Los Angeles County Children and Families First –
Proposition 10 Commission (aka First 5 LA)
RELEASE DATE: October 15, 2012
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. TIMELINE FOR SELECTION PROCESS 3
II. BACKGROUND 4
III. PROJECT OVERVIEW 6
IV. SCOPE OF WORK/STATEMENT OF WORK 9
V. ELIGIBILITY 12
VI. SUMMARY OF DESIRED QUALIFICATIONS 12
VII. TERMS OF PROJECT 13
VIII. SELECTION PROCESS AND REVIEW CRITERIA 14
IV. REQUIRED DOCUMENTS 15
X. CONTRACTUAL CONSIDERATIONS 18
XI. APPEALS Policy 20
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I. TIMELINE FOR SELECTION PROCESS[1]
ACTIVITY / DATERFQ Released / October 15, 2012
Information Session / October 22, 2012
Final date to submit questions and requests for additional information / October 24, 2012
Posting of responses to questions / October 26, 2012
Application Due / November 21, 2012 at 5:00 p.m., PST. NO EXCEPTIONS
Final Applicants Interviews / December 10, 2012
Contractor Selected / December 17, 2012
Board of Commissioners Approval / January, 2013
Contract Start Date 1 / January, 2013
All questions and requests for additional information regarding this RFQ must be received in writing by First 5 LA via email before 5 p.m., November 26, 2012. First 5 LA reserves the sole right to determine the timing and content of the responses to all questions and requests for additional information.
Questions can be submitted to:
Roozbeh Hamouni, Director of Information Technology
First 5 LA
750 N. Alameda Street, Suite 300
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Phone: 213. 482. 7801
Email:
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II. BACKGROUND
First 5 LA — “Champions for Our Children”
In 1998, California voters passed Proposition 10, which levied a 50-cent per pack tax on all tobacco products. The resulting tax revenues were earmarked for the creation of a comprehensive system of information and services to advance early childhood development and school readiness within each county in California. In Los Angeles County, the First 5 LA Commission was formed as a public entity to develop and oversee various early childhood initiatives and to manage the funding from Proposition 10. Since 1998, First 5 LA has invested more than $1 billion to support programs, initiatives, research, partnerships, public education and other endeavors in all four of its goal areas:
· Children are born healthy
· Children maintain a healthy weight
· Children are safe from abuse and neglect
· Children are ready for kindergarten
The First 5 LA FY 2009-2015 Strategic Plan
In 2009, First 5 LA’s Board of Commissioners adopted a new strategic plan to guide its investments through June 2015. The plan, Strengthening Families and Communities in L.A. County, marked a significant evolution in First 5 LA’s approach to grantmaking. In addition to a countywide approach that focuses on policy change, public education, workforce development and other strategies, the strategic plan also commits a sizeable portion of funds to improve the well-being of children in specific geographic communities.
The Commission selected 14 Best Start communities based on lessons learned from First 5 LA’s first decade and research, which shows that the role of safe and supportive neighborhoods is just as important to a young child’s quality of life as supportive and informed parents and caregivers.
This combined place-based and countywide approach allows the Commission to concentrate its limited resources in areas of high need and to sustain those efforts over time. The strategic plan will allow First 5 LA to continue focusing on strengthening families while deepening our commitment to fostering a community’s ability to create and sustain safe and nurturing places for children to grow.
Figure 1: First 5 LA Prioritized Pathway
In the Strategic Plan, the Commission identified a pathway for our investments that leads to our desired outcomes for children, families and communities in our four goal areas.
The Place-Based Approach, Best Start
The First 5 LA commissioners’ place-based approach focuses on the places where families live — combining efforts to strengthen families with those that build community capacity to create and sustain thriving and healthy environments for all children. The research and promising practices[2] emerging from decades of place-based efforts make a strong case for First 5 LA’s shifting a significant amount of resources to this funding strategy. The place-based approach allows First 5 LA to focus on families most in need, creating a seamless pipeline to effectively serve families along the continuum of a child’s development. This approach also creates unique partnerships with families, community residents and other funders, resulting in a better measure of our impact.
