ÿþAMINA KRUCK: Now we're wrapping up. We've been doing is trying to give you a good overview of the program and you ask a lot of questions as we go along the way. So I'm just wondering if there's some other questions hanging out for the day. She's first, she started and then you. Hold on. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was wondering, we were talking about the way you were having these supports surrounding the mentor / mentee relationship and if you heard that somebody was in a job situation and trying to pull all the resources together. But then is there a confidentiality issue with the mentor mentee. How do you handle that? AMINA KRUCK: Good question. APRIL REED: In that situation the mentors are very clear with confidentiality what they're required to report to us is if there's danger to self, danger to others. And then with their mentee's permission, they can let us know if something has come up. So when that mentor noticed the stress, they talked about it and said hey, this sounds difficult. Can I get your staff, have you talked to your staff? Would you want them to call you and so that's how we did that. APRIL REED: In the training we talked to them about confidentiality and why that's important and how they feel about having it themselves. So they can kind of make the connection that somebody else would want to have that as well. APRIL REED: Right. And the mentors are careful about that to ask for permission. Even in cases where they heard the mentee say I e-mailed my staff person last week. It gives them an opportunity to say did you hear back? Kind of helping facilitate that connection and support for them. They will always ask permission before they do that. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I just wanted to ask at my CIL we have support groups like stroke support group. Is that different than a mentor support group. Or are they the same thing or different? AMINA KRUCK: Tomorrow we're going to talk more about what our mentor group is like and then you can help answer that question for us because all support groups are run differently. Doug doesn't, that support group does not want anybody making any roles. I led women's support group for a while that was very specific. The format that we used. And they knew that was the format for that particular women's group that we did. I lead another womens group now and it has a particular format and it's not for everybody and I'm up front what it is. AUDIENCE MEMBER: It's not a mentor. AMINA KRUCK: No, it is not a mentor program. As you learn about this, you get to decide, do you want to call it that? Cause we've got somebody else here thinking: Hey, I've got a support group that could turn into a mentor group. But remember, the mentor group are peer mentors because they went through the orientation training to be peer mentors once they get done some choose not to do one-on-one and would rather do the group I think you're going to talk about history and how the group got going and why we started the group. So, at different times we have had mentoring groups that brought mentors and mentees together to problem solve. And this group has evolved. About four different times, four different ways, this particular group that we're working with right now. So hold that thought and keep asking those questions. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I actually have two questions. One AMINA KRUCK: You can only have one. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'll blend them. AMINA KRUCK: Put it all together. AUDIENCE MEMBER: How long does a mentee usually stay in the program? What's the average time that a mentee is there. AMINA KRUCK: That's a really good question. We have an answer to that but it doesn't mean anything. APRIL REED: Yeah. Because it is so individual, you know, based on what their goals are. And sometimes it changes I have somebody coming in for something simple and I will think this will be a short match and as they are working we discover other things. So typically on average, 4 to 6 months but then we have some going on for a lot longer than that and that's not uncommon. AMINA KRUCK: You know average versus median? So add it all up, but it's really anywhere from here two to three months to two years. Some mentors have worked together a long time. APRIL REED: We're not putting time limits as long as there's an active goal and we know they are meeting and working and there's progress towards the goal and they both agree it's working, we let it go on. But you know, it really depends on the goal and situation. So I have mentors that go into the hospital. It was a 1 time meeting and providing information and support and that's it. So it just really depends on what the situation is for the individual. AMINA KRUCK: And if they morphed into friends and the goal has been accomplished, then we help them feel good about graduating out of a mentor program and they have a choice whether to continue that relationship or not and many of them, some of them do. I don't know what the statistics of it is because we don't track it afterwards. AUDIENCE MEMBER: The other half of that question is can a mentor work with more than one person at a time. APRIL REED: Great question. Absolutely. So it's up to the mentors. What they can handle. I encourage new mentors to give themselves some time, get through the first match and get experience under their belt before they take on two at a time. But we have mentors that are comfortable to do two 3, 4 matches at a time. So we really let them tell us. So when I get referral, you know, I'm going to pick out who I think might be a good match. And I'm just going to call people and, like I, I had a mentor a couple weeks ago that I called and I said listen, I know I just matched you with