KIMBERLY TISSOT: all right. So Bob discussed a little bit about boards versus government bodies yesterday, so we're going to review a little bit more about that. So right now we know that both boards and government bodies, they guide policies and advise and provide leadership. We know that both require leaders to act in the best interest of the organization or agency. And we know that both have varying levels of accountability and authority. Now, we know that they're also different by government is public, non-profits are private. Appointments are often required within the public bodies and then public councils must follow open meeting laws. And Bob is going to talk a lot more about that in just a couple minutes. I'm going to review the type of government bodies, and this, what we want you all to do, and we're going to summarize it, but I want you guys to go back when you're forming your CLAs and creating your curriculums and really individualize this section and provide samples of councils and advisory boards to help link the CLA participant with the correct one that they're interested in. So a commission. Commissions provide guidance and oversight to an agency or department. They're typically involved members to be appointed. How many of you are involved in commissions? (show of hands) Great. Councils are formal advisory councils. I'm sure everyone is very familiar with the type of council, the Statewide Independent Living Council, but remember there are differences between councils that serve as more of an advisory council and a council where someone must be elected. One of our first youth CLAs, we had a young man who was about 19 and he said, well, I'm here to go serve on Greenville County City Council or, you know, we had to really explain to him that you can't just go serve. You actually have to run. But if that's what you're going for, we'll help you get there. So now he's going to school for government. So maybe he will be that eventually. An advisory board, generally no legal authority or oversight, they just provide guidance to help that department or agency with meeting their mission. This is a great one for youth. We connect our youth with a lot of advisory councils for other youth. And then committees are usually arms of boards and commissions or councils that are set forth to do the work. So you might form a finance committee, a fundraising committee. So, but remember to individualize these and provide examples from your state when you're providing this curriculum to the, during CLA. So one of the purposes of CLA is to get graduates connected with government councils and commissions. One of the things that we've had to learn, and I'm sure, Bob, you all do this as well, really explore the interests of the CLA participants. You know, what are they interested in? And a good way of exploring this in the very beginning is having an application process or an interest form. If individuals are interested, go ahead and get their interests before they start CLA so that you can start researching boards and councils around your area and start getting them connected with that. And you'll definitely want to invite some of those councils and interest areas to the graduation. And so some of the CLA participants have been interested in health care, disability, environment, social. A lot of our youth have been very interested in animal groups. So really just explore that with them. Now, remember CLA, the purpose of CLA is to get voices from the disability community to serve on other committees, councils and boards. Our voice is invaluable on non-traditional boards. You heard Effy say that, yesterday during the panel that she is often the only person with a disability and bringing up disability-related concerns on some of the advisory councils that she serves on. So make sure that we're just not focused specifically on other disability-focused boards. But also you do want to make connections because, you know, we have friends in the community that are always looking for trained professional people with disabilities to serve, so you might also want to reach out to your protection advocacies which are mandated to having a percentage of people serving on boards, developmental disability councils and of course the SILCs, your own centers. So this is, these are from South Carolina and these are some examples of boards, councils and committees that we have been able to connect our CLA grads with. The state Parent Training and Information Center. I keep saying this because it's so important for you all to connect with this group. They are now mandated to have, and I'm going to say this probably two more times today, but they are now mandated to provide services to youth with disabilities. Who better than CILs to step in and assist them? But a lot of them are also now requiring parent/youth advisory groups. So if you can connect your youth CLA grads to the PTI, that would be amazing. We have a young adult, she's in her early 20's, that is serving on the board of directors for our PTI and then we have several youth that are serving on their advisory councils. You heard Effy talk a little bit yesterday about the State Alliance for Adolescent Sexual Health. She serves on their board of directors and she is the voice for people with disabilities. Since she has been part of that board, she has been able to influence their policies, their practices to be more inclusive and accessible. We work closely with our State Department of Health and Human Services, but they have a lot of different work groups that they're doing and so we have some CLA grads on the home and community based services, person centered planning work group. A lot of these individuals are on Medicaid waivers that we've connected with them. So usually what they've done is on the HCBC person center planning work group they've had individuals with disabilities that have not spoken during these meetings, that have not said anything, have not been able to provide their input because they weren't trained or they were insecure or just scared to voice their concerns. Now they have about four CLA participants and they can't stop talking sometimes, which is good. Yes. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a question on when people make application to attend the CLA, I mean, we all know that there are people out there, we cringe at the thought on a board or a council or, they don't have the makeup to get along with other people or maybe there is some kind of disability or disorder or something that is really getting in their way and we cringe at that. Do you accept everybody who applies to be on your CLA teams or do you ever turn anybody down? KIMBERLY TISSOT: you can handle that a number of ways. What we have done is we have an interview process, and I think you all do as well. If they're not ready for CLA, we'll provide that one-on-one guidance until they are ready. So not necessarily saying you can't participate in CLA, but it's why don't you not participate in the next training and let's get you ready to start participating. So that's where you want to hone in on their soft skills or whatever your concerns are and start working with those individuals. ROBERT HAND: if I can address that. When we talk about recruitment too, it is in there. We take our Leadership Academy very seriously, so if somebody graduates, they've got my backing. If a council calls, if a board calls, I'm going to be saying, yes, I recommend this person. And so we do do that. We look at people, we have them fill out a very brief application, we interview them. But it's the same process. We never say, nope, we're not taking you. We say these are skills you're going to need to be successful in this program. So if you'll get with our people, either a group we have that's working on that or something else and go through it, and then that's how we try to deal with that. Because I think that's very legitimate. Everybody has the right to apply for any board or council they want, obviously, and we would never stop them, but we can only endorse the people we feel are going to be productive and helpful for the mission of developing inclusion. KIMBERLY TISSOT: and what we've learned, too, is a lot of individuals that we may feel that are not ready have never been held to, held accountable for their actions or have ever been told, hey, you know when you yell in a meeting, that's not appropriate. So we've had to really work on those soft skills quite a bit. And we're going to talk about that, too, soft skills, in a little bit about what CLA covers. So we have somebody serving on a county school, they're actually a representative on their school council. Who would you think that we would appoint for that in schools? Students. And the reason why is usually there's only one student with a disability, but we're trying to increase that. School of medicine's advisory board with the University of South Carolina. Doctors. Doctors need input from people with disabilities. Anybody working in the medical field, they need to know about accessibility. They need to know about sexual health and interacting with people with disabilities. So we have a person serving on that. United Way boards of directors, they're wanting to get more connected in their communities, United Way is a great one. We have a CLA grad that serves on Newberry County Young Professionals board of directors. This young woman has MS and her voice has been incredible on this rural county. She's making sure that their parks and recs are now getting to be accessible. So they're doing a lot of work on the ground in that county. And then of course we have a young adult who is in his early twenties who is serving on our state's DD council. He is the youngest person on the DD council and he is a great advocate. So his voice has been amazing on it. So these are the types of councils that CLA grads can, and I'm sure all of you have something very similar in your states. So just when you're thinking outside the box, outside of CILs and SILCs, where can you see CLA grads go. Yes, ma'am. AUDIENCE MEMBER: as you're talking about this, and I'm talking about all of the different advisory councils and decision-making bodies graduates are on, I am wondering, are you also looking at, I mean, it's one thing to have the voices being heard. But then to have those voices impacting decision making in the form of resolutions, in the form of where these agencies are holding their events, I mean, so on and so forth. So are you guys measuring that impact in that way? KIMBERLY TISSOT: we are, and it's difficult, and we're going to talk a little bit about collecting data and all of that in a little bit, but we formed the alumni association for that reason, to start measuring what is the change, so that we can really, when we're writing grants for programs like this, we can really speak on behalf of the impact. Yeah. Are you ready to talk about open meeting? ROBERT HAND: yeah, let me mention your stuff just a little bit before I go into open meeting laws. When we, as we talk about this more, and I think you may be talking about it, but I'll mention it. When we give this, you know, we're not charging anybody. We do it all through foundation grants. But we want people who are committed to doing this. That's what it's all about, change. So, you know, we don't want someone who's sitting at home with nothing to do and they say, oh, great, I'll come down there and spend some time going through your thing and get your documents and then I'll go back and sit at home again. We want people who want to make a difference. And so in that whole recruitment process, we give people lists. You know, I don't know for all of you, for us, our city probably has 30 or 40 advisory councils, you know. Parks, streets, I mean, you name it, they have an advisory council. Our county does. The state does. We have a thousand nonprofit boards. And we give people lists of all of those and say: where is your interest? Because at graduation, and she'll talk about that, we're going to want you to be saying this is what I want to do. But there are, and we have other lists we could give you. I mean, most cities and counties and stuff have more advisory groups than they could possibly fill and they're looking for people who are interested in that area and particularly that know how to be a good council member to be on those. Yes. AUDIENCE MEMBER: do you ever provide