ROBERT HAND: okay. We're going to start talking about, even though it's listed under graduation, we're going to start with the point before that, which is recruiting. And when we talk about this as a whole, I'm going to say something I'm sure I've said before and I'll probably say again before we leave, but like ILRU has several measurements. They have that pre-test and post-test and satisfaction. To me there's only one measurement. Six months from now, how many successful Leadership Academies are there? And a year from now, how many people with disabilities are out there making a difference in their community? That's what it's really about. And so because of that, in effect, it affects all of the things, but recruitment is one of the big points that's important. And one of the things I say here is I found that the first class is really significant for you, because either you get some initial funding or you're doing it on your own to start with so that you'll have something to show to funders. And who comes out of that first class is going to make a real difference. Do you have people who did understand it, who did pick up on it, who have gone out into the community and made a difference? So even though all of the recruitment's important, to me, this one has a particularly significant aspect for the success of the academy as a whole. And the more successful it is, the more people who are going to get that opportunity to go out and take leadership roles. Another point which I made earlier in our discussion is obviously each of you will decide on your own systems. But what we do, and I think this applies to what Kimberly does, we take pride in the people that we bring in and take through this program and we stay in touch to the degree possible, but a part of it is helping them get placements. So when you're doing your recruitment and you're accepting people in, you need to be thinking when they graduate, am I going to feel like I can recommend them to a board, to a council or something? That's a significant part of it. Again, we're not suggesting that, if not, you just reject them, but you think about it and help them with it. Why not? What does this person not have or what are they doing that you don't feel qualifies them? And, therefore, how can you help them get to the point, if this is really what they want to do, that they could do that? So there's a number of ways to go about recruitment, and I know that Kimberly has several as well. But, first of all, we did a number of stuff. We looked at the community as a whole, which we're doing all of the time, and saying where are successful people already out there? Business people, people in universities, community colleges, people that we're watching do activities in the community who are self-advocates or advocates for a cause, who are doing it in a good, successful, cooperative way. We look at other organizations that serve individuals with disabilities and say who among them seem to have some good leadership skills? And so that's a good place to start. Obviously, all of you are already providing a range of services for people with disabilities, so you may have a number of people right off. I know we said to our staff think about who you're working with who you think would be really good and really successful on this and make recommendations to them. If you have contacts with schools, and we have a very active youth, at RICV they have a very active youth program that goes into a lot of schools and has other after-school kinds of leadership and advocacy activities they do. And that was a very good place to look for people who were very interested, looked like they'd be committed and want to do it. We've had a lot of success at the community colleges, the universities, and, you know, that includes the private ones. We have a branch of Phoenix University and they're very interested in it. So those are some places that you can start. We promoted it through the Department of Rehabilitation and some of the other governmental entities, like we have what's called a Regional Center for People with Developmental Disabilities. A lot of your other organizations, particularly those who serve people with disabilities of different types or who serve underprivileged or low income kinds of groups, a lot of them were very interested in sending either board members or people that they were working with who wanted to be strong advocates and get them going. Did you have other. KIMBERLY TISSOT: we've done things that are similar to that and we've reached out to student disability services at colleges and universities and looked for programs that would be a natural fit. Like we were just talking about partners of policy making. That is a program that teaches advocacy on the government level. So with the DD population, reaching out to them, because a lot of their Partners of Policy graduates came over to CLA afterwards and continued with their leadership development. So looking at programs we can kind of partner with. ROBERT HAND: and at the university and at the community college, they have the Office for Services for Students with Disabilities. And so we would go in and talk to them. In fact, one of them was on our board and I was on the advisory committee of another. So we presented them with information about it. And one of the things about recruitment that we found really helped us get off the ground is even though you can't do the formal applications and recruitment until you're all set up and ready to go, you can start the process before that. You can go out to people and say we're going to be doing this. Think about who you know who would be good for this. And you can start talking about that, you know, a week after you're back. You can just make a little flyer that says this is coming to our community. Who do you know who's going to be a really good participant for this sort of thing? So we get it out there. We've also done, as you mentioned, through our elected officials, many of them have people that they work with in the community who have disabilities and so we've had city council, we've had county or