PAULA MCELWEE: I want to tell you just a little bit why I am so excited that we're doing this training and that is that because it leap frogs training and that is that because it leap frogs over our usual process and gets you to a place where you're training leaders and then those leaders are coming back to apply to be on different positions.

So instead of hoping you can find somebody and, you know, kind of, it proactively gives you a chance to bring people with disabilities together, give them the tools that they need in order to serve on maybe your transportation board, there in your community, maybe your housing authority board.

Maybe your, you know, you think about all the things that affect people with disabilities, employment, disaster preparedness, all of the things that we know are very important.

We want to think about not just your centers and your SILCs, you can take the cream of the crop out of the class and put them on your boards, right.

But we also want to think about all the ways that we can impact our community.

If you look at the requirements for centers and the description of what is a center for independent living, it talks about equal access internally and in the community at large.

Well, how are we accomplishing that? We're often sending our already overstretched staff to go and testify at these meetings.

Wouldn't it be better to be on the other side of the table? 

So as you look at what could be exciting, how could we change our community, I think training leaders in your community to serve in all kinds of roles gives you better access in the community at large.

So I'm very excited to turn it over to Bob and to Kimberly and let them tell us more.

ROBERT HAND: thank you so much, Paula.

So, as she mentioned, I'm Bob Hand.

I'm enjoying retirement.

I retired in April, so I get to go on luxury retirement trips like this one right here, in between working.

But before I get into, what I'm going to start with is the history of the Leadership Academy and how we got to where we are and why we got there, but I want to make a couple of generic remarks first.

Several people have addressed youth, and I can assure you this is an excellent program for developing leadership with youth.

RICV, Resources for Independence Central Valley, their courses, their classes are Valley, their courses, their classes are primarily for adults, but we have a very strong youth program there and some of our youth participate in every one of our classes.

And I don't want to take Kimberly's thunder away, but when she talks about it, they have an extremely strong youth program and have Leadership Academies for them, so you'll see that.

The other thing I think is important about application is this is not a generic how-to-be-a-leader training.

You know, we talk about some things within it, how you dress and how you interact, but this is a very, very specific program.

What do you need to do to be a successful board member on a nonprofit board or successful on a government council? 

Very specific.

Both this training and the manual you have will teach you exactly how you can start your program and teach people with that.

So, to me, one of the big differences, again, it's not kind of a generic thing to talk about being a good leader and then you can go back and figure out how in the world would I ever apply that, but, rather, if you want to follow this formula, it has exactly how you do it.

And it is very focused.

This is about boards and government councils,  not other kinds of general leadership.

But the other important thing, I mean, we all talk about having members represented on the SILC, on the disability advisory commission, but that's only a small part of it.

You know, we want people on the city parks committee, we want people on the city streets committee,  we want people on public utilities advisory groups because people with disabilities have a right  to a say in all of that.

Let's not restrict ourselves to just disability programs.

And the same with non-profits.

We have a right to have that voice in all of the non-profits who are providing services.

So you're going to see that that's going to come out as we move along.

So this was actually your page.

(laughing)

Okay.

So this is a little bit about the overview.

Effective community leaders.

In both CIL and SILC boards, at RICV, and I've left there, so obviously there's a little bit of change, but when I was there, four out of the last five board members we recruited came from our Leadership Academy.

You put on the academies, you see who's interested, who's dynamic, who's catching on to what a board is supposed to do and you recruit them onto the board.

This gives them framework and skills for developing capable community leaders.

And we're going to talk about that capability issue.

We're going to talk about the benefits and the advantages of implementing it, the steps to implement it very specifically.

Okay.

So, and I'm going to say one other thing here that, well, two other things.

One is, when you put on a Community Leadership Academy, when I do one, one of the first things I always say is: you get out of it what you put into it.

Now, here we have several activities.

We're going to have group discussions.

We're going to have breakout sessions.

And it's not that, as they know, I can't sit up here and talk all day long.

I can do that, but when you guys get the chance to interact and give your experiences and ask questions, that's when you're going to get the most out of it.