a new person. But I've got somebody I think might be a good fit. Will you think about it? So she did and said I can do that and, but it's completely up to them. But we have had that, we've also had consumers that had more than one mentor. AMINA KRUCK: Different goals, different needs. APRIL REED: So some of my mentors would not touch budgeting ever. But you know, so if one of their mentees has that come up, we'll pull in another mentor to do that piece while they keep working on something else. AMINA KRUCK: And like with budgeting, I want to point out. Meanwhile, the IL staff is providing classes on budgeting. But this is somebody's needing someone over time to practice the skills they're learning. With support. When I was a poor single parent I used to go to Rosita's Cafe to do my bills. Little margarita. A little burrito, I didn't want to be alone at home doing it back then. So the idea of having company with something stressful is really helpful. APRIL REED: We try to do synergy to, and have the mentors understand with budgeting for example. Last week we had budgeting class taught by IL skills specialist. They have curriculum they use and materials they like. So the mentor we're getting ready to match him with somebody who has a budgeting goal so he went in and sat in that class so he would be aware of what his mentee had been working on, what paperwork, what forms, that kind of thing, practice examples so he can kind of step in and continue supporting what's already been done with that. AMINA KRUCK: Is he an accountant. APRIL REED: No. AMINA KRUCK: No, he's somebody not afraid of numbers. APRIL REED: It's usually basic budgeting stuff. AMINA KRUCK: Most of our mentees don't have money to budget. That's the bigger problem, that is the stress of not having much money. Kathy AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was wondering how has the program assisted the IL staff as far as managing services to their consumers have they been able to expand services and take on more consumers? AMINA KRUCK: Definitely frees them up because once they're working and seeing the different areas that somebody is working on. At some point it may mean that they'll only be checking in periodically because this person only had one goal and it was a great goal to work on a mentor with so they're off working together and the staff is just checking in and reading notes to see how things are going. In another case you've got somebody who has multiple needs. If you've every done direct staff work, it can be very overwhelming. With that person there may be something specific like learning how to use transportation while they're trying to get them out of the nursing home and do other things. So that's the person who goes on trips on the bus with them while the staff is working through some of these other issues. So it helps them move through and provides some things that maybe they don't have the same skills or are not the right sex, or gender, I keep saying sex, the right gender, we had those issues where somebody really wanted to work with a female. We only have a male in that area. So a way to help her with some of those issues she felt she needed support with a female is then to have her working with a mentor. So it gives you more variety like I said with all those demographic things skills, knowledge, experience. It helps people move through and also frees up a staff member but not a dumping ground for somebody the staff doesn't know what to do with it. That doesn't mean the staff might not come and staff with us to help us think about whether a peer mentor could work or not. Which they do sometimes as they also refer people to be mentors for us. AUDIENCE MEMBER: How many matches are you doing a month on average? Or how many new referrals for new mentees. APRIL REED: It depends but we try to maintain about 25 matches every month. One-on-one matches. And then we also do our groups so we're including those in mentoring hours as well. AMINA KRUCK: And we're in transition right now where it used to be the mass of our referrals came from the community integration unit people doing direct IL skills, rehab person and outreach to nursing, er, the rehab centers. The person who did outreach to rehab centers before was like a peer mentor magnet and he referred people all the time. The person doing that job now, great guy, wonderful guy. Never refers anybody. And so we've got about three staff right now that we're really having a hard time getting any referrals from. So we're looking at other, that's, and that's where the peer mentor group kind of comes in and some other ways to be using those mentor skills until we can figure it out. So that's why we're meeting when we get back with the sports and fitness center to see is there some way we can do something there. So I've watched it over the years. That's the benefit of getting older. You've gone up and down several times. And it ebbs and wanes where your referrals are coming from. We have a goal to have more happening with the employment program and we haven't quite figured out how to make that work as well as we'd like right now. So the outreaching to nursing homes when Karen died, we're just kind of recovering from that. And seeing who else would really have the kind of passion that she and Fernando do as two people who moved out of nursing homes. There's like nothing kind of can replace that. So we've got a couple people now that we're kind of fostering growth with to do that. And that's so important moving people out of nursing homes because they're so isolated and so many barriers of them getting free. It's better now with cell phones because before it used to be impossible to do a phone call to lay any ground work. But that's a group that really benefits a lot from peer mentoring. And