a stipend to help with transportation costs and other ancillary costs for participants? ROBERT HAND: we haven't because, I mean, nobody's ever asked us for it. We give more than, in more than one place. When we do it, we've done it in five or six different places in Fresno. We've done it in Merced. We've done it in Visallis. So it hasn't come up, but I think that's a legitimate issue to look at if it is a problem for someone. KIMBERLY TISSOT: we serve half the state, so it would be very difficult for us to require everyone to come to our office. So we've had to get creative and meet in community locations. And we've also created an online CLA so that folks can participate from their homes. ROBERT HAND: okay. We're going to talk about what you have to teach. One of the things you have to teach is open meeting laws. Now, when I teach this in a state, I teach it primarily in California. I've done Kansas and Missouri and South Carolina. Then I go and research the open meeting laws for that state. And it's not in one of our slides, but we can give you the website if you don't know where you can go and look up the open meeting laws in your state. How many of you feel like you know the open meeting laws in your state? (show of hands) Okay. A lot of you do. And so in this, when I'm doing a Leadership Academy, obviously I'm teaching the very specific open meeting laws in that state. In this case, we're going to talk about it in a somewhat more generic place, but I'm going to give you a lot of examples from California that may or may not apply. But it's really important, yes. AUDIENCE MEMBER: what is that website for those of us that might be. KIMBERLY TISSOT: I'm looking that up right now. ROBERT HAND: we'll get it to you here in just a little bit and we'll try to write it down and get it to you or read it out. But we'll have it for you. For our purposes, I'm going to talk about government councils and commissions. In some cases, like strange states like South Carolina, it actually applies to their independent living center. That's more unusual, though. So for most of them we're talking about if you're appointed to city, county or state commission, council, whatever. California actually has two. We have the Bagley-Keene Act at the state level and then we have the Brown Act at the county on down level. But they're both mainly the same. So the kinds of things that we have to look at primarily are usually you have to have an agenda set beforehand and it has to be posted. Now, back in my younger days, that meant you put it on a bulletin board or you put it on the door of the meeting. Now it usually means you put it on the website of the organization. But that must be there. And in most cases, there are exceptions, in most cases you can't change from that agenda. So what's listed on the agenda is what you discuss. I mean, you can pass on something, but you can't add new things. Now, again, that changes by state, and there are exceptions. But in generality, that's the concept. Because let's look at why open meeting laws exist. The idea was that the good old boys would meet in secret and they would make the decisions, and then they would come into the meeting and just pretend like they're doing it then. And they would bring up a topic maybe you really wanted to give input, but they wouldn't tell you they were going to discuss it at that meeting and then it would get decided on. So this whole design is the public must know what's going to be discussed and the public must have input and the decision making must occur at that meeting. That's the concept. But once you get into government, of course, it gets crazy. But again, I'll talk about sort of California a little bit and what we teach our people, and then you can look at what applies. So one thing is you must ask for input. In California's open meeting laws, there must be a time set aside for public input for things that are not on the agenda. Not for things that are on the agenda, but for things that aren't on the agenda. So when I ran the state rehab council, when I ran the city affairs on disability advisory commission, we would have a time and if we had accessibility of some program on the agenda and somebody wanted to talk about that, I'd say, wait, you can talk about that when that agenda item comes up. But right now it's a time when you can talk about anything. The ADA coordinator for the city of Fresno told me that there was a woman who would regularly come to the city council meeting and read poems that she had written because that was her right. She could, during that time as a member of the public, she could say whatever she wanted. Typically, you give people a time limit. Now, at least in California, there's no time limit in the law, but it says you can set one. But if you set one, you need to set it for everybody. So I can't say to you, you have three minutes to talk. Oh, but you have more to say, so I'm going to give you ten minutes to talk. Yes. AUDIENCE MEMBER: can you make a reasonable accommodation to say if, can you give someone that uses a communication device or has difficulty speaking or uses an interpreter, can you say at the outset that people requesting reasonable accommodations like that have a five-minute window instead of a three-minute? ROBERT HAND: right. Yes. If it's for a reasonable accommodation, that's a very good point, you could give them extra time for that purpose. AUDIENCE MEMBER: do they need to ask for that ahead of time when they register for public comment? ROBERT HAND: you know, there's no legal guidance that I know of. I think it would be wise and I'm sure the law would say that if somebody asks for it at the time and that was reasonable, you would have to allow it. That would be my guess. Again, I'm not a lawyer, so that's not legal advice, but that's, and what we would teach is to allow it. Remember we're talking about what we're going to teach in the academy. But that's not an easy thing to do. When I took over the Fresno Disability Advisory Council, for years before that they hadn't ran by the law. They kind of did whatever they wanted and the council got reformed and so people were used to coming in and just talking about whatever it is they