I also have a little disclaimer.

We're going to talk about some of the legal issues of being on a board.

We're going to talk about some finances.

I think I can safely say  that neither Kimberly or I are an attorney or a CPA, so don't take anything we say as legal advice even though we're going to talk about legal issues.

And the other thing I'll say is if you're interested in starting one of these, when you get back, if you're working on actively getting it started and you have your first course within the first four to six months, you will be successful.

If you get back and you say, wow, this is great, we really want to do it, but I've got all these other things I need to do first, so I'm going to put it off and do it later, almost certainly you will never have a Leadership Academy.

And I say that from experience because I've trained throughout California and many places besides that, the ones who get on it and get it going are successful.

The ones who say, oh, first I need to do this and I need to do this and I'm going to start it later, it never gets done.

So keep that in mind.

You have a question back there?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: when you talk about the time line, I definitely see the point.

What we're looking at is having a rather involved recruitment process because we're in a very rural area.

When you say four to six months to actually have the academy, would recruitment be enough to get us on the time line moving or do you think we need to move up our recruitment efforts and actually hold the academy within that time line?

ROBERT HAND: well, that's kind of a generic statement, so obviously in each place you have to work on it.

But I guess my point being is if you delay the process of starting and actively working, you're not likely to ever start one.

If you're working on it and it takes you seven months instead of six months or something, it will still work as long as it's there and you're going for it.

So let's look at a little bit of the history of it.

It was about six years ago, Paula, were you president of the board then? 

Paula was president of our board.

You can imagine the difficulties I had then [laughter] and the way we did our strategic plan is our board set general goals and then the staff would go back and develop measurable objectives.

So this wonderful board set this goal: people with disabilities will be full participants in our communities.

Not this building will become accessible, not they'll be able to participate in this program, but, rather, full participants.

And we're looking at that and going, you know, what are we going to do to accomplish that?

And one of the things we looked at in our communities was all of the groups making decisions, the other non-profits who were providing services to our people, the government entities, none of them had the IL philosophy within their decision-making process.

And so what happens is they make decisions without thinking about accessibility or anything and then we go and protest it.

And we thought, well, what if we were making those decisions with them? 

This is some statistics about 57 million of the 324 million residents in the U.S., on the last census, and this may be a little older, but self-reported as having a disability and yet less than one half of 1 percent of federal government employees in management reported having a disability.

And if you look at your city councils, you look at your counties, the state, how many of those people have disabilities and take that into consideration? 

So that's what we wanted to start looking at.

You have to have a mic.

Do we want to do it this way?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So it becomes difficult to measure the participation rate of individuals with disabilities since you don't have to report you have a disability, and some disabilities are not observable by others.

So I think that we need to be careful when we're talking about this because self-disclosure can be very stigmatizing for some individuals.

So I just, you know, in the back of my mind.

ROBERT HAND: that's a perfectly legitimate point.

There very well may be more people with disabilities.

But I think we can say, for whatever reason, accessibility and inclusion are generally not being considered in a lot of the community decision making.

That's what we're after.

So we looked at that and we said, great, we have lots of contacts in our community.

We'll get a lot of our people with disabilities in these positions.

We'll help them get appointed to boards.

We'll help them get on these councils.

So we asked a lot of our constituents to do that and a lot of them said, well, no, we don't want to do it because we don't feel like we know what we're doing if we get on there.

And we talked to some of them who were on some and they said, you know what we are?

We're kind of the token person with a disability because we don't feel like we really know what we're doing and how to have an effect on them.

So what we decided then was, well, we can't just throw people out there and get them on these boards.

We need to prepare them.

And so we started ourselves, basically I with a few of my staff designed this academy to teach people.

It was just to be at RICV, we're just going to have our local community academy to both encourage people to start taking that leadership and to teach some of the main things, parliamentary procedures, leadership skills, open meeting laws and etcetera.

I often tell people our secret plan is to take over the central valley of California because we're going to have all of our graduates in all of these leadership positions.

