Collective action is about everyday leaders joining forces as stewards to carry forth the California dream.

Stewardship, Collective Action and the Everyday Leader

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Nov 7 · 3 min read

The following is an excerpt from the Van’s plenary speech at the 2019 California Economic Summit.

By Van Ton-Quinlivan

I’m on the Leadership Council of California Forward, the organizers of this Summit. You heard Oscar talk about stewardship, a core value that informs our work. I too share those values and was named a California Steward Leader in 2017.

I have my own California dream story. My family escaped from the Viet Nam War in 1975 and immigrated to the U.S. when I was just six years old. Although my family struggled, thanks to the support of community healthcare services, lunch tokens, and English as a second language classes, we eventually got back on our feet.

This experience grounds me. Throughout my career as an executive in the private sector, public sector, and now in the non-profit sector, I’ve worked to pay it forward and steward the same opportunity I had then.

I’m going to hone in on the concept of action — the kind of action that magnifies our personal impact. The action that brings us out of our comfortable silos in partnership with others. The kind of action that gives us courage to take on challenges of a size we would never tackle if alone.

I’m talking about collective action — the kind of action that occurs when we identify common ground.

My first experience with the Summit was not from the stage, it was from the audience. Like most of you, I was an everyday leader trying to do the right thing as vice chancellor driving the workforce mission of the California Community Colleges, the largest system of higher education in the nation with 115 institutions.

All I wanted was for more students to land successfully in the workforce through good career education programs. Why? Because I knew first-hand from my own personal story that a good education creates opportunity and opens doors.

Coincidentally during that same time, the Summit’s partners held a series of regional meetings and surfaced the most pressing issue that they had in common — they needed skilled workers to fuel their economies. This was their number one burning issue then.

That’s when they found me. My system of community colleges could deliver one million more skilled workers, but only if some serious and substantive policy changes were made.

It would be a big, big lift. The friction to secure the changes would be great.

But thanks to my Summit partners, I had the input and support of Deb Nankivell/Mike Betts/Pete Weber/Ashley Swearingen in Fresno, Bill Allen and Alma Salazar in LA, Paul Granillo in the Inland Empire, Bill Mueller in Sacramento, Linda Bidrossian and Carl Guardino in the Bay Area/Silicon Valley, Lucy Dunn in Orange County, Oscar Chavez in the North Bay, Bruce Insley in the South Central, Mark Cafferty in San Diego, Kathy Moxon in the Red Coast, Rory Rottschalk in the Sierras, Kate Roberts in Monterey, Jim Mayer and Lenny Mendonca of CAFWD, Dave Regan of the SEIU United Healthcare Workers, Kish Rajan at GOBIZ, Glenda Humiston at the UCNR, and more.

These were the steward leaders within our regions and state. They hosted regional townhalls, served on task forces, wrote letters to endorse, and showed up to testify against the opposition.

The collective action bore results — you may know it by the name Strong Workforce Program. The Governor, Assembly, and Senate flowed new Strong Workforce monies into every region to connect employers and students along educational pathways of importance to regional labor needs.

New career education paths in cloud computing, digital retail ready, hi-touch healthcare, self-employment pathways into the gig economy, net zero energy facilities management, NextFlex advanced manufacturing technologies embedded in fabrics, and so on. The curricular innovations started coming from community colleges and their partners in every region, in service of students and employers.

This Summit is about identifying the opportunity for collective action. It’s about everyday leaders joining forces as stewards to carry forth the California dream.

So, everyday leaders, what are the issues where others may find common ground with you? What are the issues that can only be solved together, that we cannot solve alone? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Written by

Thought leader & do-er. Exec-In-Residence @IFTF. Emeritus Exec Vice Chancellor Workforce & Digital Futures @CalCommColleges. #Wkdev #HigherEd #FutureofWork

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