ROBERT HAND: I will mention a couple of other things. Kimberly said they had had about seven courses or we call cohorts at RICV. I think they're at 15 or so with 250 plus graduates. So, you know, if this builds over years, and not all of your graduates will do anything. Some of them will fade away, but a lot of them are going to end up on boards and councils at state level, at city, at the county. That's going to make a huge difference to your community in the long run. And, by the way, Kimberly brought up numerous issues about graduation, about funding, about recruitment, and we're going to be going over all of those in detail, but she was just giving the overview, as I was. But we're going to go over it in detail. Now, amazingly, we're not going to go over it in the same order that is in your trainer's manual because I'm not that organized, number one; and, number two, you know, typically this is done at one center. So I would go into a center like I did with Kimberly's and do the training there. And so you kind of have a different approach. They're already there doing it, in effect, ready to do it. So this approach, instead, is trying to introduce the idea to you and show you what it is and stuff, and then we'll go back. So, like, I think funding and how you get funding is right at the beginning. We're going to move that to the end. But you have the manual anyway and you'll have all of that anyway. Okay. So the first part we're talking about is, happens to be under section 4. That's pages 27 to 41. And, again, we're not, you don't have to follow page by page. We're not going to do it that way. But just letting you know where it is as far as how we approach it. And so it starts off with remember you're going to have a trainer who's in charge of this. Now, organizations do it different ways. Some of them have one trainer that basically does the whole academy. Others have different staff members or volunteers who take on each section. Like that's what we started doing at RICV. When we first started it, I trained all of it. But then we made it where as other staff learned about it, one will take one section, one will take another section. I do parliamentary procedure parts typically. And it depends on people's strengths. So you can really involve a lot of people that way. Although you do need someone who is going to coordinate the whole thing, who is going to be in charge of it. But the trainer on this one, introduce participants to the academy and empowerment, so they'll understand the concepts of leadership. You cover the course, or that outline for that one. How they determine individual leadership styles. Cover legal and ethical responsibilities. Now, one of the things that we're going to talk about, too, on each one is a guest speaker. Now, I'm going to be talking about that towards the end in detail, but I put it up here to understand one of the things we think is important is to have guest speakers throughout the program. It does two things for you. One is it breaks it up. If you have one person presenting every time, all of the time, it can get a little boring. But the more important thing it does is it brings in people in the community to be part of that. So we're going to talk about that. You can have legislators or their staff. You can have executive directors of other non-profits. You can have people with disabilities who have been successful, like that's what that says. And as we talk about speakers, again, further in the program, we're going to give you examples of all of those. So it's designed to help individuals dealing with leadership. Now, this is a point that I think was very important that we stress in this is the difference between what we refer to as natural leadership. I mean, it's often learned, and it has other topics. It's different than appointed leadership. And we found it important for people to understand this. If you go look at some playground and kids playing, you're going to see somebody who says, oh, let's all play baseball and nobody is going to pay any attention to them. And then you're going to find some other kid that says let's all play baseball and everybody is going to go, yeah, let's do it. Or you're going to find among your staff somebody with no position of authority, but if people are having trouble, they go to that person and say, what are we going to do about this? Some people, whether it's natural or learned, they have leadership positions in peoples' minds. And when you get on a board and when you get on a council, if you want to be successful, you have to see that. So I was the executive director of one place and as I got to know the board, I saw that there was one guy who had been around a long time. He had a lot of money. He was influential in the community. And I realized it didn't matter what else happened, if he didn't agree with it, it didn't happen on that board. And so I learned that I had to meet with him and convince him first before it ever goes to the board. And if we want our people to be successful, we need to teach them about that and teach them where to look and teach them how to go about it, as opposed to appointed authority. So, you know, a person can be mayor, and appointed means elected, how, they're there because of their office. You can be mayor. It doesn't mean you're a leader at all. It might mean that you know a lot of people who would vote for you. It doesn't mean you necessarily have leadership skills and, yet, you have certain authority and positions. And that's how it is on boards and councils. You might have a chairperson, and if you know nothing about it and you get on a board and you think, well, they're the chairperson. Obviously, they know all about leadership and know about what they're doing. And they don't realize that often the chairperson is the person who missed the last meeting and got elected to be the chairperson. So this is something we go through and we talk about with people. So, again, we go through outside speakers, community members committed to the organization. And we'll go through that in a little more detail. But they need to be people, obviously, who understand and have a commitment to including people with disabilities in the IL philosophy. Am I in yours? Never mind. I'll say just a little bit more about this, then. So, anyway, this is the beginning as we talk about leadership. And we're going to talk a little bit more about types of leaders and how