And, by the way, we talked about some other things.

We talked about getting people elected to some of the elected positions, but that's much more difficult and as a nonprofit, if you get involved directly in elections, you can have problems.

So we decided advisory boards and nonprofit boards was the way to go for this.

Quite frankly, it was so successful that we were asked to design the train the trainer program and put it elsewhere.

When we were telling people statewide what was going on, they were so impressed with it that we were strongly encouraged to develop this.

The governor's appointment office in California calls me up when they're trying to find appointments from our area.

They tell me that if any of our graduates apply, they will give them a priority because they know they're going to understand what they're doing.

And the same with our city and county.

It's sought after as leaders.

When I came in, RICV was under probation and Department of Rehab was going to close it.

Obviously, there were a lot of things to solve.

Part of it was nobody wanted to have anything to do with them because they just weren't doing the right stuff.

Now we're seen as the people who train leaders.

And I have to tell you it's not just people with disabilities.

Now we get applicants from the university, we get applicants from other nonprofit boards.

The local foundation is after us to do training there.

This really changes how an independent living center is seen from this nice little place that helps people with disabilities to a place that trains the leaders in their community.

So this program will give you the knowledge to do all of that.

And I have to thank ILRU for this.

They've purchased the trainers manual.

That's $130 plus tax and shipping and all of that.

So each of you are getting that free.

That's a very valuable tool.

We're going to be going not exactly through it.

You won't see us stepping through each page and saying here's what this page says and here's what this page says, but we will go through the sections of it.

I do want to just start off by saying sort of generically it's color coded and the first tabs are all about each section and how you train them.

And it says what materials you need to have.

It says what the purpose of that particular part of it is, some of the goals you should be meeting within that.

Step by step what you do.

Then the sort of blueish tabs are things that just as a trainer you might need.

There's a sample press release.

There's a certificate of graduation.

There's other things like that.

And then the last section in the orange color, that's the student manual.

When we train, and I think when you guys train, you use the student manual.

So each student wouldn't have the trainer's manual, but if you choose to do it, each of them would have the student manual.

But you have that within that section.

I need to tell you this is copyrighted by RICV.

Not by me.

I don't own it.

They own it.

So it is a copyrighted book, but anytime you want any of the materials, you can use it.

But some things, like the certificates and that sort of stuff, certainly you're welcome to copy and use if you want to do that.

But the manual, you can take that and you can actually step through that.

That's going to tell you how you start a program right there.

To me, yes, in the back.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: When we choose to implement this program, are we permitted to copy the student manual section or do we need to purchase those individually for students who participate?

ROBERT HAND: Yeah, you would have to purchase them individually.

They cost, I think, $15, again plus shipping.

Now, you don't have to have those.

You can run this without those.

They have things like sample articles and bylaws and things, and we're going to go through that.

You can just use your own articles and use your own bylaws and do that.

But I can't give you permission to copy it because I don't own it, RICV owns it.

You know, if you have 10 people and you buy one for each of them, it's going to cost you about $200.

So it's not like it's a huge expense to do that.

But, as I said, you can run a program without doing that.

Obviously, the first ones we ran we didn't have those.

We just copied articles and bylaws and things.

Yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was wondering, and maybe I'm jumping the gun, but are you going to get into how you attract people to this, how you run it as far as time of day and, you know, the frequency of the trainings?

Because we have a hard enough time getting people on our advisory committees and things, I mean.

ROBERT HAND: yes, we're going to talk about all of that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: oh, good.

ROBERT HAND: and anything we don't talk about, you ask us about as we go along.

But all of that's a part of it.

Because you're right, if you can't get people there, there it doesn't make much difference.

But we'll talk about how you go about doing that.

Having the academy will improve the knowledge and skill level of your own board members.

Not only does RICV recruit board members, but many of our board members go through the program if they hadn't gone through it before.

So most of them have been trained through this program.

It greatly improves your ability to recruit board members with disabilities.

We all know the problem.

