ROBERT HAND: so, what we are going to do is take about an hour and talk about placement and back to some data collection that we'll be getting into and talking about some more. And then a time at the end of that period again for a group discussion, a large group discussion, about some of those issues. And I'll go ahead and mention at this point that then for tomorrow morning we're going to start off with a review that Kimberly and I and potentially Paula will be doing about some of the main points to keep in mind as you're starting. And then there will be a time period where, I think they've made a sheet for you actually to work with, but putting together the exact steps. What are you going to do? What kind of time frame? How are you going to get something started? Whatever form that you want to start it in. And I'll mention, we'll say it tomorrow, but I'll go ahead and mention it now. I think the very last, well, maybe it's not the very last slide, it's close to the last slide, has Kimberly and I's contact information, and I'll commit her already, but, you know, you can e-mail or call us anytime after this if you have questions, if you're saying, well, we're trying to do this, but it's not working. Whatever you want, we'll be happy to respond to you by e-mail or to talk to you on the phone about it later on. So placements, again, I think one of the things that makes Leadership Academy unique is you have the graduation, you give them their certificate, they've learned all of this, but it's not over, as it is with many kinds of, you know, if you take a board training through United Way or through a foundation, typically you go through the training, they may give you a certificate and then they forget you ever existed sort of thing. So, for ours it's buying into it with the person. So, as I said, we ask people before they start the program what area are you interested in serving your community in? We try to get an answer there. Some people don't know. Some people will say, you know, I really want to get out there and do some work in leadership in the community, but I don't know just what yet. And then through the process, as we talk about various boards and we talk about councils, they'll pick something. But we make it very clear right from the beginning, as I mentioned before, we're doing it so people will go out and do some- thing in the community, not just so they'll have another certificate to put on their wall. So we're actively promoting that. So by the graduation hopefully they have either a specific, I mean, we have people who say, I want to get on this board, or I want to get on this council, but we'll have others who say, I'm interested in animals and I want to serve on some kind of a group that does things with animals, or I'm very interested in autism. We have one who was a woman who had two children who had been diagnosed with autism and she wanted to get involved with an autism group. So they may just have a theme sort of an area of interest or they may have specific ones. So then you have to go about them getting the placement and you helping. Now, I think in part of our write-up somewhere in there that one of my staff wrote it says it's really a 90/10 relationship. The person has 90 percent of the responsibility to find a place for themselves and you have 10 percent. I think that's probably a little too skewed, if you want to be very successful at it. Because a lot of the people we work with don't have the contacts to make that happen. So if you need to start, as you start planning your academy, start by listing the contacts you have. You may already have a good number of them, and hopefully most of you do, in the areas of non-profits and then in the government areas. But you also may have areas where you know you don't have any contacts. It could be in some of the nonprofit field, if you will, you might work with a lot of people in the disability field, but there may be other kinds of non-profits you really haven't interacted with. You might have great contacts at your city government, but at the state you don't really interact much with those people. Whatever, you should be identifying that yourself as you go along. And so by the time you're presenting your academy and you're moving people on to graduation, you need to have done the work to develop those contacts. So if you have a new state Senator in your area that's been elected recently and you don't have the contacts, to be a successful academy, you need to get out there and make those contacts with him because pretty soon you're going to be asking for his help in getting people appointed to a state council. And, you know, I was, when I was appointed both to the State Rehab Council and to the SILC, there was a process you were supposed to go through. I had no idea at the time. This is before we even started our academy. But what I did was go to my state Senator's staff and got the state Senator to write a letter saying I want to see this person appointed to these and I got appointed to both of them right away. It was only later that they told me, well, you know, there's actually a process you're supposed to go through for this. So having those contacts can make a huge difference. So that's the beginning point. Now, the other thing that we do in one of our sessions, I'm not sure if you guys do this or not, one of our sessions on placement is, do not look at that screen. I'm not talking about that. One of the things we do in one of our sessions is we bring computers in and, you know, we've made sure whatever place we're doing it has WIFI access. We have it at our agency, but we'll make sure otherwise. And then we set people down and we already have the areas, like, for the city, we'll pull up the application process, the list of their advisory councils. We do that for the state, for the Governor's office. And so you can have people within one of our sessions already starting that