we've had our state legislators, their regular offices recommend people who would come in initially with disabilities, sometimes now it's like some of their own staff, they'll send their staff through the training so that they'll learn about this whole aspect of leadership in the community. So, anyway, it's not, we haven't found it to be a difficult thing. Now, the more you do, then you have to start looking more broadly, because at first, you know, you're going to need 12, 15 people. That may not be hard to identify. The next time another 12, 15. Well, now maybe you've already gone through 30 people. You know, in Fresno we've gone through 250 people or so, and so now finding new ones, you have to start reaching out more. But the good part of that is you now have the reputation or you tend to have people coming to you looking for it. So that balances out the idea that you've already, you've already recruited sort of the easy pickings of people in the community you already knew would be good for that. Do you want to say more about that or go to your next one? KIMBERLY TISSOT: go ahead and go to the next one. Now we're going to talk about planning a CLA graduation. This is a fun part and you have to get a little creative. ROBERT HAND: she gets the fun part. KIMBERLY TISSOT: so this is a really big deal and you need to make it a really big deal. These individuals just spent the last six weeks with you and, to learn these great skills to go out in the community and make change. So we need to make this an event. You can either, Bob and I were talking earlier, you can either provide them with a certificate and not help them connecting with boards or you can have an event and invite people and then they can start utilizing their skills. And the graduation is usually the first place they start to use the skills that they learned in CLA. We teach about networking. We teach about chitchat during events, how to make conversations with people. So we prepare them for the graduation as well to let them know what to expect because we also make the graduation something that we call a diversity mixer. So we invite the community members in. You're wanting, you usually want to prepare a program. And I talk about maybe a list of all the CLA graduates that are graduating in that class. Thanking the speakers and thanking the sponsors and then an agenda for the day. Prepare opening and closing remarks. We get a key note speaker and usually from a government official to come in and actually talk about the importance of serving on boards and making a community change. So really this is, you're making connections again with folks. And you might want to invite one of your speakers back to do that key note. We also assist the CLA graduates with creating an elevator speech. To talk a little bit about them and just get the conversation started. And this is a skill that everyone should have to be able to say something about yourself. What they are, who can, what they can offer. And this is something that we have them work on and this is one of their homework assignments and when they go home they prepare an elevator speech. And some like to practice before, and so we give them the opportunity to do this. This is sometimes the first, really first time they've done any kind of public speaking. ROBERT HAND: and can I say, when we have them get their certificate as part of that, they're expected to say either these are the boards I'm on or this is the kind of board or council that I want to be on. This is why I went through the training so that if there are representatives of those groups in the, participating, they're going to hear them say I want to be part of that. KIMBERLY TISSOT: you also want to prepare certificates. And there are examples of certificates in your booklet on page 126. So you can follow that. Something that we still have failed to mention. When you are part of the Community Leadership Academy and you offer this program, we can actually provide you with the CLA logo so that we all have the same logo. It's kind of branding the Community Leadership Academy. And I'll have Bob talk a little bit more about the website that you can be a part of as well. We also send invitations out. And we're very selective of who we send invitations out, mailing, because mail can get a little expensive, but we do mail CLA invitations out. We also do e-mail invites on our listserv. And we also connect with the Association for Non-profits and United Ways to get their organizations involved to come to the CLA graduation. And then we also, the way that we design the graduation is that it is a mixer. We do about an hour worth of, we have the keynote and then the elevator speeches and then the awards ceremony, and then it's time for them to get connected with different community organizations. So we encourage community organizations to bring information about them. Maybe some board applications, brochures, to provide the CLA graduates with a little bit more information. So the graduation does not have to be expensive. You can get, we really encourage to get in-kind donations. This is something that you will get local sponsors for. We've reached out to grocery stores to assist us with providing food for the CLA. Local restaurants. We've had really amazing high-end restaurants donate food to make the event a little bit more fancy. We've had bakeries provide us with CLA cakes with the logo on it. Everybody celebrates with a cake for some reason, so we thought it was appropriate. But you need to make sure that you are offering dietary accommodations. So we also have, we have a cake, but we also have sugar free desserts. So make sure when you're planning this that you're thinking about all populations. Party supply stores. We've had table linens donated. We've had party platters. We've had non-latex balloons provided. So, you know, and this can be an ongoing partnership. We've had printers print up the invitations for us and the program for free. So this, again, is another networking opportunity for your organization. But make sure you always recognize your donors. I'm sure you all do, but