You have an independent living center, you have to have at least 51 percent of your board with significant disabilities, so you kind of pick people with disabilities.

And, you know, I do a lot of board training.

Besides the Leadership Academy, I'll go do training for peoples boards.

Board members don't know what they're doing most of the time.

It doesn't mean they're not smart.

We have at RICV a vice president of a bank, we have an attorney, professional people, but they have no clue what a board of a nonprofit is supposed to do.

And if they don't know and they're providing the leadership, it's going to cause you tremendous problems.

Or the same with a SILC.

This will teach them exactly how to go about being a board member.

It will enhance your center's reputation in the community.

As I said, both statewide and locally, RICV now is known as providing outstanding services, but also as a place you can go to to become a leader in the community, a place where non-profits can send their board members, where others in the community who want to do that can get the training to become leaders.

Let me just see where I'm at.

It will make your community a better place.

And, of course, that was the point of all of this when we started it.

Get people with disabilities in decision-making positions in your community and then when they're making those decisions, they don't do it without that perspective and then you have to go tell them they did it wrong.

Let's help them make the right decisions right from the start, and that's what this is about.

And, as I mentioned, all kinds of nonprofit boards and government boards, not just disability-related boards, because we all know every single thing the government does affects you.

Every nonprofit that's providing some kind of services, I don't care if it's meals or employment or anything, as much as it affects anybody else, it affects people with disabilities, and we should be there helping their boards make their decisions about what they're going to do.

Okay.

This academy is designed to run between 15 and 18 hours.

The actual manual was printed up when we were running it for 15 hours.

Some of the feedback we got said people needed more time to practice parliamentary procedures and we got our university Fresno State University, to give course credit for it, so we went to 18 hours to do that.

But we'll talk about that.

There can be a lot of leeway.

To me, the best idea is to do it about three hours a day one day a week for five or six weeks.

Now, some of them have ran like two days in a row, you know, two eight-hour days or something, and you can do that.

The advantage of this one is we encourage people when they're going through the course to go to boards, to go to council meetings and watch them and see.

I mean, even if the board is doing everything wrong that they observe, they're going to be able to see that and go, oh, yeah, now I see why we don't do these things.

But they can also see how they do do it.

They can see how the open meeting laws run.

They can see people make motions and vote on them.

And so by spreading it out like that, we give them a little more opportunity to get some experience.

Like I said, you can design it any way you want for your center.

Sometimes because of transportation issues.

I did a training for Oakland, for their disability advisory commission and they brought in some other commissions.

And we did it as a two-day event because they were bringing all of these people in to do it.

And then we'll, over the next couple of days, talk about pretty much every detail, step a to step z, in effect, of what you need to do to start your program.

How to go about getting funding, how do you recruit people, how do you set it up, all of that.

Again, there will be questions, I'm sure issues we won't address that we strongly encourage you to bring up.

And now I'm turning it over to Kimberly.

KIMBERLY TISSOT: I am the very proud executive director of ABLE South Carolina.

We are a center for independent living in South Carolina and we serve 23 counties, which actually makes up half of our state.

This program was really easy for me to want to start to get this program at our center.

I started to sound like a broken record telling organizations and businesses you need to involve people with disabilities in decision making.

You need to have them part of your board.

You need to have them part of your advisory councils.

They would say, well, help me get connected.

This is the way that we can help them get connected.

And so we started this program and I'm going to talk with you a little about how we started it, and also during lunch today you're going to actually have ABLE South Carolina on that big screen up there and you're going to have the opportunity to talk to some of our staff that implement the programs, as well as CLA graduates.

So you can learn from their experience, what this program has done for them and ask them what boards they've served on and how they think their voice is making a difference.

So we received a training, in August of 2014, Bob came to our center, very similar to what we're doing here.

I think he spent about two or three days with us as well.

The way that we set it up, I identified a few staff members that needed to be at the training and also invited some funders, possible funders to be involved so that they could hear about how this program would get started and hear the value of it.

So from that, from August 2014, it took us about six months to get up and get started.

