PAULA MCELWEE: thank you for all of your questions on sticky notes yesterday. We had quite a few more of them and we have done two things with them. We have a recap that Bob and Kimberly are going to do in a few minutes. And so in that recap we're going to work a lot of the questions into that, but we have some that were direct questions and answers that we'll go ahead and answer for you. There were some questions around the application process and the screening of applicants that came through. One of them was: does any CLA have an application process that screens out people who lack the basic skills? And kind of related to that, when we talked about behavior that board members need to have, where is the line between expecting a person to behave in an appropriate manner and a board accommodating a person's disability? So those are both kind of related ideas around are you screening people based on their ability? Do you guys want to speak to either of those? ROBERT HAND: under recruitment which we are going to talk about in more detail later. But on the issue of working effectively in a board versus a person having a disability that may make that difficult for them to interact and what those board would see as appropriate. I think, again, that that's a process of getting the person into the right situation. Yes, boards, just like jobs and any other groups, need to make accommodations. But, on the other hand, they also have the right to expect to function in particular ways if that's the design that they had. And so I think it's really incumbent on us as we're doing placements to look at people and say: is that particular board an appropriate place for them to be on? Are they going to be effective on it? Just as if we're trying to get somebody a job, we would say: are they going to be effective? Are they going to be able to work well in that environment? So I think that's the balance. It's not like there's a line in the sand, you can say this side is accommodation and this side they don't have to. It's one of those gray areas. But, on the other hand, if you're in a board situation and you cannot work effectively with those people, for whatever reason, then just saying, well, you should be able to, they should adapt, isn't going to make it any more effective. PAULA MCELWEE: there were lots of, you know, nuances to this. Sometimes it's a skill that the person may not realize that they need to be on the board, and you can work with them to understand why the board would expect that. And maybe it is a skill that can be taught, so you've got that option. And then you've also got the what's the best match? You know, what's the board that you think will be the best match with this person? And see what their interests are and find that. And it's a life is flexible like that; right? You know, you figure out and you back up and you say this worked and this didn't. And as you implement it, you're going to try and find your very best matches for your people. And there are people who are going to say, hey, I want to be on a board, and then are not going to follow through with even the classes maybe. Well, then you've learned something about their reliability to be on a board and you can say, hey, a barrier to, you know, to a board electing you is your willingness to be there on a regular basis. Are you willing to? And you work with them; right? So. ROBERT HAND: I think one of the things about that, there was a quote from Thomas Edison, which I'll never get exactly right, but the basis of it is when you think you've tried everything, you haven't. He was very big on keep going. That people who fail, it's because they just didn't try enough. He said, "I haven't failed. I just found 10,000 ways that didn't work." And so I think in those kind of situations that's what we need to do. What's another alternative? What's another way to look at it? What's some other training? Keep working through it. PAULA MCELWEE: and sometimes you can find a mentor on that board who will also work with the person when they first get on to help them understand kind of what's expected. And so sometimes you may work with the board, too, to do an accommodation or a mentoring situation that's useful to you. You had a question? AUDIENCE MEMBER: we had continued the discussion a little bit last night about the importance of having a stick to it attitude and really including that as part of the training for participants in the academy. Boards are hard. As we've heard from a lot of people, they can be very dysfunctional, but that doesn't mean you should necessarily quit the board, if that's something, if that's a board that's important to you. And I like the idea of a mentor. Then a really good goal would be do work on that board, be part of that board, change things to the way they should be. With new participants that's a learning process, but the idea of sticking with it is important. PAULA MCELWEE: we believe that everyone has the ability to function in this way and to be a leader given the right circumstances. So how do you assist that person to do that? The point here is that we want to help develop leaders in the community who are speaking about our issues at every forum and are able to be that person. So how do we get them those opportunities and how do we facilitate that? There were a couple of questions on can the criteria on your application include disability type. Looking at a goal towards diversity. You certainly can do that. You can just say disability and they can write it in or they don't have to. You know, it's always their choice. But you're not talking about something where you would discriminate against somebody on the basis of a disability and you're giving preference rather than discrimination. So you can ask that question certainly. And somebody asked how detailed can the application get to determine who is and isn't eligible. Well, that's a decision you'll make at your local level and what seems to fit for your local situation. We've given samples in the manual, but you can certainly change that if you'd like to. Another question was: should the speakers, do the speakers have to be disabled as well? Are we