CD Liston Consulting

Examples

• Assisted senior leadership team of the North Carolina Community College System conduct Listening Tours at all 58 community colleges to identify best practices and analyze policy issues related to increasing access, improving student success, and ensuring program quality. 

• Researched green energy education and training programs at community colleges that target low-income and dislocated workers to identify best practices that may be taken to scale across the country.

• Analyzed key energy policies for the 13 states in the Appalachian Regional Commission as part of a workforce needs assessment.

• Conducted a statewide environmental scan of demand-driven workforce development projects for the North Carolina Rural Economic Development Center.

• Served as Principal Investigator of an aerospace industry workforce needs assessment for the Golden LEAF Foundation.

• Assisted two colleges with the development of Long Range Plans through quantitative and qualitative data analyses and community Listening Forums.

• Advised a Louisiana private foundation on investments to improve the regional education and workforce system in a nine-parish rural region.

• Created a performance measurement framework and strategic recommendations for Oregon’s Employer Workforce Training Fund.

• Contributed to the original strategic plan for BioNetwork, North Carolina’s long standing, multi-million dollar biotech workforce initiative.

Examples

• Facilitating North Carolina's Developmental Education Initiative State Policy Committee as it works to increase the number of students who successfully enter and complete college-level courses in the state's community colleges. 

• Co-directed a Ford Foundation grant to catalyze eight community college “learning and innovation” networks, each of which focused on jointly developing new programs to address a specific issue or challenges facing all members. 

• Provided technical assistance to a group of community colleges developing models for integrating entrepreneurship skills and behaviors into technical education programs.

• Helped facilitate Media Arts Alliance, a US Department of Education-supported international community college network that supports new media programs linked to regions' creative economies.

Examples

• Carried out a strategic assessment of the Kaufmann Foundation's First Step FastTrac entrepreneurship curriculum.

• Assisted a gap analysis of how North Carolina's community college programs correspond to projected occupational demand.

• Directed a labor market analysis and assessment of South Florida’s growing biotechnology cluster.

• Served as chief external evaluator for two National Science Foundation-funded grants to improve technician-level education.

• Led evaluation team to determine the future of the North Carolina Center for Applied Textile Technology.

• Served as Project Director and primary author of Cultivating Successful Rural Economies, a competitively selected international compendium of benchmark economic development practices.

• Contributed to comprehensive compendium of all employer-driven, state-funded training programs in the US, for the National Governors Association.

Examples

• Managed for ten years the Trans-Atlantic Technology and Training Alliance, a 32-member network of community and technical colleges in the US, Europe and South Africa that focuses on the roles of these institutions in supporting regional economies.

• Served as Co-Principal Investigator of a seven-year National Science Foundation-supported project to integrate business management and soft skills into two-year technical education programs through project-based and contextual learning.  

• Served as Project Director for two multi-year Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grants supporting creation of some of the first community college online courses in the country in the mid-1990s.

Cynthia has written or co-written proposals totaling approximately $2 million in contracts and grants from multiple federal agencies, state and local governments, and national foundations.