Parents, civic and business leaders, members of the clergy, representatives from community-based organizations and others are working together to develop partnerships within each of the 14 communities. By June 2012, each community partnership will have submitted proposals to the First 5 LA commissioners for future investments. These can include building safe parks, providing early childhood education programs or supporting other strategies that achieve Best Start’s primary goals that children in each community grow up safe, healthy and ready to learn.
To learn more about Best Start, visit www.beststartla.org.
Countywide Approach
The strategic plan also outlines the critical role of strong, coordinated and responsive systems in supporting families and improving outcomes for children prenatal through age 5. These systems include the actual structures through which health and human services are provided in L.A. County, as well as less formalized systems. By focusing on countywide systems improvement and change, strategic plan investments can have a widespread impact on children across the county, while, at the same time, helping to improve the sustainability of the place-based approach and outcomes. First 5 LA understands that enduring systems changes are most successful when they are informed by — and grow out of — close-to-the ground, culturally competent, community-based and resident-driven models for strengthening families, such as those we will be supporting in the Best Start communities.
The countywide approach is a comprehensive effort through a variety of programs, strategies and initiatives. For example, First 5 LA is launching nearly two dozen commissioner-developed investments in areas such as autism identification and service referrals; early child care and education workforce development; nutrition and physical activity programs for families and child care facilities and parental support projects. In addition, among other strategies, First 5 LA continues to strive for increased access to health care and insurance for pregnant women, children and their families; provide telephonic or online and printed resource directories for families and support and enhance the impact of our investments with effective, strategic partnerships and leveraging social and financial capital via our newly-developed Community Investments Department.
III. PROJECT OVERVIEW
First 5 LA FY 2010-15 Accountability and Learning Framework
The First 5 LA FY 2009-15 Strategic Plan includes an innovative blend of place-based and countywide funding strategies designed to improve outcomes in four goal areas. The Commission’s decision to move to a combined place-based and countywide funding approach is an effort to focus more intentionally on impacting the well-being of families and children by improving the communities in which they live. Thus, our FY 2010-15 Accountability and Learning Framework reflects this emphasis on place-based and countywide evaluations as well as a strengthened emphasis on using results from our evaluations and research projects to learn and improve on an ongoing basis.
The goals of First 5 LA’s Accountability and Learning Framework for the FY 2009-2015 Strategic Plan include the following:
• Gather and disseminate timely information on implementation and outcomes to support and improve our work and the work of our grantees;
• Capture change over time in target communities;
• Help First 5 LA staff learn and improve programs over time; and
• Enable us to tell a comprehensive story of our investments to our stakeholders – most notably First 5 LA Commissioners, our community partners, grantees and other external stakeholders.
The major types of activities in which First 5 LA will engage over the course of the strategic plan include the following:
• Place-based and strategic evaluations, including evaluations of some of First 5 LA’s key strategies, as well as data collection within each of First 5 LA’s target communities to monitor progress towards change;
• Research projects designed to be responsive to policy and programmatic issues arising out of our evaluation work;
• Integration of data across multiple county agencies serving children 0-5 and their families; and
• Dissemination activities, including the development of an online dashboard where stakeholders can track progress on key outcome areas and where Best Start Communities will be able to monitor change happening within its boundaries.
Data Systems Integration at First 5 LA
Implementation of the new Strategic Plan and the Accountability and Learning Framework has significant ramifications for our collection, use and management of data. In 2010, a Data Systems Integration (DSI) team made up of representatives from all First 5 LA departments was engaged in the strategic planning process to determine what major information- and data-related activities are required throughout the organization to meet our goals. This led to the creation of a new Information Technology department within First 5 LA that reports directly to the Chief Administrative Officer and is headed by a Director of Information Technology. The DSI team hired an Information and Technology Planning Consultant to help our organization match our technology investments to our information needs. This consultant was charged with creating a five year technology plan to assist in reconfiguring First 5 LA’s existing technology systems to meet current and projected needs for both information and data for the entire organization.
