a shout out to my chair from the national association workforce board. or would get to come to the next board meeting. pleasure to work with you every day. i am here to talk about two initiatives. did not bring enough hand out. i will send you copies of these things. i want to round our efforts and shape the future. there are some handouts there. the best piece is the green sheet. save the future looks a little bit like this. a little software company in washington, thank you, seattle. more importantly, we have 150,000 partners in the united states. almost all of those are 50 employees are less. if that ecosystem isn't working for us then microsoft is not going to survive. nor will all the companies that work in the eye piece sector. we have more stem grabs or computer science. a whole range of folks. please check our web site. we would love more applicants but more importantly when we look at what we can do to be helpful as we see -- federal resources shrinking and state and local resources shrinking what are the appropriate roles for the private sector

continued to collide and run parallel, eight years ago as was mentioned i joined the board of the national association of workforce boards. 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 employers engagement in the public worse system. i believe that employers have the loudest and the strongest and the best voice in helping to shape the policy and to advocate 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. 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 a little bit of an interesting -- a twist a tale of two cities, the danville chamber, the l.a. chamber but we partnered to cowrite and put out a letter for chambers of commerce to support the bipartisan legislation that was introduced in the senate for the w.i. reauthorization. and because of the support and help