And I'll talk with you a minute about everything that we have had to do in that six months.

It really went by quickly, but I think six months is enough time to get a program like this started.

This program is very inexpensive.

If you want to provide supplies, we did go ahead and give the student workbooks.

But these are very inexpensive.

We provide, I should have brought it, a portfolio for all of the participants.

So it's like a leather-bound portfolio with a pen and paper, because they're starting their professional leadership when they walk into CLA, so we want to give them tools to use so they can be successful.

We give them a Robert's Rules of Order.

Everyone loves that book.

We give them a few things.

Even the supplies to provide the tools to consumers is really inexpensive.

So we started our first CLA in February of 2015 and then we, from there we developed youth CLA groups.

We developed different areas within the communities that we serve.

And we'll talk about that and you'll get the opportunity to see a few folks this afternoon.

We are now on our seventh Community Leadership Academy and we have had over 40 CLA graduates complete the program.

From the 40 graduates, we have 26 graduates in leadership positions and 62 positions in 45 leadership areas.

That is 62 positions that people with disabilities are filling on a number of different boards, committees and councils that otherwise, if they did not go through the training, if they did not get connected, they would not be on those boards.

A lot of those county, the councils and boards that they serve on are non-traditional, so a disability voice was never there.

So the impact that these CLA graduates have made is significant.

So some of the things that took us six months.

What were you doing in that six months to get started? 

We had to secure some funding.

Who is going, you know, we needed somebody to pay for these books and somebody to pay  for the supplies.

I think our first, this program actually cost $6,200 a year to implement at our center and we offer several trainings throughout the year, quarterly trainings.

And we also have an online component and an in-person component of the training.

We had to create the schedule of what days are going to work best to offer a CLA, how many hours are going to work best.

Location.

We had to secure a location for the trainings.

Staffing needs.

You've got to identify the right staff for this program.

You need to have staff that understands boards, understands how boards run.

You've got to have staff that understands how government and the councils are formed, someone who can really get out and talk with government officials even, because you'll learn about that in a minute.

Experience serving on boards.

I think it's really hard to teach how to be involved in a board if you've never done it.

So that is something, so both staff members that I have implementing this program, they both serve on a number of boards and committees.

You need someone that's really good at recruitment and outreach.

How are you going to get your program out there?

How are you going to sell it to not only consumers, but also boards?

How are you going to do that? 

So you're going to need that really strong person.

We had two people who kind of implement our outreach plan.

We had someone who is really creative with graphics.

You all have a brochure in your packet that he created.

And then we have someone who is really great with social media.

And then getting out in the community and recruiting individuals.

In our first CLA, I believe we had about 12 participants and it was really easy to fill up.

Now we have a waiting list for our CLA.

People call us because they want to be involved in this program.
 
Event planning.

There's something that happens after the CLA.

You really want to have some sort of ceremony, some sort of graduation event.

And you also want to try to invite boards and other organizations to this so that you can make connections so that these CLA grads may meet someone at the graduation and go serve on their board later on.

So we have two ways that we really do outreach for this.

We get, we get the consumers there and then we get the organizations at the event.

And then experience facilitating trainings.

We are, and you'll see this picture up here is Robbie Kopp and Dori Tempio, who is in the chair, and then in the middle that is a CLA graduate getting her certificate at the graduation ceremony.

Dori does our consumer trainings and she also trains the community members.

So she, and you'll meet her today.

Her personality is huge.

She was obviously the right person to facilitate and coordinate this program.

Robbie Kopp does our, a lot of our community outreach and he is involved in advocacy.

So he does, he knows all of the advocacy priorities in South Carolina.

He knows what the disability community really needs to bring.

So he steps in during that component of CLA and also teaches how boards operate.

So he's, and so you'll meet both of them today, so we're really excited.

So part of, and I am not doing very good with the slides.

Okay.

Part of our recruitment was, when we did secure funding, our funder came to us and said: we really think we want to get this out there.

We want it to go nationally.