process. Some of them have already filled out applications to advisory committee before the graduation actually occurs. This is maybe the last class before the graduation. And we already have them sitting down, filling that out. And so you get a head start. But one way or another, you need to help them within that process. We know for the different non-profits how they go about electing their board members. Now, that doesn't always mean you're going to get somebody elected and they may not even have an opening. Somebody might say, well, I want to be on this board and you've talked to them and they say, well, we don't have an opening right now, but they can put in their application and they can be on the waiting list to do that. One of the ways we try to do it is identifying staff who have different contacts. So there's a whole group of both elected officials and non-profits that, when I was the executive there, that I had personal contacts with. And then we had other staff members who had contacts with different non-profits or different elected officials. And so when the person is saying this is what I want to do, we can sort of match that up with what staff person had those contacts, and that way we would help that process. You know, for the government entities it's a little bit of a formal process typically, and yet it's just like the saying goes, it's not what you know, it's who you know. If you have the personal contact, it makes a difference. So, you know, if you're going to be on the Disability Advisory Commission for the city of Fresno, there's a specific application process and then the interview and there's the steps you have to go through. On the other hand, if I called up the Mayor and said, "this is one of our graduates and they would be really great on this and they're applying and I'd really like for you to personally consider that," that was going to make a big difference in whether they got on that commission or not. So you have to use your contacts within that to help make that process occur. You want to get as wide a range as you can, because, again, we don't want to limit ourselves. As CILs, it's very common for us to have a whole lot of contacts within the disability community, but one of the main things we want to emphasize is not to just get placements within the disability community. So you need to reach out to other kinds of non-profits. You need to make sure you're paying attention to those advisory committees that are not specifically disability oriented. And have your list and have your contacts ahead. Now, the other thing we found is that sometimes when people are telling us what they want to do, it doesn't appear that's going to work. I mean, we never stop anybody for applying, but some of them have criteria, here's what we're looking for on our council, here's what we're looking for on your board members, and they don't meet that criteria. So when you have that, again, that's our role to kind of help guide them. Not necessarily stop them. You know, we may say, hey, look, you can fill out the application. We want to be up front with you. Here's the requirements and you don't have those at this time. But fill out that application, but in the meantime, if you're not going to get on that board, what's your second choice? Because let's move that way, too. And, therefore, try to help people realize that often for some of the higher level things, it's a step process. You know, you're going to have to get yourself some experience and some background on it. And this is sort of an aside on placement, but I think it's also significant. If any of you do job placement or if you help people prepare for work, the Department of Rehab in California were big supporters of our Leadership Academy. The previous director came and spoke at, I can't remember, either two or three of our presentations. And we're one of the rare activities that they would formally promote through their system because they have to be very careful what they promote. But they said this is a great way to help people get jobs because if you study job placement at all, you realize that most people don't get jobs because of the ads in the paper. They get jobs because somebody has an opening and they know them or they know a friend of theirs. So if you get on a council, if you get on a board, you're suddenly meeting a whole lot of new people, often business people, and, therefore, not only do you have something to put on your resume about something important you've done for the community, but you've also built contacts that can help in other ways, such as job placement. So that's something we keep in mind. And when we were talking about referrals, in the job placement program at RICV, many times they've referred their consumer to the Leadership Academy if they're not in a position where it looks like they're immediately going to find employment and they need some development. They need to develop some soft skills, but they also need to develop some kind of community contacts and stuff if they're likely to move on to the kind of employment they want. So that's been sort of a side issue on that. Yeah. Can you hand her the mic? AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm glad you brought that up because I was going to ask if you had started looking at tracking employment outcomes for your graduates as compared to some control group, because everything you're doing is building up so much more than the ability to participate well and be a really good member of a board or advisory committee. Chances are the business people on that committee, on the advisory committees these graduates are participating on are going to say, wow, you know, and, you know, have you ever considered working for us, take a look at the job openings. So I bet you you're going to see a difference in that area, too, and every independent living center across the nation is particularly concerned with paid