so we've had kind of a year where we're just bringing that back online again. Because of that loss. Karen was all over the place. And she ended up being on all the Mayor's commissions and everything else. And she really was doing so much. So you have those kinds of blows to the program, either with changes to staff or changes to volunteers where you then have to regroup. I was talking to the guy from Paraquad about that. You have to keep reinventing yourself. APRIL REED: And Amina is really good as a manager in helping me think about you know, when I hit a wall where you know, we've done everything we can. Let's figure out another way. That's where we've come up with some of our best ideas including some of the mentoring groups that we do and some different ways that we use mentors. Okay. We're not getting referral here, what else do we do? What else do we try? It keeps the program healthy, otherwise I think you get stagnant and maybe a little spoiled. AMINA KRUCK: It's kind of funny because Phoenix is not a grassroots advocacy place. Maybe because it's 115 out there. We don't do marches and things. So it just never has been and I've tried, you know, so sometimes our advocacy appears to be kind of top down, but it's based on what do we get the calls and complaints about and that kind of thing. Unless it's topic specific like transit, then you can get people to show up. But then one of the benefits that came out of a bunch of hot mentors who don't have mentees is then they all came down and did the capitol legislative training and went down when we were advocating for Medicaid expansion and wanting to know why I didn't invite them to go to Senator Flake's office for the disabilities treaty. So it's interesting that you know, one thing was kind of not working like it did before and now, because we were talking like are we frauds? We're coming and talking and now we are banging our own head staff. I have a meeting with another director to talk about what's going on over here. It's been like pulling teeth the last year, what's that about? Lack of trust? We've been told part of it is change of people that are getting referred over and that they're not ready for mentoring. And are they too protective? You know, we have to figure that out. So you walk, a pattern happens for a while and then you figure out uh-oh, this isn't going away, it's not a little blip. It's a big blip and then you have to problem solve it. APRIL REED: Or sometimes things just occur and it's like why haven't we been doing this. I was on the phone with our nursing home reintegration coordinator last week and he said I'm spending all this time trying to do applications. I said Okay. Let's get another mentor in there with you. He said I have one, can I have another? I can think of five people right now that would meet you next week. He's like Okay. And I thought gosh, why didn't we have this conversation a month ago? But it's just sometimes you've got to get the staff in the right place at the right time. Where you're both able to brainstorm and figure out what can we do more of? AMINA KRUCK: And there's a good example of helping out the direct service staff because who has time to fill out applications? You know? That's always a quandary. Wow, that's great. And these people getting out of nursing homes they have a million applications to fill out and figure out and everything. So what a great solution. Now, Karen who was his partner, they're both American Indian and so that was one of their real bonds because there are a lot of American Indians that go back and forth between the res and rehab and to find the services they need and they end up in a nursing home in Phoenix and they're away from their culture and so having the two of them come in has made a big difference to help that group move out of nursing homes. Other questions. Burning desire? Loosen the microphone so it can be passed around easily. I'd like to hear from a few people, high points for this day so far from you before we adjourn. I'm not taking this personally. AUDIENCE MEMBER: If nobody's going to talk, I will. So high point for me is looking at this program that you guys have outlined and all the work that you've done to create all the forms that you have. AMINA KRUCK: April, April, April earth energy AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you April. And thinking about how we're going to try and integrate this into our program, I'm excited but I'm kind of wary of the amount of database manipulation that we're going to have to do and whether we can actually do that with our database. And so our networked in system. AMINA KRUCK: When you have a small program, it's easier to do manually. It's when your program gets bigger so you have time to think about how to do it in your database. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I don't know if we can change anything in our database I don't even know if we can add things to our database? AMINA KRUCK: Well whatever you don't have in your database, you can create something. In Microsoft Office. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah, Access, I was thinking about doing that. I just started AMINA KRUCK: That's what we had before. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Absolutely, like the evaluation forms, the reason we created it in Google Docs and did it so can be into an Excel chart was because our database couldn't do that and they said this will take too much money and too much time. AMINA KRUCK: And we had the model from the PAS program evaluation but still they said--but PAS actually brings in money. They got theirs, we did not get ours. APRIL REED: We don't make money. But that's how we got it. We figured out a way to do it? Excel and it works great. AMINA KRUCK: I love it you because you said what is your high point and what is your intimidation point. So that was great, that is another option. You can tell us your intimidation point. Cause we are going to look at those barriers and strengths tomorrow in more detail. Anybody else high point? And also remember if you're too shy to talk, you can use the sticky pads and leave them on the table for us. Anybody else going to tell me what your high point is for the day, so I know. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, this is Jess. I think you know, I think part of being an independent living center is trying to figure out not just to be about services, right, and how do you really be about the people? And I really have to commend you because I've worked in other independent living centers and they all have different way of doing peer counseling. Yeah, I foresee this to be something that provides a very stable influx of people coming in and really being about the people again. Which is where I really think independent living needs to be. And it's also intimidating because it's a full-time job. AMINA KRUCK: Yeah, because look how much she's doing. It's true. AUDIENCE MEMBER: It is, as a center, how do you find those people. Because the funding is not always necessarily there AMINA KRUCK: But you just start with two or three at a time. That's, like we're getting ready to expand to another county and that's our goal, to get two. APRIL REED: Yeah, we're expanding into another rural county that we serve and we have one IL skills staff person there. Rosalie, luckily it's Rosalie who was a peer mentor for us a hundred years ago. So she speaks peer mentor language. And so her and I are okay can we, where's our marketing flyer? We're going to go down to the senior centers and we've got to start marketing and she tells me stories about literally being on the side of a mountain and not being sure if she's going to be able to keep going because it's a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. AMINA KRUCK: Or let alone being in a house because she's a chair user. APRIL REED: Our goal is two peer mentors for this area in the next six months. AMINA KRUCK: That's another way to think about it. Starting small and then everything else is manageable with that. And just knowing who's doing it, what kind of support they need. 0r to do it. They can't be thrown at it and think it's going to work. We support in terms of, we do pay like I said, mileage reimbursement for them or bus pass reimbursement and some of those things that take resources. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, I'm, I never heard of group mentoring before today. I hate to sound naive, but I'm excited to hear about that tomorrow. APRIL REED: You know honestly, group mentoring, I didn't know what to call it. I went through a couple different, I called it discussion group for a while and then disability discussion group and then I just was like this is mentoring group. AMINA KRUCK: But we had a group going before April was with us and then we had a different peer mentor coordinator that didn't get that piece and didn't do too good with that and it fell by the wayside for 10 years and then we started it up again for purposes we'll share tomorrow. AUDIENCE MEMBER: It turned me off. I love the groups, April and I were talking about that this morning. I think that could be real effective for us, Janet. Just the ideas that you showed about getting other staff members involved and getting them on board. That is something that I'm going to make a, you know, a personal goal to, cause right now it's, we have a lot of walls in our buildings we need to knock them down. AMINA KRUCK: This is the one program that crosses all the programs. It is the one program that crosses all, besides I&R, is the one program that crosses all the other programs. And bringing your staff in to do the mentor orientation training helps them get a buy-in and start to meet the mentors and stuff too. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think that's a wonderful idea. Also, the, like we do a disability etiquette training. We've done a bunch of them this year. And we've been all staff members. And when you were saying you had a team of mentors, that's perfect. AMINA KRUCK: They love to do it. They feel safe with you, they feel safe with April now and they'll go anywhere for her. Really they will because they feel safe with her she takes good care of them. APRIL REED: I wouldn't have a job if it weren't for them. I need them to stay. AMINA KRUCK: And she knows her place. AUDIENCE MEMBER: If you were going to build a program from the ground up like I'm basically going to be doing, would you start with, where would you begin? Would you start building your mentors first or, no, advertising, what, okay? APRIL REED: Perfect question. I love this question. If you take the online class with me, I probably say this every day of the online class for three weeks. Start with policies, start with procedures, start with your forms, your rules and guidelines. Who are we looking for? Who do we want? Because, if you don't have that written down in outline, that's why we gave you all the forms in our training manual, you can copy and adapt as you want. But, if you don't know what you're looking for, if you haven't outlined where you want to go, you want to do that first because a lot of times we make mistakes because we miss a piece. Maybe we've got the training but we didn't think about crisis intervention. So start with the forms and policies. The other thing is sometimes we skip to recruitment. The very first thing somebody is going to ask you is what do I do if this happens, how many hours do I work with somebody. So you can't answer those questions unless you've outlined what your programs are. AMINA