is this the most efficient program i can run. can i get outcomes for less money, less time? can my people do more quality things than time-intensive activity? that is not reinventing the bottom line. i think it applies to the workforce more than it has in a declining budget year, several declining budget years. and in a conversation with our

board of directors, we did it off the governance model. i don't want to spend my time in your board room talking about the churn. i want to know what your outcomes will be. and i think that is true for all business people. as we present our story and say, workforce development can work for you, they don't want to hear about the sill os. they don't want to here about cross-training professionals. what they want to hear about is what you'll do for them, how long it will take, and what it's going to cost them. we love to brag a bit, but there's a lot to brag about, dallas is on the grow. we're seeing jobs. we're seeing development. when you look out the windows downtown and you see cranes in the air. and that means business is good, and that is putting the right people in the jobs, and that is one of the things workforce is here for. our award-winning program this year is northgate constructers, north gate is a cooperative that came on board and won the contract to build the connector to the dallas-ft. worth airport.

our airports are also just booming. dfw and love field have been through reconstruction in the past couple of years. amazing traffic coming through those airports and and we need better roads to get there. so this was a marriage that i did not anticipate. you have books in front of you that are regional workforce leadership. this is our annual report, and this is a culmination of the dallas workforce program, fork force solutions north texas. north texas was already singled out by the secretary talking about their mobile unit. we have some amazing projects, and i want you to see all of the projects. but if you turn to the center of the book. you see infrastructure, we took it from the president's council's definition. infrastructure is everything from transmission and broadband to road construction. and we jumped on road construction. turns out federal grants for road construction require on-the-job training meaning

people have a curriculum they must follow on the job. something we know in workforce. they also required that more women be hired in construction. they also asked more veterans be hired in construction and more minority vendors. we made a pact with northgate, we started out with a different company. we have three companies working on our sector initiative. northgate was ready and willing and had the jobs. their challenge was grant diversity. they needed women to do construction. that is not easy. i've done this business, for many, many years putting women in construction jobs and hard hats, we have all tried it and it is very difficult. training had to be accomplished under their syllabus for ojt, and we had a time crunch. i will tell you, they are ahead of schedule. sector specific response. we came up with three different companies who did road construction and said what do you need? they said here is what we need and how fast we need it. we joined forces with community colleges and more on the job training conversation than we had previously done.

came of that a very short turnaround. this was about seven, six months in the making. 51 hires, and 25 pending. 22% women. 46% came off the ui roles. and 33% texas back to work. what is that? it's a program that benefits us greatly. the state comes to terms, let's get people with low skill and prior low wage by off the rolls by giving the company a credit to hire them and keep them for four months. it makes a difference. anything your state can do to incentivize employers. there's a time here of perhaps discrimination against long-term unemployed. we are hearing that they get turned down because employers feel that they sat out the recession. they chose not the find a job. it's hard to say. it's very hard to say. but giving an employer an in

incentive to hire a worker like this is one way to tackle the problem. they have done that. we're very proud of our veterans and we have many of them. 2011 texas honored the employer as employer of the year, north gate constructers. our other big story is the omni dallas convention center. we took a parking lot and turned it into a multi-million dollar economic theme. it's an awesome hotel. it's a convention hotel. previously we didn't have a convention hotel. a very big struggle between our mayor and city council over two mayor terms. lots of things went on to see this happen. omni had to come to the table a lot with a lot of money. they had built a similar hotel in ft. worth. they knew what they wanted. employer driven. they came to the workforce system and said, i want you to put this on the table and give me this. employer directed. that is what we are about. today, they have hired 522 of

our workers with a projections for 750 by march of this year. i don't think we can ask for better in our results conversation. they needed a ready work force partnership. they didn't just want it out of our stables. they didn't want to come and say how do you have? who can we train? they wanted the community college involved and faith based organizations. at the bottom, you see his bridge builders, they allowed -- developed a curriculum for people in the community, people in the downtown community to go to training and become a hotel employee. hardest program we've ever dealt with. it's very, very difficult, but the rewards are to see. people who live near the hotel can work in the hotel. we're building jobs and we're building families. people who had been unemployed far beyond their unemployment benefits. it's a community partnership. rest care is our provider, they are a for-profit company out of louisville. they are an amazing group to work with.