job outcomes. So. ROBERT HAND: yeah, and we're going to talk about tracking more and data, but I don't think that's one they've actually tracked, but it's a very good point. Because a lot of the same skills are what we teach in work preparation. KIMBERLY TISSOT: you know, with placement, too, another good part about creating a CLA Alumni Association is that they can network with each other and make recommendations for other committees that the alumni are aware of. And so that's been very successful with us. Because we have the philosophy that we're going to teach you how to do it, we're not going to necessarily go out and find that board and make you serve on that committee, but we'll teach you how to get connected. And that's part of, I think a huge skill that CLA teaches is it teaches you how to look at community resources in looking for non-profits and boards and councils to serve on. One of the tasks that we have, the Association for Non-profits do when they come and speak to the CLA class is that they talk about where to find these boards and committees. So that's something that, and we also link them with the nonprofit association to help our consumers also find placement. So. That's another thought. They get a network of support through CLA. ROBERT HAND: did you have any other placement stuff? KIMBERLY TISSOT: I mean, we pretty much do, he taught us how to run our program, so it's somewhat identical, but in completely opposite parts of the country. You know, some things that have worked in California might have not worked in South Carolina and vice versa. That's why you have to really modify this CLA curriculum to fit your communities. ROBERT HAND: okay. And again, we're going to have kind of a group discussion on that later, but let's go ahead back to the tracking and the data collection. One of the big issues for long-term funding is the data that you can get off of this. My vision that I would love to see, you know, RICV has gotten several grants to fund their program. And part of, some of those grants were to fund us to go train others within the program. We actually got grants for that. I know that you guys have got grants for it. But I would love to see a large foundation give a grant that could be shared with a lot of the independent living centers that are doing this. You know, if there were 20 doing it and I could approach a large foundation and say by funding this, you're going to be helping 20 programs across the United States develop leaders within their communities and stuff, I think there would be a lot of value to that. But to do it, we have to have data. And so there's a few kinds of data we certainly recommend that you collect and Kimberly talked about some of that. The first has to do with placements. So, well, graduates, how many people have you had in your program? How many people graduated? And both of us have found there's minor differences. We've had some people develop some medical problems in the process, so they've had to drop out or something like that. But both of us, it's been quite close. The number who go in are very close to the number who come out. So how many graduates do you have and what are the characteristics, you know, of age and gender and ethnicity and stuff? We've talked already about the value of the diversity within that. And then how many people are getting on boards and councils and what ones? Some of our people are already on boards. I mean, we list that as well because it's still a board where they're getting to use the training that they've received. So that's sort of the minimum that we collect. And if you collect that, you're going to have a good starting place. And, by the way, we've seen the same thing I think you guys have seen some, which is several of our people end up on several boards or councils. I think it's because they know what they're doing and it's so valuable both for them and the councils to have somebody like that that they end up being recruited into several different ones. But we do have some that are just on one. We have ones on state level councils, county, city, and then a number of non-profits. So you want those lists. Now, something that I started at RICV about a year, year and a half ago, and it's sort of moved along but I don't know where it's going to go, but I'd love to see others working on it and developing it, and that's in impact measurements of it. So it's great to say we have people on all of these councils. Now what difference does it make? And so we were working with interns primarily from the Experimental Psychology Graduate Program at Fresno State, although we had some from rehabilitation counseling and some from social work, and we had several teams of interns. They were actually working on that in several departments. So we were trying to develop impacts for independent living, impacts for our youth program, impacts of job placement. But one of the ones that I wanted them concentrating on was impacts for the Community Leadership Academy. So looking at what does that mean. And, again, the more we could have started where people are looking at this, I think it would be ideal. So somebody had mentioned earlier great you're on this, but is that group addressing accessibility needs? Are they, is there anything about independent living philosophy that's filtering into this group now that you didn't experience when you first came onto it? And so there's impacts to the individual. And we have had those questions. How has it changed your life? You know, you graduated. You got on this board. Now what other things are different? And so I think they may be looking at placement within that. I don't remember that, the details they have in that. But impact measurement on these things is something that I think would be well worth developing. Obviously, I'm not the executive director at RICV now and I don't know where they are on that. I know other kinds of impact measurements