Henrico Times

CCWA Received Two Awards at HIRE Ed Conference

"Seeing my CCWA colleagues and our community-based partners win two Chancellor’s Awards at the Virginia Community Colleges annual HIRE Education conference at the Hotel Roanoke was definitely a highpoint of 2022, and CCWA has seen some milestones in 2022!" wrote Creamer about the recognition of CCWA. "The Chancellor Awards at HIRE Education celebrate the best across all 23 community colleges in the Commonwealth. To have CCWA’s Health Care Program Coordinator Amy Taloma win for Outstanding Faculty member in 2022 and City of Richmond’s Office of Community Wealth Building (OCWB) win for Best Consortia or Collaboration with a community college partner certainly put CCWA faculty and staff attending the event in an early spirit of Thanksgiving.  Amy’s significant expansion of work-based learning across CCWA health care training programs and CCWA’s partnership with OCWB to move low-income residents of Richmond into living wage jobs with opportunities for continued education and career progression are indicative of the best of today’s workforce development programs. 

I am pleased to announce CCWA received two awards at the Chancellor’s Awards Banquet at the HIRE Education Conference at the Hotel Roanoke, November 9 to 11.  CCWA sent a team of eight to the conference.

Amy Taloma received the award for Outstanding Achievement by a College Faculty Member for her work in dramatically expanding enrollments, completions, and credentials in a variety of health care training programs and for her success in standing up paid internships, paid clinical experiences and other forms of work-based learning in many of CCWA’s health care classes.  The award recognizes her success in partnering with VCU-Health, Henrico County’s 9-1-1 Center, and a variety of long-term care facilities in the region to offer internships and post-program job placements for CCWA Health Care students. 

CCWA is a three time winner of the Rising Start Award which goes to a workforce professional with less than three years of experience in the VCCS, but this competition was open to all faculty at all colleges including senior administrators.  We have the nomination submitted for this award as needed. 

For the first time, CCWA also won a second award for Outstanding Achievement by a College through a Collaboration or Consortia of Partners.  The award in this category was won by CCWA for our partnership with City of Richmond’s Office of Community Wealth Building (OCWB).  OCWB serves low-income, unemployed and underemployed residents of City of Richmond.  To date, through a five year contract with CCWA to deliver occupational training to OCWB clients in high demand occupations, CCWA has trained and helped to place into living wage jobs more than 300 OCWB clients.  Student success stories that were cited as part of the nomination package to VCCS include a truck driver, both a former professional athlete and a former inmate, who earned his CDL through CCWA and is now making $2,000 a week.

Original source can be found here