KRUCK: You heard all the questions. It's always the part people get really nervous about can it work and are we going to get sued, and will somebody get hurt. So those are always comes up. When you came into this program, did you have some of these forms and then you updated them? APRIL REED: We had forms and things in different formats but we've updated and we kind of take a look at the forms pretty regularly we make changes, even, like I have some key times in my calendar where I block off to look at different things. Yeah, when I came over we had some forms. And then we just did a lot of updating, we are constantly doing that. AMINA KRUCK: The example of all the forms are in there. APRIL REED: Yeah, almost all of our forms are in there, so our applications that we use, feel free to edit those as you like. We were talking about earlier, we were talking about how do we get staff in to understand, you know, sending out an email to kind of say hey, is anybody interested, I definitely experienced that when I took over the program. I did e-mails not getting a lot of response so I've got to get an in with people and that is what I did. really sitting down with the staff and talking about what do you need. This is what we're envisioning, do you like this form we're using. And so it really helped with buy-in because they felt like they were giving input and really helping reform and create the program versus us just saying hey, refer mentors. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Did you do that one-on-one with staff? APRIL REED: One-on-one. AMINA KRUCK: She can go to a staff meeting but ultimately she has to go one-on-one, like the guy is so fabulous, that goes to the, at some point she'll crack him, that goes to the rehab centers. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you, that's been helpful AMINA KRUCK: And you know, people will ask, they'll start to tell you who they think will be good to be first mentors. Or they will start to say, oh, I had somebody so great. I wish we did have a mentor. APRIL REED: As a coordinator, if you can get with staff, you can hear them when they are talking about what is their fear, why aren't they referring. I remember a lady when I first took over the program, Paula, when I met with her, what she was afraid of was my people won't be safe. I want them to have a good experience. AMINA KRUCK: She got people out of nursing homes. APRIL REED: They're in a nursing home. They can't handle a failure or disappointing event. So Paula, I said come to the group. I was trying -- AMINA KRUCK: Little preview, Paula made us go out an do a group in another place close to her nursing homes where she could, that was their first outing was to come to that group. APRIL REED: And I'd say come cofacilitate with me. Then she'd slowly got on board and the new, the way I knew I got her is when she started, I'll bring soda for the next group and she would lug in a case, she had a heart condition, she shouldn't have been doing, she would lug in cases of soda and store them in the office to make sure people that came in had soda when they came in. I'd bring the pizza. AMINA KRUCK: She wanted snacks because this was a big event for them to get out. It was one of their first outings. And you know, you're reminding me about Paula and making me think about one of the other reasons we're having trouble getting people from this other unit is because over the last two years, they've developed an Independent Living Council and tried to talk to anybody at our agency about what the difference between the Independent Living Council and the mentoring group and some of the people are the same. But they were people they started having meetings to talk about the center to teach them about independent living centers and the history. And skills, who were consumers coming in for IL skills. And then to start making ideas about programs and fostering their creativity. And so they've got that going. While we've got this peer mentor program going. And so a lot of their energy has been going into developing this council quite frankly. Several of whom have become peer mentors now. And community advocates and stuff. So it's always messy. Always messy. Just always what I hold out as an administrator is to everybody who gets frustrated is the only reason it's hard is because everybody cares so much about what they're job is and they're so busy with their job. So it's not that the program isn't good. Not that they're just jerks. That's really why it is so hard to get this interaction and we are a big enough center now, but this problem has been since we were only CI and PAS unit. Always been the same kind of problem. Why? Because people are so dedicated to what they're doing it's hard for them to think about what else is going on. And she's got a really hard job to go to all these different units and help them integrate. And the sports center is turning out to be another place like that, that we'll get everybody messed up, but I'll tell you our staff was resentful about the sports center in the beginning. Because they could never come to our agency meetings because they have to be there. You know, it is a teeny staff covering the whole thing every hour it's open so they couldn't get to know each other. And it was causing us to have some financial stress. It was during the recession that we opened it. So that's the kind of stuff that happens. But it's always because people care so much about what they're doing and so that's kind of my job is to hold that out for everybody as we try to work through it. