Wendy Porter

Background

About Wendy Porter

Wendy is the Senior Manager, Regional Apprenticeship in the North/Far North at LAUNCH and The Foundation for Ca Community Colleges. She drives work that expands registered apprenticeships with California’s community colleges to build an inclusive, job-ready workforce for the future. Developing relationships and partnerships with education, industry and workforce development entities to embrace innovative program development is her passion. Wendy also serves as Vice President of the Board for ChicoSTART (Startup Incubator) which facilitates GrowTECH a NorCal tech industry partnership. Her earlier career in the private tech sector in Silicon Valley is foundational to her entrepreneurial tactics in building education pathways to employment. Her recent passion is facilitating collaboration between the NFN's 7 Workforce Development Boards, their Job Centers and the 15 NFN Community Colleges.Wendy started her career at Hewlett Packard-IT in Silicon Valley in the mid 1990's, her favorite positions were creating and running an internal website development business and managing multi-million dollar international software development projects. She moved to Chico to raise her family and became President of Shasta QA (software testing). She then pivoted into the startup space launching 3 startups then taking over as the Executive Director of Chicostart, a startup incubator. Her work at Chicostart in building the tech industry partnership (growTECH) led her into her current work with the CA Community Colleges to help align education with industry needs as part of the North Far North Regional Consortium.