gentlemen welcome to the regular meeting of the government audit. to my right is supervisor katie tang and david campos. i would also like to welcome the clerk of the committee. the clerk is miss andrea os berry and broadcasting this for sf gov

tv. >> please make sure to silence all cell phones and devices. >> thank you, very much. okay. clerk pleas read the first item. item no. 1 hearing regarding the training of job placement and disadvantaged workers. >> all right ladies and gentlemen this hearing is called by supervisors london breed. >> thanks to the committee for heeg this item today. one of the first legislations that i introduced into this office was the tax exclusion. part of the

premise to figure out a way to retain and grow our tech company here in san francisco it was promise that we made to our city that we would be growing jobs. one of the questions that came up during this process is which communities and for whom are we creating this job market for. and feedback that i often got is that are we often creating jobs for those with college degrees and backgrounds in engineering. and the question is how is this going to benefit communities that are here particularly under served communities, the south of market, tender lion and mission districts. the impetus for calling this hearing is to do a check in. this is rather new in

terms of an initiative for us. the federal judge has allocated funding for our city to do a training program to help the folks get the skill set they need in order to be competitive for a new job. not every job requires a degree in engineering and computer science but maybe skill sets that we can get through a program such as this. techsf began last fall. it's just begun. it's not a program that we can fully evaluate yet, but i think it's important that we have an opportunity while it's on going to do a check in to see if we are actually reaching the communities that we intended to reach. if we are providing the skill sets, the tech companies need and whether we are adequately partnered with tech companies to ensure

it's graduates get jobs and lastly at the midway point to see if there are other ways that the board of supervisors can help this to become successful. i think what everyone fwhants -- wants in this room is real outcome and normal san francisco residents would not normally get to this sector and all of us in the fall will be incredibly excited. that is the purpose of this hearing is really a check in with providing feedback and also to just coordinate better communications amongst the various different sectors. i know supervisor breed wants to make comments as well and want to thank her for here cosponsor ship and she talked about one of her top priorities was getting jobs for her community and we have been working very

closely on this hearing and i want to thank conner johnson and supervisor breed's office. they are the ones doing the bulk of the work in getting this hearing prepared. >> thank you so much for being here today. this is my first response -- sponsoring this hearing. the communities we serve need these kinds of opportunities. i know that us working together both from the city side and the private sector side can really help to create the kind of opportunities for our communities that are so desperately needed. i want to thank the directors, rufo and simmonds and staff for presenting today and i want to thank the tech companies that

have joined us today. i know everybody is very eager to get to work and coming here to talk about this matter. it's very appreciated. while san francisco is contributing to its economic success, that does not always reach our most disadvantaged communities. i'm here to help everyone be part of this success. i don't want this to be silicone valley or career for other areas. san francisco's tech center should be driven by san franciscans that reflect our commute -- communities. this is better for our economy and it's better for our residents. so how can we do it? first we at city hall must ensure that we are collaborating with the tech force industry and make sure we are ready for the future. we

need training programs particularly for disadvantaged communities and we need private partnerships and oed's. i'm specifically looking to answering 4 questions. is the program reaching under served communities. is it's training geared towards what tech companies actually need. is techsf partnering with companies to get jobs and what can we do to hide. the digital divide is only one part of our solution. we need to focus on transitional age youth and high school students and we need to cross program collaboration to ensure one program advance to another level. i also think we should consider what the next

steps are after tech sf which is a temporary grant program. i am determined that these opportunities be shared. i look forward to your presentation and thank you all very much for being here. >> ladies and gentlemen, time for the fun to begin. >> i want to thank supervisor breed for calling this hearing. i really appreciate the leadership that they have taken on this issue. i want to provide some context for why i think this hearing is really important. i think that everything that was said by supervisor kim and supervisor breed, i completely agree with and we welcome the prosperity that has been brought to the city by the tech companies. but i do want to provide some

perspective. this city too has made an investment in these tech companies. and when we changed our tax system last year, if you look at the over all amount that the tech industry is paying in taxes in san francisco, it's about 5 percent less they are paying today in the system. i think the board of supervisors supported the effort to move away from the payroll tax. any businesses and industry comes with responsibility. the question that i hope we get to see an answer for is what are they doing, not saying, but what are they doing in response to that investment from the city. are we truly getting anything in concrete in return. what i have seen in my