you look at that as we go in. Okay. Now I'll let you say more. KIMBERLY TISSOT: so as you are doing your CLA, you're going to want outside speakers. It just makes it a lot more interesting when you have different individuals coming and talking about how the government runs, how their boards run, and it gives the CLA participants actually exposure to different organizations. We have had a number of speakers come in and we've had council reps, we have had, met staff members from the governor's office. In the video, actually a city council member was in the video, but he was, also every time a CLA happens, he has signed up to be a speaker. We have got commitment from community members that are coming in to help us implement CLA. Bob was talking a minute ago about staff facilitating CLA or volunteers, but this is also something that your CLA graduates can help you facilitate. We have had a number of graduates come in and help lead a session or two. But this is something that you all could pass on to a CLA graduate or you can also hire them on your team. We've done many, we've hired many people from CLA. But with the CLA, too, it's really brought that commitment to ABLE South Carolina from the community. We were not working with a lot of some of the nonprofit organizations until CLA started because we started to invite them to that graduation, which we call a mixer. There's nothing that we mix in drinks, so don't worry. No alcoholic beverages. We just wanted to make sure that we use a term instead of graduation. But we use a mixer just to get the community members there to meet the graduates. Community members also have a better understanding what we do as a center for independent living. We are always preaching that people with disabilities need to be involved. Now they're actually seeing how people with disabilities are becoming involved. So they learn our mission through coming in. That city councilman has invited us for every single issue that's impacting citizens with disabilities. So not only is he interested in CLA, he knows what ABLE South Carolina can now do because of CLA. As I mentioned, we've hired, if you want a trained staff, you can hire from CLA. We have actually two people that we've hired from our CLA and we've got a few youth leaders that are moving up to staff positions. You'll actually meet two of the staff members today who were hired from, as participants of CLA. You will also get trained board and SILC members. I think everyone has a hard time finding SILC members and board members who are trained. Not just people with disabilities, but we want leaders with disabilities on our boards, and CLA is a way that you can get them, get trained individuals. We stress the importance of CLA, and I'll talk way more about this later, but stress the importance of using the voice, the disability voice on other boards and councils that you serve on. So we preach this to our CLA participants because it's so important. They're not just any ordinary board member, but they're a board member with a disability and it's bringing that to their boards and councils that they are serving on. So looking at issues like accessibility and then funding opportunities. We have gained a lot of different funding opportunities from just having CLA at our CIL because of the exposure of CLA. How many of you know what your state PTI is, Parent Training Information center? [show of hands] Well, recently, I think about a year ago they, all the grants were out for rebid. Thank goodness we don't have to do that, right? But all the PTIs were writing their grants again for grant renewal and I got a call from the executive director from the PTI of our state calling and saying, hey, Kimberly, do you mind if I put a portion of CLA into our grant and I'll give you money? I said, sure! That would be terrific! But what she was wanting was she was wanting to give us money to train individuals, in CLA, to train individuals in CLA to serve on her board and her youth parent advisory council. So we're assisting her with that and we're getting funding. So that's great. And we also got a lot of different funding contracts that we can talk about a little bit later. But, do you want to jump into that one? Okay. ROBERT HAND: all right. Within that, if you see within that section we do talk a little bit about leadership styles, but it's more about how you apply it. Remember what we're interested in is that people know how to be board members and council members. We also have had numerous people go through it and I've had some go through a leadership program, a board training program at our local foundation, and by our United Way, and people who have come to ours have said this is so much better because those were generic trainings about being on a board where ours is very specific. How do you make a motion? How do you make a second? What's a friendly amendment? How do you do it if it's not a friendly amendment? What's it mean when somebody calls the question? And we teach, which we'll go over later, the details of how do you be a board member. So I think that that's very crucial for it. And, again, we'll give you examples of that. But a little bit, obviously, it's about leadership now. On that particular page 36, we went to some tools online where they have these little tests you can give yourself. Now, one of the things we discovered a couple of years later that one of those, I don't remember which one, is no longer there. So that's the problem when you print up these kinds of things. Now, what we have done, I think these guys, well, it, we have given you two quizzes in your handouts that were available online that talk a little bit about leadership techniques. Now, again, we're not trying, we're not one of these groups that, I've gone through several of them. You know, you're a bear because your leadership style is this way or, it's not about that at all. It's just getting people to think about the way they go about perceiving leadership and the way that they perceive it in other people, in looking at some of the aspects of it, some of the things that are important about leaders. And that's what we're trying to get through this. Not a labeling of the type of leader you are, not a labeling of the type of communication that you use, but, rather, an understanding, and these are about do you do these kinds of cooperative things in leadership situations? And that's what we're approaching in that.