are being developed throughout the United States. NCIL has a group that has worked on that. Paul Andrews is working on it in other places. But for the Leadership Academy, it's a very specific one they've worked on. And I would certainly be happy to help somebody with that kind of thing. And I wish I could say we had better measurements of it, but I think they've kind of started the process and I don't think it's gone really far yet. But it's the kind of process if you want to get particularly major grants, smaller grants won't require that sort of thing, but major ones will. KIMBERLY TISSOT: another way of tracking, too, is, the impact is also reaching out to the boards and councils that individuals are participating in, getting both sides of the impact understanding. So we did interviews with not only the CLA graduates, but with their consent we also reached out to the committees and councils that they're serving on just to get their perspective. When we did that video, there was a board rep that was talking about the impact that Effy had on serving on their advisory council and we did that with a number of other organizations that we knew that have CLA grads. So it's very beneficial to get both sides, too, because sometimes individuals aren't, they're not going to toot their own horn as much as others will. So we get both stories. But also when you're looking at identifying boards and councils for individuals to serve on, you know, sending a survey out through an association of non-profits, getting their ideas of what diversity means to them, do they think about disability when they think about having a diverse board and getting that imput and seeing the needs of your community so that you know how to target outreach. Does that make sense? ROBERT HAND: yeah. KIMBERLY TISSOT: okay. ROBERT HAND: that's very good. And so within that data collection part a little promotion again on it is if you guys start doing this and developing it, I'd love to help you work out a way for everybody to share the information. I know the staff at RICV, as we were looking at this impact, we called up your staff, we called up three or four other of the Leadership Academies to get basic information from them about placements and where they're at. I don't know if they were having you guys ask some of the same impact measurement questions. KIMBERLY TISSOT: uh-huh. ROBERT HAND: so there's a beginning there of gathering some of that data from across that's probably four or five different Leadership Academies. But again, if we could spread that, people collecting data, and then share and we could start building up a bank of information about not only placements and what people are doing now, but the effects that may be having in the communities and surveys of places where it's put, then I think we have the possibilities of much more significant funding for this. Okay. KIMBERLY TISSOT: I'm just thinking about the website, too. I mentioned the website earlier and we went back and reviewed it and I think it is not including all of the different CLAs, but that's something we can work on in the next couple of months. ROBERT HAND: one of the things you'll see in the manual, when we started all of this and developed it, the idea was to develop a website that would be available for everybody. So there is a website, nationalCLA.org. And it's listed in the data collection system part of the manual. They only have developed that to the point right now where they have RICV's information on it. So you're going to see information about their academies and their graduates and a lot of other stuff. The concept was always, though, to use it as a joint website where everybody could put data on that. And I recently talked to the manager at RICV who is in charge of the IT stuff and the web and he said they would be very willing to develop it more, it's just that it hasn't happened at this point and there hasn't been a lot of people saying they want to do that. So when we talk about joint kinds of things that could benefit all of us, there's already a website available that if anybody develops ways that they think that would be useful and a way to bring the information together from several and then be accessible to all of you. So if you want that data, you can go there and get it to write a grant. So you can say, you know, we're looking for funding to do this and it's already being done at these places and they already have this many placements in the community, etcetera, then that would be a way to get that. Now, RICV can get you some of that information because they've already collected it. So it would be available to you by getting ahold of them, and I can give you, there is contact information in there or I can give you contact information. AUDIENCE MEMBER: did you say it was nationalCLA.org? ROBERT HAND: yeah. And you can also go to ricv.org and they'll have a link to it from there. But again, it's something that I think would be well worth developing. And if any of you get into this and say this is the area that I, you know, that I'm really looking forward to and I think I would like to go for more significant grants, then that system is going to be available. And as soon as I think there's more groups buying into using it, RICV is very open to developing it more. And even using it, it was first developed with the concept that people could get on a board and have some issue, and they could go on that website and put in the question "what should I do under this kind of situation?" and get feedback that way, both from people at RICV, but also it would be an open site that other graduates and other organizations would have access to. KIMBERLY TISSOT: and you can use that same model for the alumni association and kind of have a brainstorming like a blog, ongoing blog where alumni can communicate with each other and problem solve if there are problems with some of the boards that they're serving on.