and we have the addition of work in texas, which is the state database. 700 fulltime jobs. this is the story. this is the story. it was a parking lot, a parking lot that sits adjacent to the u.s. department of labor, no less. we didn't take labor's parking lot. okay, it was a 6 acre parking lot belonging to the city of dallas. it is now a $500 million hotel. it is leed silver certified and they have some great facilities for the downtown night life. machinesed earlier, one of the other things that we are known for in dallas and we have done well child care. workforce should and does manage the child care for families. that is the predicate for the child care assistance that you be working and keep your job. it's a good dove tail and it's all about the economy, if you have good daycare, on top of the issue of daycare and daycare

when people need it, men and women both go to work. you don't have the issue of the child is sick. talk to employers how long are they without employees because the child is sick or because they didn't have child care that was consistent and reliable. we have two objectives in this. employers depend on employees to get to work and then tomorrow's workforce begins in pre-k, we have these kids in schools. little three-year-olds, if they are not learning to read, eating correctly or learning, that is your workforce of tomorrow. in 2011, we served 24,000 children in this system. about an average of 11,085 per day. we did not run a daycare. we simply facilitate daycare for working families through the daycares licensed in our community. workforce and business align to build a future workforce and provide child care for today's working families. it's a huge plus in our texas model, and i strongly encourage other states to follow.

with that, mayor, i'll turn it back to you. >> thank you very much, laurie. [ applause ] >> thank you. next we have laurie moran, another laurie. president of danville pennsylvania county chamber of commerce, a position she held 10 years. she is currently chair of the national association of workforce boards and has served on their board of directors for the past eight years. a leader in that organization. thank you for being with us today, laurie, tell us what is going on there. [ applause ] >> thank you, after listening to dallas i think we should have renamed this to something like a tale of two cities and my other observation is why am i from virginia and my accent is more southern than those from dallas? so let me tell you what we are doing, even though we are very

different, you'll hear a lot of common themes my guess is throughout the entire afternoon so i want to share with you a little bit about what is happening in our community and why it's so important as we talk about business engagement in the public workforce sector. before i joined the chamber of commerce, i worked for the tire company in the danville community. it is a small community, the city of danville is 42,000 people. we have an msa of 110,000 people. at the time i was at good year, it was at its peak and it's the number one employer in our region. while i was in goodyear we were dealing with a crisis in our workforce, which i became very much involved in. we were watching an aging workforce that was hitting retirement age and yet we didn't

have the skilled craftsmen and workers that were able to come into the workplace and replace those people when they retired. so our company was involved in workforce. it was during that time i was appointed to my local workforce investment board. when i joined my chamber of commerce as president and ceo in january of 2002, to tell you a little bit about our community and what we were going through, double digit unemployment was already in our community. we were a community that was built on textiles, tobacco, and furniture. if you want to talk about the perfect storm, talk about what so we were in double digit unemployment when the rest of the country was still doing fairly well. in a 10 month period we saw over 18,000 people lose jobs in my

city and county. population of 110,000, 18,000 jobs just in textiles and tobacco, and the furniture market. so when i went to the chamber, workforce development, the job creation piece was the number one issue facing our region. it still is today. and you cannot have the conversation about job creation without having the workforce conversation. they are one and the same no matter what anyone else will say, they are one and the same. we worked closely as a chamber and continue to do so with our local workforce investment board. we worked with our mandated partners. at that time we still had a lot of silos in our region, and the chamber took a key leadership role in trying to bring all the partners to the table to have the community conversation about the importance of workforce development and the importance of working with our employers, we helped to convene a workforce

summit that brought 20 plus partners together as well as employers to have these conversations. and as a result built a relationship with public sector as well as private sector that was built on trust and open communications among all of our agencies. our whip continued to be a front-runner and leader in all of these conversations and a few years ago came out and said the employer is our number one customer. we cannot serve job seekers if we are not also serving our employers, because we have to be training and working with our job seekers for the jobs that are going to be here for them when they complete our programs. about two and a half years ago the chamber entered into a partnership with our community action agency to tell you what small communities are like, the executive director of our c.a.p. is the mayor of our city and he

is a former chairman of one of the predecessor chambers that was formed in the '80s. it's a strong connection and working relationship with everyone. two and a half years ago, the chamber partnered with there are c.a.p. on the summer youth program. we worked with and provided the preemployment training for our youth using employers and hr managers from across the region to come in and talk to the youth about the expectations of going into the workplace. we also worked in identifying work sites so that our youth had meaningful job experiences during that program. had a successful partnership with them and saw tremendous success through the summer youth program and a year and a half ago, because of a lot of that working relationship building, the chamber entered into a formal memorandum of understanding, mou, with our community action agency, who is our one-stop operator to provide the business outreach for the one-stop center. my chamber has a full time

person on staff who markets the one-stop program and services that are available, who is also extremely familiar with all of the programs and services offered by all of the partners and literally goes in to be that representative for that business to help them cut through the red tape or lack of understanding about what is available, to help them get beyond any preconceived and often wrong perceptions they may have about what the workforce is like and what's available to them to help them identify what's best to grow their workforce and get the best employees possible. i have a staff member doing this daily, has been for the last year and a half, working hand in hand going back to our one-stop center meeting with case managers boutd what are the needs, the requirements of jobs, what types of applicants are they looking for and finding the best fema for those employers.