involving people without disabilities? And the answer to that is we are a disability rights organization. I mean, that's who we are. We certainly should have qualified people with disabilities who are in some of those roles. Does that have to be everybody? No. You know, if you've got your mayor who said, yes, that they would be glad to come and speak at your Leadership Academy and the mayor doesn't have a disability as far as you know, it's still the mayor, right? You're going to let him come. So as you build your group of instructors, you're going to have a mix of people. You're going to think about what is, what gives your students the very best connections in the community to go that next step and be on those boards. So you're going to have some of both. You're going to have some people who are graduates who are great students who can tell, you know, how they've been able to have an impact. You're going to have some people who are maybe from academia who are going to teach a class or do some of that. I don't know if you guys wanted to speak to that, too, or not. KIMBERLY TISSOT: we've had a mix of individuals with and without disabilities, but making sure that they are qualified and professionals in the community, I think that's huge. One of our board members, and we do use a lot of our board members coming in, because a lot of our board members are professionals with disabilities. We have attorneys on our board who have disabilities. We have professors. So we utilize them a lot when providing our CLA, but outside resources as well. I mean, our senator, of course, who comes and speaks at CLA does not have a disability, but is very knowledgeable about disability rights issues and comes to our organization quite often. City reps. You do want to involve them as much as possible because that gets them committed to CLA as well. What about you, Bob? ROBERT HAND: yeah. I mean, it's the same situation and Paula pretty much covered it, but, again, you want to be successful. You want the people to be successful. Certainly do not choose somebody to be a speaker just because they have a disability. So if they come in and you say, hey, that's great, they have a disability, but the information they give is not good, then you haven't helped your people. So I think that has to be our first consideration, who's going to get them the information they need to be a successful board member and council member? And then if you can have somebody with a disability who's going to provide that, that's much better, but not "the" criteria. PAULA MCELWEE: you certainly want to model for these students that people with disabilities can have leadership roles; right? If they haven't seen that yet in their lives, depending on how much they have been involved in the community, then this is another opportunity for you to show that. And so you want to do it as much as you're able to. Have you some suggestions for identifying binder materials other than color? With everything that has to do with an accommodation, of course, you have a responsibility to, you have a responsibility to make your materials accessible when you go out into the community. We had electronic versions for the materials and there are titles and we probably should have read the title as well as given the color when we referred you to the manual, and we'll try to do that more clearly as we go, you know, into the future ones. But certainly you need to be aware of all those kinds of things and find out from your students what accommodations they need and make sure that you're accommodating the materials to their needs. So there's an electronic version that you can work with as well as the version, some of you have the electronic version, some of you have the paper version. KIMBERLY TISSOT: these binders are just for the staff, but you can always modify them for any staff accommodations as well. Adding bump dots to the tabs or whatever is needed, you can easily do that. PAULA MCELWEE: okay. And are Kimberly and Bob available to assist during our development and launch? What do you think, guys? KIMBERLY TISSOT: absolutely. You can call us anytime. We can share our CLA curriculum with you all and help get you started. You can even maybe observe an online CLA if you would like to. But we are here to support you and our team is very excited about supporting other CILs. I know that facilitators that facilitate our CLA would be more than willing to help you as needed and your staff. ROBERT HAND: yeah. One of the later slides has our e-mail address and phone number, so you could call or e-mail us. I mean, if you want me to come to your center and help, there's a cost to that. I am not independently wealthy, so I wouldn't go do that for free. I do do that at organizations. Kimberly got a grant to have me come out there to start her program. But as far as just sharing information, you know, you get back and you're working on something, wow, what would be the best way to do this? Just feel free to call or e-mail either of us and we'd be happy to help step you through that. PAULA MCELWEE: so is that helpful? Yeah. And then you can also always contact the TA, I'm the TA call person at ILRU and I'll come around with my card during the break and pass that out to anybody who wants it, and we can also help you make the connections to information about this. So we'd be glad to do that. Okay. Those are the questions we're going to handle right now. I'd like to do a couple of other things before these guys start the next piece. And one of the things I'd like to do is remind you about the other part of your evaluation. So in your folders is the green evaluation. We picked up the blue ones on the first day. This is the post-test. And then there's also another evaluation sheet. So there's a post-test and an evaluation. And if you would fill those both out before you leave. I know some of you may scoot out of here before we can say that at the end. So be sure that you fill those out, put them in the middle of the table. It really helps us to have good evaluation information which helps, as you know, with our grants as well as improving our services. So we really appreciate that.