make sure that they're mentioned maybe in the program of the graduation, near the food, because they like to be recognized and they're going to probably give to you again if you recognize them. So I just have a few examples. I'm sure you guys are really hungry now. So these are some examples of cakes that we have had. And I think, Bob, you copied our cakes with the logos, but we had them put our logo and the CLA logo on the cake. There's two different cakes. There's a rectangle one displayed and a round one. A local bakery provided the cake on the right and it says CLA Community Leadership Academy. We have connections in different communities that our offices are located, so one of those cakes is from Greenville, South Carolina and one of the cakes is from Columbia. They're ongoing supporters for us, the bakeries. And this is just a little picture of a CLA graduation photo. You see people mingling, they are talking, no one is getting bored. People are eating and getting that opportunity to network. Here is a picture of Robbie Kopp who you all met briefly yesterday during the panel providing the certificates. I'm always there, but I do not like to be in front of the center of attention, so I have my staff do that part for me. And then tracking graduates. This is something that, did you want to add anything about CLA graduation? ROBERT HAND: well, I think tracking graduates comes later, after placement. KIMBERLY TISSOT: does it? ROBERT HAND: yes. KIMBERLY TISSOT: I am out of order, then. AUDIENCE MEMBER: not according to the slides. KIMBERLY TISSOT: I have tracking now. ROBERT HAND: okay. Go ahead and track if you want. KIMBERLY TISSOT: you need cake. So if you turn to page 127, it gives you a little bit of information about how to track the success of your CLA graduates. And a lot of our grants, this is required, and the main grant that we got to facilitate CLA requires us to track and actually they gave us the duties of tracking all people with disabilities who are serving on boards, on councils in South Carolina, and that's impossible because not everyone is going to self-disclose, but you can track your graduates. You can track them, you know, three, six, 12 months after graduation. And then forming some kind of association for afterwards so that the CLA graduates can stay connected with each other but you can also stay connected and see what they're doing in the community. Tracking graduates really gives your program validity. It's a good way to evaluate your program and the way you can do that is if you're facilitating CLA for six weeks and you have graduates that aren't on any boards and commissions, you need to go back and reassess what's going on in your program to make sure that you make it stronger and maybe providing more assistance to that graduate with connecting to the community. And then we do follow-up interviews with a lot of our CLA grads and, you know, informing them that this is coming. Kind of hold them accountable. Let them know, hey, we're going to check on you in three months to see what boards you were placed on. We can't wait to hear about all the change that you're making in the community. So make it exciting for them. ROBERT HAND: okay. So we'll be going on break in just a few minutes. No, we're going to go to that later because tracking is later. KIMBERLY TISSOT: okay. ROBERT HAND: (laughing) but I wanted to say a little bit more about the recruitment again, or the graduation again. Kimberly talked about it, it's that same kind of thing. How, what kind of effect your graduation has depends on you, because you can certainly just line up everybody, hand them their certificate and say thank you and go. But you can also make it, to the degree possible, a big community event. We have people who love to invite their family members. I mean, I had, you know, 12 family members coming, and this is a big event for these people and some of them, of course, it's the first kind of actual graduation ceremony they've gone to, not all of them, but all of them take it and see it as significant. If you have elected officials or their staff there, you have executive directors of other non-profits or board members of other non-profits. And so you make it that, a very special event for them. Again, and then as they get it, it's good to have them be a part of that, giving some kind of talk about themselves, and particularly talking about what they want to do. We often have them say what did you gain most out of the Leadership Academy? Which part of it did you think was most significant for you? Mainly giving them the idea, or the experience of getting up in front of people and talking. And that's one of the things, and we'll talk about it a little tomorrow, too, as we train, but if people want to be successful on boards or on councils, you've got to be willing to talk in front of a group of people. And so this graduation, even though we've done it as a group before then, the graduation gives them that more public experience of doing that and saying a few things that are prepared. And then, as she said, we always have a mixer. We've had people invited to apply for boards right there during the graduation and we've had elected officials say to them, yeah, I have appointments that I get to make to these councils and I know you mentioned that you were interested in that, so, you know, get ahold of me and I'll show you how to fill out that or, we'll get you that application and stuff. So the graduation is a party and it's a celebration, but it's actually a useful part of the whole academy itself and it can help you in that next step, which is the placement and follow-up. KIMBERLY TISSOT: with the elevator speeches, too, make sure they are elevator speeches, they're not 10-minute presentations about themselves. Because we have set time frames on their speeches so that they can get their point across very briefly because that is the point of the elevator speech. ROBERT HAND: so right now I know they have dessert and coffee, so if you all will sit there for a few minutes, Kimberly and I will go get some. KIMBERLY TISSOT: I told you he needs cake.