neighborhood and district especially mount mission that we have seen a great influx of tech workers. we are happy to see so many people want to come into this neighborhood. but with that influx comes some challenges. resents in the mission have increased dramatically in the last year 1/2 and it's not uncommon to see a one bedroom apartment going for $3,000 in the mission now a days. so the question is, as their workers are moving into these neighborhood, what are these companies doing to give something back. in the mission it's especially important because even though it is this hot neighborhood, 6 of 10 lowest performing schools are in the mission where many of the tech companies and many of the workers have a presence. what are they doing concretely to really give back to a city

that has embraced them. i am confident of the mayor's office at work force and economic development. ron simmonds has a long history of doing the most with very little. i'm confident with the city as ready to partner with them, but the city can only go as far as these industries are willing to go. it's really important to get the specification. we've seen a lot of chat and a lot of talk but the devil is in the detail and the proof is in the pudding and i would hope to see a lot of that today. thank you. >> okay, thank you, everyone. i'm going to briefly go over the agenda for the public. first we'll have todd ruf oh who will talk about the labor market. rond a will bring

information about tech sf and the executive director will talk about techsf services and two employers. community director and finally we'll have techsf participants i really appreciate the opportunity to come and talk about jobs. and

training and preparing san franciscans and connecting san francisco to those jobs. last week the state released unemployment rate and in march it has has a rate of 6 percent. >> it is also in those numbers we released the job growth numbers. san francisco had a job growth rate of 3.6 percent to a national average. it's a long way of saying that san francisco is recovering and san francisco is growing jobs. and it's important to sort of note that as the economy recovers, that the most powerful force

for reduce unemployment is supporting the growth of these jobs in san francisco. and just from by way of background, and asment -- as many of the supervisors noted, it doesn't just happen. it can be nurtured and reflects decisions we've made to supporting efforts and efforts to the growing manufacturing sector in san francisco. these are collective means that we make to support those jobs. in the office of economic and work force development, we see our folks in that role to help nut -- nurture that environment. there is a number of tools in economic work force development to achieve that and techsf is

an important one of those tools. with that, let's get to the program. >> thank you all this morning for having me here, supervisors. i have worked with most of you all and particularly supervisor kim, we've been at this for almost two years. just to give you some time lines around how all this came about. we responded to a grant in the fall of 2011. it was an h 1v grant and we got notification in the spring of last year that we won the award and received the fund ing in july. over the last year 1/2 we

have been preparing to receive funding what we call sector academy training. this is the fourth out of my office. the first one was city build which started in 2005-2006 and with the fund we were able to start the health care academy and now we are techsf. the concept of the sector of academies is to look at the labor market and set up training where we can ensure that folks get placement and the idea is to get hard and soft skill training and partner with the employer community to ensure that the participants have an opportunity of gaining employment upon compleement. in -- completion. it's not like you are going to a community

college for a year or two. the idea is to give folks enough skill and relevant skills so they can get employed in a shorter period of time over all throughout all the academies that we provide, the majority of the participants that we serve throughout san francisco are folks that are usually not in the labor market, struggling to get into labor market or have some issues that may prevent them from easily getting into labor market so when we saw the grant for technology it seemed the try the structure to get this set up. this is the first time i get called for a hearing and i'm glad about that to give i -- you a baseline for that. i want to provide an overview and as supervisor cohen said, all of our programs are done on a

team approach. at a high level the vision of techsf to ensure the residents and county of san francisco get an opportunity to participate in the tech sector. and the training we provide is relevant. >> i want to stop for a second. do you have copies of the printout? we don't have any here. does everybody have a copy of the powerpoint?

>> so the initiative brings together the industry, employers, educators, the community based organizations as well as the city to provide a consortium to address this technology. the other idea behind this is that we'll be able to use the federal dollars as seed money and at the end of this we'll have a system that is established and we are able to leverage funding to keep it going. so our focus has been on targeting individuals that would otherwise not again get an opportunity to participate in the tech sector. h 1b by

definition does have eligibility requirements. all participants have to be 18 years and older. they need high school diploma or ged will safe that requirement and some work experience, some history. the other population that dol identified in this particular grant were individuals that had been identified as having long-term unemployment as a target population. in long-term unemployment meant that you have been unemployed for six months or more. we were just really starting to come out of the recession we were in so we were seeing in terms of who were left as being unemployed are people that were unemployed for a long time which means their skills were not up to speed to compete in the market