this person is reporting back to the workforce investment board so we can look at and start to have conversations around what are the policies needed or what happens different programs or strategies. we are seeing some strong development of our sectors and sector strategies as a result of these conversations. we are seeing employers that are stepping up and coming to serve on our workforce board. i don't know about a lot of you with you we always had trouble getting private sector to come to the table. but they are seeing the value of serve in that role, and they are offering to do that. to give you a few stats of what we have done, in our first year of our program, our business service manager went out and made over 100 employer visits those were one-on-one visits and met with 200 plus other groups and sat in meetings. we have conducted job farce, targeted job farce, communitywide job fairs.

this past october we did a job fair, had 33 employers participate, 500 job openings. as a result of that job fair, we were able to place 300 of our clients into jobs as a result of that. that is 300 people that i'm not sure would have gotten into those jobs and i'm not sure how easily the employer would have filled them without the additional connections. so we are seeing great results. we are doing wage and benefit surveys with our employers because we're also trying to help our employers have a better understanding of what the marketplace is, to understand how to be competitive in the marketplace. tremendous work, we have seen a benefit by having the partnership between the chamber and workforce investment board and the one-stop operator and as -- have seen that as a model we believe has some real good long-term benefit for the region as we help connect employers more to the system. let me say that, as my worlds have continued to collide and

run parallel, eight years ago, as was mentioned i joined the workforce board and went in as the chair almost a year ago. i am a firm believer that not just at the local level but at the national level, we have to have more employer engagement in the public workforce system. i believe that employers have the loudest and the strongest and the best voice in helping to shape the policy and advocating for the work that every one of us in this room is doing on a day in and day out basis. i will have to also share some tremendous thank yous to people sitting in this room. gracious, time flies when you're having fun. a few months ago, we'll put it that way, a few months ago we had an opportunity and my chamber partnered with the l.a. chamber of commerce.

which is an interesting twist, the tale of two cities, the danville chamber and l.a. chamber. we partnered to co-write and put out a signed letter from the chamber of commerce to support the bipartisan legislation introduced into the senate for the w.a.i. organization. because of support from the u.s. conference of mayors and people sitting in this room, we had 106 chambers from across the country that we're estimating represented about 100,000 employers that signed onto that letter. i will tell you the amount of comments and the appreciation that we have received back because of that level of support, and i owe tremendous thanks to the people in l.a., l.a. chamber of commerce, and the people in this room. as i look around and i look at the people represented, i'm thinking, yes, your chamber signed on. we ended up, we did an initial push. because many of you are aware because of different bills on the house side, we kind of

stepped back from that particular letter, because it was addressed in the senate bill to look at shared principals that we all believe in to look at a different way to frame it and go back out and get that support. but, i do believe, not only at the local level but at the national level, we have to engage employers because again, i will come back to what i started with, job creation, and workforce development go hand in hand. you do not have one without the other. and so i thank all of you for the tremendous work that you are continuing to do and i am certainly open to any questions. [ applause ] >> thank you. so we've got two professionals up here that are very experienced. questions? thoughts? anybody that has got anything? anything that you guys want to add that you heard? >> i just will add, there's a card on your table that will get you to our online website, our online -- sorry, workforce center. and i mean to bring it up

because it's an innovation that i don't think that we have seen before. it is a full service one-stop online, including voice-over training. so if you go to the home and little under there hit "training" for those professionals in the audience, you'll hear extreme -- linda davis. thank you so much. linda is with me. there's amazing training that can be delivered. again, there's so many of us in the board. 6,000 workforce boards, 3,000 centers. how much more of this do we need to bring this to the internet and to begin to share our information so that people can gain from this throughout the country and not just in one location. >> that is what i'm hearing, kind of best practices that are out there, the more we can simplify and make this consistent, obviously things have to be tailored for each market but not reinventing the wheel is critical.

employers and the labor doesn't. well, great, thank you very much, ladies, i appreciate it. [ applause ] tonight on communicators, consumer electronics show, the look at the impact of mobile networks on society and improving spectrum use. the world's largest provider of mobile networks. also, what's an ultrabook and the latest in smartphones with bryan deaner taupe on c-span 2. >> miss the latest on c-span? subscribe to our youtube channel and we'll notify you of the newest video approach, signature programs, road to the white house and campaign 2012, plus our recent lcv city tour of beaumont, texas. >> there was a sad, tragic ep