Biz Sense

ers and college instructors connect with community experts.

If you have a talent, skill, educational training, hobby, or career expertise that could be helpful to share with local students, we’d like to hear from you. We’ll share your information with local high school teachers and CR and HSU instructors to help them enrich their curriculum by bringing your realworld insight into their classrooms. Our resource speakers can be as creative as the many talented people who live in our community. Maybe you own or manage a business and are willing to share job interview tips in a high school or college business class, or teach higher education science or engineering and can be a guest speaker in a high school biology, chemistry, or environmental science class, or are a restaurant owner or chef who can share information about the food supply chain and buying local farm to table with culinary students, or are a history buff who can discuss local history. Other examples for volunteers include sharing insight about effective leadership skills, job readiness, cultural diversity, personal finance, conflict resolution, or many other topics. Whatever your expertise, connecting students with community members who can share real-world insight and experience, helps to broaden their understanding of our world, and helps them to better prepare for future job and career success.

Please join us in this partnership to help make virtual learning creative and engaging, and to support our local job training pipeline. Contact me at jritter@hcoe.org, or 707-498-2917 to volunteer, or for more information. Thank you.

Jim Ritter coordinates the College Connect program and community outreach for the Humboldt County Office of Education, Education At Work department, and serves on the Eureka Chamber of Commerce Business & Education Committee and the Arcata Chamber Board of Directors. Before working in education, he was a rafting and fishing outfitter in Idaho, Oregon, and the California Sierras for 27 years.