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Have you considered having a mentor program for youth under 18, you said they are all over 18. AMINA KRUCK: We have considered it. We haven't done it yet. That's all I can say about that right now. There was one point in which our board had decided we could not do it for liability reasons. But there's just a lot of noise about that right now. So I see that starting to change our DD grant just changed. We can finally start working with people 16. Right now, the one thing we're doing with youth is going out to the special ed classes to do the presentations and that's the one thing so far. But there is another group that has worked with youth mentoring that's the Southwest Institute for Youth and Family. So they have some experience in doing that. And he went through our peer mentor program, the guy running that program. And we did their training for peer mentoring. So there is something happening and we just had a youth leadership training thing that some of the SILCs are promoting which was fabulous and some of our mentors went and were volunteers and went through that whole training with the youth. AUDIENCE MEMBER: You guys do have a youth program there. APRIL REED: Yes. It works with youth sports in 322. AMINA KRUCK: We have a half of an FTE person. APRIL REED: Our mentors currently what they do with that program (off mic) is give presentations. But for those AMINA KRUCK: She works one-on-one with people. She goes with the classes and she also sometimes goes to their IEPs and things like that. But it's a funding issue right now for us. We have a little teeny United Way grant that has been supporting this. APRIL REED: Right now, what we do with the peer mentors we have them give presentations and work with youth that way. But for those of you who are interested in youth and what's going on nationally, we have had included stuff tomorrow afternoon to give you, we have done some research, kind of the latest about social media and what some other national youth programs are doing and some of the good things and some of the interesting things that are happening there, we will have that. AMINA KRUCK: Some of it is fun. We don't want to duplicate effort so we've done a lot to support Southwest Institute and what they've been doing. So we'll be moving into that area because we have a promise grant coming in. So there will be changes. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a second question. I was wondering about I'm assuming mentors do home visits and have there been any problems with home visits in terms of liability APRIL REED: Actually, the mentors don't do home visits. Typically. We ask them to meet with somebody in the community at a library at the ABIL office. And for example we might have somebody in an apartment, but they have a rec room, so they'll meet in the rec room or something like that. Group home, they can go into the group home, they will meet in the common areas, same thing with the nursing home. We tried in the past olden days we did that but we kind of moved away from that just because of liability. Really what convinced us we talked about surveys and evaluations we did surveys with mentors and mentees and asked them and then we went back and looked at, there was a place in our form where we asked people where they wanted to meet and we pulled that data and found that the majority of mentors and mentees were asking to meet in public places anyway. That really moved us to go ahead and have that. AMINA KRUCK: Unless on a rare occasion it's something about the home that they want to be working on for a little bit. It is good for the mentee to be out of their home and doing something somewhere else. APRIL REED: We recently made an exception because we had a mentee with low vision and what the mentor was there to do was help them orient their office, and so of course, the mentor had to be there but I gave special permission for that and we knew what was going on and it was female to female and they both felt comfortable with it and were willing to proceed that way. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I just want to kind of tack on to your original question. I'm youth advocate for program at SCRS and one thing I thought about was having a peer mentorship program for my youth program. But I kind of was curious you said that your board worried about that regarding liability issues but what were some of the reasons  AMINA KRUCK: I can't tell you. I just can't tell you, that board is not the board we have currently and I'm pretty sure that the board we have currently wouldn't feel that way because the chair of our board used to run Raising Special Kids Parent Training and Education Center. And we've done cross writing grants for each other and programs for years. But right now you also have to ask yourself do you have the resource. So right now we have a goal of growing the program in the, a new county. So that's the other piece. You have to ask yourself and grow by increments one thing at a time. As you can see, April is very methodical. When we started the peer mentor program, we did not have all those forms and policies and procedures in line and we got them one by one when we knew we needed them. You know what I mean? Like I said, depending on what is gong on with Southwest Institute because just like PVA and spinal cord injury go out to rehab enters so that's another reason we don't do mentors as much as we used to in the rehab centers is because number one, they are only there for two weeks and number two those guys are out there and what we want to do is catch them when they come out into the community and figure out how to make that work best. So I foresee us doing more in this area with youth in the near future within the next three or four years something will be going. But this last strategic plan, that was not on the plan yet. It was to grow the program in the rural areas that have nothing. So that's what I can tell you about that that