Strategies for Resource Development for SILCs Presented by Ann McDaniel and Brad Williams at the 2016 SILC Congress in Phoenix, Arizona. ANN MCDANIEL: I think you know I am Ann McDaniel from West Virginia. We are going to spend some time this morning talking about resource development. Should SILCs be doing it? What would you do it for? And some thoughts about ways to do that successfully. The learning objectives are in the PowerPoint, they are around describing the regulatory requirements regarding SILC resource development. Opportunities for SILCs to obtain public and private sources of funding. And examples of creative approaches and strategies for SILC resource development. So what the law says is that one of our authorities, and remember we have duties we have to do, and authorities we may choose to do. But one of our authorities is to conduct resource development activities to support the activities described in this sub section and this sub section being section 705 about being a SILC. Or to support the provision of independent living services by centers for independent living. So that gives us a pretty broad spectrum of things we might do resource development around. So anything that the SILC has to do under duties or that the SILC chooses to do under authorities, we can conduct resource development to support those activities. But we can also support, conduct resource development to support independent living services for centers for independent living. So it is very broad what we may choose to do resource development about. And I would just point out to you again, if you think about the authorities and what we are allowed to do now, and particularly that last authority that gives us the opportunity to do anything that is consistent with the purpose and with this section that the SILC chooses to do, that is a pretty broad opportunity to choose things to do that we may not have funding in our resource plan to accomplish. But we have the ability now to do resource development to support those activities. And I am going to turn it over to Brad to start talking to you about specific strategies. BRAD WILLIAMS: In thinking generally, you know, in order to do that resource development and have an authority, it has to be in your plan. If you don't have it in your plan, you know. I mean you really need to do that if that is what you are going to do. So you have to keep that in mind. So I am going to go over some organizing strategies because if you are going to do resource development in the future, you really should not just go out and do it in a haphazard kind of way, right. You really should organize yourself so you pursue resource development consistent with your mission, your vision, your goals, and your organizational needs. You know we have presented on this before, you know, with the SILC-NET, it is archived if you want to kind of Google it and check it out. We have this whole strategy in terms of, there is a SILC snapshot that you can archive where you can kind of go and identify your SILC needs. You know your organizational needs. Okay, cause think of it this way. Your SPIL is kind of a strategic document, but its for your state plan. But you uniquely have organizational needs, you know, as an entity. And you need to find a way to assess that, all right. Especially if you are going to do resource development. So there is other ways of doing that too. You can, anyone familiar with a SWOT analysis? You know, strengths, weakness, opportunities, threats, right. You want to do that. So that you can kind of gauge that. There is also kind of like the Druker Foundation has ways to look at some of your vision, your mission, your goals. You might want to have a session, a retreat, to do these types of things so that you know exactly where you are as an organization. Because, again, you should not just do resource development you should have a good sense that everything fits whatever you are pursing with this. So that you do, on the second thing, you tailor your activities around what you think you might be able to get. You are not kind of like the dog chasing its tail, okay. You know, yeah, you might go out there and search a grant and say this might be a great idea, okay. But, you know, it should fit your mission, vision, and goals and your organizational needs. You should not just chase money. All right. And you might want to recruit the skills that you need. We know we have to do recruitment, right. And as you do recruitment you have certain appointment categories, but you also look for other strategic things, other, you know, that might help and facilitate your council. One might be a fund raising professional, right? If you are going to start doing resource development, but other board members with skills and experience, and volunteers. These are just things to keep in mind. And then other organizing strategies. I think you might want to consider a development committee. You know that is one way to work with this and part of this is that board involvement is crucial with resource development. And a development plan then becomes, you know with multiple strategies that is supported by the full council is going to be huge as you are starting to move forward with this. So if you have a development committee, as you are doing different types of planning coming up with a development plan that has different strategies of what you can then pursue could be very crucial. So again, you are not just doing this, shooting from the hip hap hazard, you actually have a plan and you are going to start pursuing it. Create a committee description. What is the purpose of this development committee and then you revise council member expectations about giving. So this kind of goes with recruitment. So as you are recruiting and you might have a description of what it is for expectations for your council members. Tell them about this expectation of giving, all