wanted for however long they wanted. So I had to be very forceful and say, you know, I don't have a choice. This is the law. I'm the one that's held accountable and this council is held accountable for the law, so we're going to give you this time. The other thing about open meeting laws, which is kind of counterproductive. Remember the reason you have an agenda is so that people can know what's going to be addressed. But we would have people come to the state rehab council in Sacramento and maybe they had driven for an hour and they would say I'm having this problem, can you address it? And I would have to say, thank you for your input, but we can't do anything about it at this meeting because it's not on the agenda. And so we, if you're going to be in that situation, you have to understand that. And we teach in our academy if you're there, tell everybody beforehand, okay, we're going to take public input for things not on the agenda. You're going to get three minutes. And understand we are not going to be able to deal with this issue. We want to hear you, but it's not on the agenda. You can ask to have it put on the agenda for next time. And always say you can ask because sometimes people would present things that weren't appropriate for that council. So I couldn't say we'll put it on the agenda because it may have been something the council doesn't deal with. But we can say you can ask. So you want to be respective, you want to encourage that, but you have to understand that these laws apply to all of these councils and you have to follow them. Yes. AUDIENCE MEMBER: often when we have someone that brings a problem forward during our public comment we, because we have so many resources, we'll just let them know to get with us after the meeting to at least provide them resources, take their information, so that they leave there feeling like they've gotten something. And then we do follow up with them. ROBERT HAND: right. And we would do that. We would say, oh, that goes to this person from the department of rehab who might be there. Can you talk to him? It's just as a council, you cannot address it. Council members could ask questions for clarification, but they couldn't say, yeah, that's really important. I think we ought to deal with that. Because then they're dealing with an issue that's not on the agenda. The other thing I think is, in California, anyway, it's important to know, and you have to look at your own laws, is you can inadvertently have a meeting. In California's open meeting laws, if we're on a council and she e-mails me and says, oh, I think we should do this and I e-mail her and say, hey, I think we should do that, then we just had a meeting and that was illegal. So again you have to look at your own laws, but California's are very strict about what constitutes a law. And if three of you are discussing anything, even if it's by e-mail, even if it's one person to the other, then that becomes a meeting, you would have had to have posted it, you would have had to have it in an accessible area, etcetera. So, again, we have our list, we have our open meeting laws. We go through them in detail at the meeting and let people know about them. And what's happened is when they go on these councils, the government people love it because they know what they're doing and they don't have to continually remind them, no, you can't do this, because we've pretaught them all of the regulations. So again, it's a whole range of regulations that may be in state laws and you'll have to know the ones that are very specific for your state. If you need help with any of that, I think you're giving people the website, but if you need help with any of it, again, feel free to get back to us. From what we've seen, what I've seen of looking at different states, some of them give a lot of leeway, others are very strict. Now, even in open meeting laws you can go into closed session generally for personnel regulations or for negotiations. So, like, if you're on a council and you need to give advice of whether the agency, whether that agency should buy a building and in that meeting you're going to say, well, we think you should offer 200,000, but you could go up to 250,000. Well, you wouldn't say that in a public meeting or you're going to have to pay 250,000. So the law allows you to negotiate those, or if you have personnel issues that must be done in a closed meeting, you're not allowed to do that in an open meeting. But all votes have to be public no matter what you're voting on outside of that. Yes. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I like this, that we teach them the open meeting laws. We've had an incident where we've had conflicting, there was a council or a board meeting for a nonprofit and they were asked about the open meeting laws. Conflicting comments from two different attorneys. And who enforces it? Because I was asked about it. I called the attorney general's office. They couldn't answer my question. Told me to call board and commissions. When I called board and commissions, they told me to call the attorney general's office. So it's great to teach this, but who enforces it? ROBERT HAND: the truth is, unless somebody makes a complaint and go to court, it's like a lot of laws. When I was on the State Rehab Council, we had an attorney on the council. The Department of Rehab sent their attorney to tell us the laws and the two of them spent the meeting arguing about it. So the best you can do is do like I always do. Say your disclaimer. We are not attorneys. We're telling you the best of our knowledge. Give the people the basics of it. But different people interpret it, at one point our State Independent Living Council interpreted how they were running it different than the State Rehab Council did, and I was on both councils, but they both had different interpretations of it. So you just have to kind of go with what you can best understand. Kimberly has given me the website. I'm going to read it off. But we'll have it in writing for you so you can get it later, but it's ballot, b a l l o t, ballot and pedia, that's all one word, ballotpedia.org. But if you don't get it there, come up and see us and you can just copy it down