We want to pay for some type of commercial, some type of promotional video to be used.

So we said okay.

We took them up on that.

And they created this video.

What we ended up doing with this video is we loaded them up on USB drives and sent them to almost them up on USB drives and sent them to almost every single nonprofit in our state through our nonprofit association.

So everyone has this video and everyone learned the importance of having a diverse board and including people with disabilities.

So I am going to play the video.

From the video: ABLE South Carolina presents Community Leadership Academy, Learn to Lead.

Community Leadership Academy is a learning tool, a bridge from not knowing anything about, Justin Williams, graduate of Community Leadership Academy.

Knowing very little bit about how a board works to having the confidence to serve.

Community Leadership Academy is one of the best leadership training courses I have ever taken.

Charles Hall, graduate of Community Leadership Academy.

I have taken multiple courses, including a course in high school that was designed to train young people to be leaders, and I honestly have learned more through the Community Leadership Academy than I have any other course I've taken as far as being involved in the community.

A lot of students go from not having a lot of confidence to having a lot more confidence and figuring out that they really could do something to help the community, influence the community.

I definitely found more of my own voice Effie Francis, graduate of Community Leadership Academy, since joining so many committees and boards.

Believe it or not, I was a pretty shy person in my youth.

I've only grown even more from that since taking CLA.

I went from shyly sitting at a board meeting taking notes and not really saying anything to actively participating and voicing my opinion and really being there to represent that very under-represented voice of youth and disability.

You can be involved in the commissions, councils, committees, the nonprofit boards, or you can do what I've done this year and actually gotten involved in government advocacy, working with state legislature, house representatives, state senate and other government agencies to be more accessible and allow more inclusion for people with disabilities.

The types of subject matter the students would encounter is Robert's Rules of Order, great speakers, dos and don'ts.

Dress, professional dress for different types of boards.

The leaders and students all had a variety of experiences on different community boards.

If you are in the least bit interested in participating on a board, commission or committee, CLA is a  great opportunity for you to not only find your voice, but help facilitate it in the most professional way possible.

Our CLA graduates are the right choice in the community because they're trained and they're dedicated.

They came to this class.

They wanted to make a difference and will be able to make a positive difference anywhere they go.

If you happen to be looking for more board members to add greater diversity to your board, commission or committee, then I don't really think you need to look any further than CLA graduates because they reflect that great diversity.

They reflect all the different kinds of people that out there who are receiving that professional training and are ready to serve on your board.

The co-director of the State Alliance for Adolescence Sexual Health, Katie Zinger, New Morning Foundation, met Effy at an Equip function and invited her to be a SAASH member because we desperately needed some youth representation.

Effy's mere presence at SAASH meetings has been a catalyst for change and about how we think about young peoples' needs.

Effy was able to make us stop and ask ourselves questions that we had never considered before.

We had never really thought about the necessity of including students with disabilities in this data collection process and because of her presence at the meeting, we really stopped and considered that, and then we've acted on that as well.

There's no way that you can be an effective board or an effective committee or do any kind of effective programming for young people without including the voice of young people with disabilities.

It's a no brainer.

If the CLA produces young people that are able to interact on a board and really participate the way Effy participates, the professionalism that she shows, it would be absolutely fantastic to have more people from the CLA on boards like SAASH.

We want to be passionate, we want to be involved.

We want to have our voice heard.

And if you want somebody that wants to have their voice heard, then recruit somebody that's a Community Leadership Academy graduate.

For more information, contact ABLE South Carolina, advocacyatable-sc.org.

803-779-5121, 800-681-6805, tty 803-779-0949.

Special thanks to the South Carolina Interagency Office of Disability and Health.

[end of video]

KIMBERLY TISSOT: so you can see how our marketing approach was, it's really getting consumers because consumers can watch this and get interested and involved in CLA.

And also we added someone who's a CLA participant is on their board just to speak to the other organizations that may be involved.

So you can do something like this.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a video, but you can go out into the community and really sell this program and really get people with disabilities on different boards.