We strongly encourage you to attend this event.  We promise you will be impressed by the teachers and facilities that are preparing high school students throughout the county for the workforce.Check it out!

 Get your tickets now for this great event at Los Gatos High.

This adult event is not to be missed, with an amazing line-up of restaurants and wineries working together to raise money to support youth mental health programs.  Get the details and buy tickets.

 

After two years of primarily working with Los Gatos and West Valley youth and businesses, we are actively seeking to expand our services throughout the county. We are working to find larger and multi-site employers, which will enable us to have work opportunities that are close to the youth we are supporting. This has a few tangible implications:

• We have moved. We are now co-located with the Silicon Valley Children's Fund on Union Avenue. This will help us achieve one of our key 2012 objectives, which is to offer 30% of our work hours to current and former foster youth. Also, a huge thanks to SVCF for providing a sizeable grant to support our efforts this year.
• We are collaborating with San Jose Councilmember Rose Herrera and her District 8 office to present the TeenForce concept to more businesses on the east side of San Jose.

Four clients in four different cities! 

• Oh, Oh Organic (Campbell) - helping with office work and bookkeeping
• Los Gatos Floors (Los Gatos) - a training position as a flooring worker and another position doing office work, bookkeeping and social media marketing
• Lake Cunningham Regional Skate Park (San Jose) - front counter worker at the state's largest skate park!
• Wingstop (Sunnyvale) - front counter worker

• Trader Joe's store#181 - five youth learned bagging, stocking, pricing and other grocery skills (see the photo below)
• Kickoff Topic - Karmen Reed offered 8 hours of training to four youth who learned the finer points of helping small businesses use Facebook, blogs and other tools to stake out their space in the social networking arena
• Wingstop is offering monthly opportunities for youth to observe the various restaurant positions and see what it is like to work in a fast paced environment. And, they have already used TeenForce to hire one of the initial trainees!
• Restaurant James Randall is offering recurring training in fine dining services such as food running, serving and hosting

 

Take a look at the progress we made last year. We know everyone isn't into Excel spreadsheets, so here is the very short summary:

• From the first half of last year to the second half: We tripled the number of hours worked by our teens from 3,600 to 11,000, and:
  • Our expenses only increased by 25%, from $43,000 to $56,000
  • Our expenses for each hour worked by our teens dropped from $11.90 to $4.90   
• This performance is proving our original goal of self-sustainability is achievable, and we look to make even more progress in 2012
• If you want to see it on a spreadsheet, click here!