later. So this is what we do with open meeting laws. Again, we get very specific and California has a lot of them. We'll bring in government representatives to talk about them. At one point, we had an attorney come in and present on it. But usually it's a, the staff of an elected official who will come in and tell how it affects them and what they have to do with it. In California now you have to, if you're on a government council, you have to go online and take an ethics training on conflict of interest and then pass an online test about it. And you have to do that, I think, every year if you're going to be on a government council. So they get very strict about all that. Technically it's a law, it's a crime if you don't follow it. You can actually be fined. I've never heard of it happening, but it can happen. The other thing that's really significant about being on a government council, and this is where we, again, do a lot of work with our people because we've had a lot of experience. Not only have I been on a lot of government councils, but I have lots of staff who have been, as well as other consumers who have in the past. In most cases, at least in the state of California, you become a government employee even though you're not paid. And so if we want our people to be successful, they have to understand that. We can think it's right or wrong, but if you're going to play that game, you've got to know the rules and you've got to understand it. So if you're going to get appointed by the governor of California, you're going to fill out a long application and it's going to ask about property you own, it's going to ask if you've ever been involved in a lawsuit, it's going to ask all of these things. But one of the key points, they will then interview you. The governor's appointment office will interview you and they'll say what will you do if you disagree with a decision of the governor? And if you say, well, if I disagree, I'm going to tell everybody I disagree, you will not be appointed. That's it. The interview is over. You will not be appointed. Now, again, we can like that or not like it, but if you want to get on that council and you want to have an effect, you can't say that. What I said was I would tell the governor why I think he's wrong and give him my advice, but as long as I'm on that council, I support the governor's decision. And that's the kind of, again, conceptual difference you have to have when you're going to be on that. When I presented to the Oakland Advisory, it was a range of advisory councils, they had all been specifically told nobody could go and speak at any public event unless the mayor had preapproved it because they didn't want to give any possibility somebody would say something that did not agree with what the mayor had. Now what we also say is that same thing. It's an advisory council. Internally you don't have to agree. You can say to the mayor, the governor, whoever you're advising, not that we ever talk directly to the governor, we talk to his representative, why you think that's wrong and the better one, but once that decision is made, you have to publicly support it. Or you have the option of resigning and then you can say whatever you want. The governor's terrible and he hates people with disabilities and nobody should ever vote for him. I have the right as a private citizen to say that. On the Governor's Advisory Council, I don't have the right to say that. So, again, that's that kind of thing that if we want people to be successful, you have to let them know and teach them that. That's only fair that they have that kind of knowledge of how to proceed. There may be very strict conflict of interest regulations. In California, you technically have to list any gift anyone has given you I think over $10 unless it's a relative or a birthday. So if you're going to apply for the state advisory council or the state living council, state rehab council, any of those, and a friend of yours gave you tickets to a football game that were worth a hundred dollars, technically you're supposed to list that just to make sure there's no conflict of interest. You know, obviously I could be bought off pretty cheap, so they had to watch me really closely. It can get ridiculous, but everybody has to buy into that. And we've worked with people who didn't like government. They wanted to be on the advisory council because they wanted to tell people their thoughts. But when we explained to them you're going to have to fill this out, you're going to have to give them all this information about yourself, they weren't willing to do that. Which is very legitimate. They didn't need to. They could go on a nonprofit board that didn't require that. But, again, we have that obligation to let people know what's going to be expected of them when they get into those situations and how to handle that. Oops. Okay. So, anyway, those are the keys for teaching about a community organization as opposed to a private one. As far as, you know, Robert's Rules of Order and how they run and stuff, all of that's the same, or the parliamentary procedures, generally all of that's the same, although government councils, at least again in California, tend to run more formally because they're sitting in front of the public and have all of that to look at. But as far as the parliamentary procedures, they're all the same. Most government councils don't have to deal with finances. There are exceptions, but the majority of them don't. You're advising about policy. You're advising about programs, etcetera, so you don't have to be monitoring the finances like you do on a nonprofit board. But the big difference is the open meeting laws, whatever your state laws are, and then the even enhanced requirements of loyalty. We talked about that earlier. If you're on a board, you have that. We talked about duty of obedience to the regulations, the bylaws, etcetera, of that board. But on a government council, typically that's much more stringent. I think we're ready for a break. Again, if you didn't get this website and you want it, just let us know and. KIMBERLY TISSOT: I put a post-it note on everyone's table with the address. ROBERT HAND: oh, you're so good. Okay.