and needed some additional assistance. from 18 years to 24 year-olds and you will see the data in the next largest group we serve is up to 40 and that has to do with the grant requirements. i'm not sure with the process if you want to stop me as i'm going. >> maybe you can help someone keep the slides moving because they are not moving with you. >> we have not really moved yet. with the funding, i want to clarify the funding. we've been talking to you all individually about the amount of funding we received and just to tell you

how we wrote these grants. we wrote them in a partnership. so west ed which is here today partnered with us in applying for the grant. the way that grant is set up is that the city receives a portion of that grant. we receive about $3 million in assistance to our tech academy. the other 2 million goes to west ed to provide in incumbent workers that are working already but need a certain amount of skill grades and that's folks working in ibm and at&t companies. that's the $5 million. the $3 million which came later is something called the work force

innovation fund grant. that was a grant to help us look at how we can use technology to integrate it into work force in a more creative way. $2.4 million of that fund comes to us. the other $600,000 goes to our other partner to do evaluation as well. so while the total was $8 million the city did not receive all the $8 million. that was the way the grant was focused when it was received. so both grants essentially through dol requirements have a very at the end extensive evaluation that we are going through and we'll have at the end of both of these grants. >> can you tell us what year are we in this grant cycle. >> we are in the first year of

both these grants. so the width grants is 3 years and the hb grant is 4. that's how i refer to it vernacular wise. in terms of the partnerships and how it's set up. the assessment case management job search skills and internship and job placement is done through a group. the other academy tech mecca and usf is i would say secondary providers to those services, but the three organizations that i mentioned earlier are sort of our primary. they do all of our support services. the training as you can see is done by those

same organizations and i would add the community college and sf state is also a part of that. there is also a number of educational consultants that have helped us with labor market research, industry knowledge and know how, specific information, community technology has helped us a lot in the initial writing of the grant and helped with the labor market research. sf unified also is a part of this, not so much as a paid participant, but when we wrote the grant, we definitely consulted with them and my latest rfp, we added some non-grant dollars to get to the school district side. the grant was not focused on high school students so in

order to address that. typically that's not what my office does because dcyf does a lot more, but because we wanted to get to folks earlier, we took resources out of my budget to get to that area. the incumbent worker training is done with the department of video coalition and as we are done with the presentation, you will happy new year more about that. currently we have 150 students enrolled. so we currently have all of those students who will be done with those various trainings by the end of summer, but i will talk of about of that 150 we do have 25 hard place ments so far

meaning that we have been able to place them. this slide is showing you the breakdown of the dollars around the fund that go we received. so you can see how to funding laid out for us. the other thing i think that's important to know about h 1b grant is the whole point of h 1b visas is a lot of companies use that to bring workers in. they are sending a message that they want us, the united states as a whole because these are federal grants, to have an opportunity to set up training systems that we can grow our own and because at the time we submitted this grant, the tech industry was booming and we had a market for it. i think we were able to really show the advantages of

why an h 1b grant would be a value for us. the additional dollars that the width is able to provide and do some innovative things about this company. for city bill which was really focused on construction. we have a very drawn out -- weigh in which i notify students of potential openings. we are able to experiment with something called techs to work which is an application that we want to pilot with our city bill students because now i have five years of cohorts of students that are waiting to be employed. we are coming back with a tech boom that i can do a mass text to notify them of jobs. i never had that ability.

we were doing calling up on the phone type of thing. so this allows us to do these types of things to make it easier for our population to be notified of employment. >> i don't know if you are done with the innovation fund, my question was on the h 1 b funding. i know it's targeted towards the occupation of industries. i'm clearly one of those is the tech industry which we unfortunately in our country we are not training for. is it particularly for the industry? my guess is if we are doing it by occupation those would be fairly highly

skilled positions that if the tech industry is going to convince the government to give an h 1b visa, for my understanding they have to show high threshold in terms of training in order to bring those individuals over. does the program that's funding then have to train those people for specific jobs or just an industry as a whole? >> the industry as a whole. so we had to look at market data and look at growth and find the occupations that met the need of the populations that we wanted to try to recruit. you will see as i go through my demographics, most of the students at techsf have only a high school diploma. you will see a chart that actually shows you the types of things that we are trying to train for