Impact Report
2019-2020

A Letter from Leadership

We are proud to present this report which celebrates our work to keep kids connected, engaged and hopeful for the future in a school year that ended amidst a fog of uncertainty in every aspect of our lives –- including our work, our schools, our personal relationships and our community.

Despite the many challenges of 2020, we remained committed to our mission and values through the innovation of education-to-career opportunities in support of local students:

  • Lifting up student voices! Beginning Fall 2019, we expanded our partnership with YouthTruth Student Survey, which illustrated how our county’s students experience higher levels of stress and anxiety about their futures, exacerbated by the impacts of distance learning and the catastrophic fires over the past several years. The results validate the crucial need for the kind of engagement, hands-on learning and career exploration that career technical education provides.
  • Demonstrating our values by getting behind: Black Lives Matter. In addition to publicly acknowledging Black Lives Matter, we began our own journey to understand and address systemic racism, seeking meaningful change in both ourselves and our organization by engaging in honest conversations about race and unconscious bias.
  • Investing quickly and wisely. In a quick response to support what we heard was most needed by CTE teachers, we launched a distance learning grant program to get tools, supplies, and materials in the hands of students in maker, engineering and construction courses.

 

And while we are proud to be sharing the accomplishments of CTE Foundation through this report, these accomplishments were not possible without the dedication and resiliency of our educators. We are awed by the empathy, creativity and dedication of the teachers who persevered through so much that was unknown, unpredictable and uncertain.

Despite the shadow that the COVID-19 pandemic cast over the learning landscape in spring 2020, it’s because of the creativity of our educators and the initiative and flexibility of many of our students that we can report positive outcomes. Our success is directly related to their commitment to hands-on learning and their drive to continue pursuing their curiosity. 

We cannot help but be extremely proud of the innovation and resilience of CTE Foundation staff to meet the needs of students and teachers through a crisis that we never could have predicted. And we are most grateful to our donors, board members and community partners who have cheered us along the way.

Sincerely,

Kathy Goodacre, CEO & Jeremy Olsan, Chair

Photo by Yanell Velasquez, media arts student at Sonoma Valley High School

Our

Solutions

More than 10,000 students engaged in career-connected learning since 2013.

Career Technical Education (CTE) Foundation invests in innovative CTE courses and quality work-based learning activities that improve student engagement and provide opportunities to explore careers.

We partner with local employers, educators and schools in the design and implementation of programs. This approach ensures that local youth have a greater chance of seeing the connections between academics and the workplace. CTE coursework and programs help students develop in-demand technical and work readiness skills that employers need, and create an informed education-to-career pathway that will lead to a successful and fulfilling future.

CTE Foundation’s efforts would not be possible without the enduring partnerships developed since our founding in 2013.

Our ability to nimbly pivot support for educators and students during the COVID-19 crisis is due in large part to the commitment of our education partners and the many funders who  support this work.