I know so far APRIL REED: Again, knowing we wouldn't have much to say about youth that's why we added in pieces to give you some good information about what's going on nationally and what are some of the big programs so you'll still get ideas about what's the current state of mentoring. AMINA KRUCK: I think about one of the board members that was part of that decision who was a psychologist who worked for the DD determination services. So she was, her job was deciding if somebody would qualify for SSDI or SSI. So she was all about liability. Period. You know what I'm saying. So again, personalities, personalities. The board we have today, I don't think they think twice about it. If we decided to do it. So come tomorrow when somebody comes to April, it's possible by, you know, this time next year we'll have three youth mentors. I don't know. But then we have to look and see what is different about working with youth. What do we know that's different? APRIL REED: We'll give you some good examples, there are some interesting things programs do when their specifically working with youth and we'll talk more about that tomorrow. But there's some very strategic things that they do with their policies that's different when you are working with adults. AMINA KRUCK: And one resource that Darrell Christianson, who is the community integration manager, he is on the ABIL board, he may come in and say hi on Wednesday, coming in, he's coming tomorrow. It's Wednesday, right? So he may come say hi. He worked in Minnesota. 15 years ago. And they wore working with youth in transition. And doing mentoring things with them in Minnesota 15 years ago, so we're not the be all end all, we're just committed. That's my disclosure. Yeah. AUDIENCE MEMBER: When you try to address what is typically known as underserved populations, I'm trying to come up with brainstorming techniques and ways that I can reach out to these underserved populations, particularly for our SPIL for our state plan, they cited us on LG, people with disabilities in the LGBTQ range, parolled inmates, people who were formerly convicted of crimes, individuals with HIV, people who are Hispanic who are Asian or people from background that typically not African-American or white. And these are things in the St. Louis area that need to be addressed. But I'm trying to make sure that I have a good viewpoint coming in on ways that I can pull people in without seeming up affrontive, AMINA KRUCK:Like a white guy AUDIENCE MEMBER: Exactly. Regardless if I'm sitting, standing or whatever. I still don't want to come in Sandra Bullocking it? AMINA KRUCK: Yeah, the first thing I would say is relationship, relationship, relationship. You got to have personal relationships yourself. To model that for your staff and then to build a relationship, to build your programs in that way. APRIL REED: I think too, it comes back to your recruitment. If you want a diverse mentor list you have to be mindful and really target diversity. When we did our brochures I was really proud that our, Lauren, our PR guy, he said to me, April this one time, this is the brochure that does not need a white man in it. We've got every diversity we can need in the shots that we took. And I was really proud of that because we have made an effort to have a diverse group of peer mentors and not be locked into something and sometimes that's how you recruit. So, if you're not, you've got to target what you want. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I also thought in terms of utilization and specific targeted out reaches, using my out reaches to address some of these areas. For out reaches to agencies that cater towards individuals with HIV or AMINA KRUCK: Yeah. And partner with them to do, partner with them to do training or summit. That's this African-American conference. When I first heard about it, quite frankly, I kind of poo-pooed it. That's interesting. We had people come all the way from California, the NAACP got excited about it. The Urban League got excited about it. Sometimes we're still disappointed that more consumers aren't coming than service providers that are serving those communities. But it is a good healthy mix happening. We would be fine if it was only the consumers that were coming. So, like, we are partnering with Area Agency on Aging which I think that's very curious but I know why is because they have a staff person who belongs to that constituency is doing it LGBTQ. They started out small with like a little summit and bigger and now I said this is the anniversary of the ADA and I want to have big parties for all constituencies, one at a time celebrating the 25th anniversary of the ADA. Cause again, Arizona is not where you do a march on July 26th. Let's partner with them and first we went and then got invited to help and now we're going to be full blown partners to create that. Well then, that is how that community gets to know more about you and they think to refer people to you, that kind of thing. That is always a challenge to reach out of your comfort zone and it helps to have staff that are from various communities who have their burning passions. That they can bring in those communities for you too. If not, you've got to go develop a personal relationship. Start in that way. That's what I think. And other people may have other things to share about it. Because it is always a challenge to step out of your comfort zone. Fernando because Fernando and Rosalee are American Indian. It changes completely the mix of who we serve in the valley. And we put on, been a real key partner, to help them put on an annual summit. This must be about the 6th annual summit now. American Indian across different tribes. Disability summit that has been very well received. I think our time is pretty much up.