In 2011, the Information and Technology Planning Consultant performed an assessment of the technology infrastructure. One of the recommendations from this assessment was to create a Technology Planning Governance Committee (TPGC). This committee is responsible for the execution of the recommendations in the technology plan. It consists of representatives from across the organization. These representatives make decisions on behalf of the organization. From the technology plan, First 5 LA is moving forward with one of the new technology initiatives - MS SharePoint 2010 infrastructure.
Current systems
First 5 LA has approximately 110 staff members and managers, and oversees grants of between $125-150 million annually. Our current data technology systems include all of the following:
Infrastructure
• 8 IBM x-series Windows 2003 Servers (file share, print server, etc.)
• 7 IBM HS21 quad core blades with 8 GB of RAN and mixture of Windows 2003 and 2008 OS
• 2 IBM SH22, 6 core blade servers with 48 GB of RAM with VMware v-sphere 5
• Fiber Channel SAN storage (IBM DS3400) with 7.5TB capacity and expansion chassis
• 100+ Windows 7 Workstations (primarily laptops with docking)
• Cisco routers, switches and firewall
• Nortel BCM phone system
Applications – All applications run on MS 2008 VMware platform and the database engine is SQL Server 2005 and 2008.
• Financial Edge by Blackbaud
• GIFTS by MicroEdge
• Office 2010 Professional Edition
• Adobe Acrobat Standard and Professional
• ApplicationXtender (EMC’s Documentum)
• Exchange in the Cloud
First 5 LA’s internal server architecture uses Virtualized Servers. First 5 LA is eligible for Microsoft donations and discounts under Microsoft’s Charity License Program.
In addition, First 5 LA has five public domains currently (in order of traffic volume):
First5la.org is a Drupal based site with a small amount of dynamic content and large structure of subpages (short and wide). All the content and design is in-house while some technical aspects are handled by a development firm (Imagistic).
Readysetgrowla.org is our parenting site that is a full html site we administer and develop/design strictly in house.
Beststartla.org is a Wordpress site with many sub-sites linked up by community. This site is handled by a marketing firm called Fenton. Staff has limited access to creating posts and adapting the calendar via dynamic updates to the embedded Google calendar.
ReadEarlyReadAloud.org is a flash based site we have used off and on to support Southern California First 5's literacy campaign. All design and development is in house.
Ffnla.org/scalar is the Southern California Alliance for Learning and Results (SCALAR) Evaluation Repository, an alliance of the evaluation branches of the Southern California Regional First 5 Commissions (Imperial, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Ventura counties).
IV. SCOPE OF WORK/STATEMENT OF WORK
Major activities and deliverables
First 5 LA is seeking an expert MS SharePoint 2010 development firm to provide a detailed proposal to address the following objectives of the organization. The proposal must include estimated hours and cost associated with the development cycle such as requirements, design, development, test, implementation, user and administrator training, and MS SharePoint Governance document.
1. Discovery. Gather business and functional requirements from internal departments, create an architecture, plan, design, and implement a software infrastructure in MS SharePoint 2010.
• Create requirements document (use case diagrams and wireframes to show overall site for each department and their sub sites. The wireframes should show specific components such as web parts)
• Create systems architecture (diagram, written description, and associated briefings), to include:
o An analysis of whether or how MS SharePoint Online can or cannot meet the requirements determined in the first step
§ If MS SharePoint Online cannot meet the requirements, the MS SharePoint 2010 development firm should develop general specifications of the server environment.
o The MS SharePoint extensions, other Microsoft and/or third-party applications recommended for inclusion, including (as examples only):
§ FAST search
§ Nintex workflow
§ K2’s products
§ GivingData
§ MS SharePoint Outlook Connector
§ InfoPath
• Create a phased implementation plan. For each phase of implementation plan:
§ Create a work breakdown that groups requirements and objectives based on functionality and reusability