right. Let them know that is what you want and you have that on an annual basis. Just also, with the committee description, identify chair and members and get yourself going. You want to almost give this culture of giving within your organization, so that it is expected. And then with these key concepts, you don't ask, you don't get. I mean that is a given. Seems pretty simple, but you are not going to get it if you don't ask. Who do you know, through this whole recruitment process. You are going to be asking about things like affiliations and different things like that. Well you want to ask about, who do you know? Because it is all about network. People, businesses, foundations. Some people serve as trustees. I mean you never know who someone is going to know. I have a little story, it is about who I know or knew and found out too late. I used to run a center for ten years, and actually as the story goes I had a fund development person and that individual had a lot of experience and we were doing a capital campaign for a multiagency building project. And I learned a lot of concepts from that individual and we were doing this campaign and on my board was a lawyer. I am from like upstate New York, Southern Adirondacks, so it is kind of rural, you know. And so this particular lawyer was, did a great job and did fantastic. Over a few years brought in about $50,000, did an amazing job. So I was not thinking, I am thinking this person is doing fantastic, I am not expecting any more from this individual. But I did not ask, who do you know? I had not learned that lesson yet. So I had decided to move on to this job and so as I was moving on, this individual came to me and said, hey I know you are moving on but just in case you don't, he said, you know, I could ask my uncle Bob, we could put a proposal in to my uncle Bob for the capital campaign. If you decide to stay. I said who is your uncle Bob? Anyone familiar with the last name of Pritsker? Okay. So I am like, okay. Well you know he was from the New York City Pritskers who came from a long line of lawyers. So he was a lawyer and he eventually became a judge. Uncle Bob was from the Chicago Pritskers. Uncle Bob owned the Hyatt Regency chain. Uncle Bob had the Pritsker Foundation and the Pritsker Architect Prize. Uncle Bobs daughter was Penny Pritsker who is the treasurer for the Obama campaign. So you have to ask people who they know. That is a little lesson. So I often ask people, who you know. But you also need to ask, and maybe we should just take a moment here, how do you organize your resource development efforts? And that is what we are asking here, I think it is important to just discuss how do you organize your efforts? Or how will you organize your efforts. I mean that is worth a little conversation. Yeah, so lets open it up. ANN MCDANIEL: How many of your SILCs have done any kind of resource development or fund raising? Okay, not very many. So this could be a short conversation. Have you done resource development in any other areas of your life? Okay, more hands. So, can you share? What kinds of things did you do? How did you organize to do resource development or fund raising? AUDIENCE MEMBER: This is a question because I have not done much of this. When you have your development committee, that can be people outside the SILC board or council? BRAD WILLIAMS: That is a great question and it is how you define your committee and that is why you should define your committee and your committee description and yeah, that is one thing that we have done, is that it should actually have a good portion of council members, which you should actually reserve some individuals to be from outside of your council. Some expertise if you will. So it is how you define it, but I think that if you are asking that question you maybe want some individuals from outside, correct? ANNE MCDANIEL: I think that the committee work of councils can always be enhanced by accessing resources of people, other people you know that could help with the work of that committee. So unless it is a committee of your council that is specifically elected or appointed, and those are the only members who can be on there, anytime you can pull somebody else in that can help accomplish the work it is a smart thing to do. Particularly when you are talking about resource development which may be an area that your council members don't have as much expertise as some other folks in your community may have. AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name is Neil Myer, I am the chair of the Vermont SILC. My day job though, is I am the director of alumni relations for Union Institute in University. We have got about 15,000 alumni. Each year we run an online and on ground auction, in coordination with our national graduation in Cincinnati, Ohio. We also do mail out, your normal mail out campaigns, email ads, and just regular fund raising. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I am the president of a couple of nonprofits. And one organization the Capital Club House, we have an annual event at one of our board members home, like this past. And we utilize the who do you know, the list of everybody and we send out invitations by email. This last time, we had an event, and we had people to auction off their vacation homes. We were fortunate to have some members who have homes in Cancun and in the countryside of some other places. So they could auction off a week of those and then we added, the same day we had five members of the national symphony to come to do a little directing and we auctioned off the opportunity to have, to let you direct the quartet. And so that was one of our annual events. We have had others, this was our second, the one we had before that we had Patrick Kennedy come to speak. So we had like an intimate dinner and people sent out invitations by email people that they knew that. So that is a once a year event. ANN MCDANIEL: Thank you. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Our resource development has just been kind of in the last couple of years and has developed as a result of collaborations with other disability related organizations within the state. For example we got a grant from the DD Council at the state level to put on an AT conference for people with disabilities. And so, I think if we in the independent living movement we are so siloed a lot of times, but I think if we reach out to some of the other disability related organizations, it is amazing a lot of them have pots of money that they are willing to work with you. And especially as another one of our goals in WIOA is to be more collaborative in our efforts. Just an idea because it benefitted not only DD but it benefitted the whole IL community in Ohio. And so we are looking at more of those opportunities to work with the state agencies who have these little pots of money can benefit the entire IL community in the state. AUDIENCE MEMBER: One of the things that we are doing at the Arkansas SILC, before I came to the Arkansas SILC I worked for Pathfinder, which is a day habilitation center in Jacksonville, Arkansas. In 2010 they celebrated 40 years and I was challenged with raising money for a playground for the children. I had five months to raise this money. So you develop a goal, you ask your board to, everybody has a network of individuals that they know 5-10 people you don't know. So I asked the board to give me 5-10 names and they did. We sent out letters to those individuals and the board signed off or put a memo with it. In five months we raised $31,000 and cleared $28,000 and broke ground for phase one of a playground that now they have three phases to. So you have to develop a goal and let individuals know what your goal is so that they can embrace what you are trying to do and have that same passion for the need within your SILC or your center. AUDIENCE MEMBER: This is Dawn from Iowa and I have been the ED of the SILC in Iowa for ten years now and right after I first started because, you know, SILCs, we don't make a whole lot of money as EDs cause we are nonprofit so I was also working part time at a department store, a chain that crosses a number of different states. And they have what is called a community day event twice a year where you sell coupon booklets for $5 and your organization gets to keep the whole $5 and also depending the store you are registered at, you get a cut from the sales that the employees of the store sell of these booklets at the register. So we have been doing that twice a year probably for the past nine years. It has not brought in huge amount of money, but we do ask the SILC council members to at least try to sell ten booklets each for that sale. If they can sell more, great. If they don't want to sell them they just want to donate ten booklets equals $50 so if they just want to donate $50 they can. So we had fairly good participation, also several of our CILs participate and one of our CILs just buys like $100 worth of the booklets and then they give them to their employees and to consumers at the center. So that has been one way we have been able to build up about 8 grand. We expended some of it on stuff, but it is all done on a volunteer basis and when I do things I do it on my own time not on the SILC time, so therefore we don't have to put it back into specific program stuff. But now that SILCs can resource develop if we start using federal funds like I used to use the donation funds that we got to mail out the coupon booklets for the board to sell. But now if I use federal funds the Part B or the I&E funds or whatever then that is gonna have to go back into specific program allowable type things. So you are going to have to make sure when you do resource develop that if you are doing it on your time using your federal and state funds, that you are going to have to do it on things that are allowable for SILCs. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I am getting confused because we are talking about CILs fund raising and all that. I belong to SILC and I am appointed by the governor, I did not know whether we allowed to fund raise. So we always talk about this and push the idea around but then when someone says no, we are not allowed to do fund raising as governor appointees. ANN MCDANIEL: That is a good question. AUDIENCE MEMBER: So we are talking about board members, SILC members, I don't know what we are talking about CILs, or, I am confused and you hear me with an accent. That is why maybe I am confused. ANN MCDANIEL: I have never heard that before, I like that. Okay. Thank you for the opportunity for a little bit of clarification. Prior to the reauthorization of the rehab act SILCs were not allowed to do resource development and fund raising using their SILC resource plan. If you had other resources you might be able to do that. How your SILC is organized can also have an effect on resource development and what you are and are not allowed to do. Now under the federal law you can use your SILC resource plan for resource development activities. But you need to put it in your state plan that you are doing that. If there are prohibitions based on the fact that you are a governor appointed council at the state level, any state prohibitions, you would need to find out about that. If you are organized as a nonprofit corporation then the rules for you are a little different. There is probably more opportunities for resource development and more responsibilities for reporting for resource development. So you need to look at those things when you get home and find out what the state laws say about what you are allowed to do. Are you a nonprofit corporation, is that how your SILC is organized and find out more about, as a nonprofit what you can do and what you have to do, okay. I am going to move this along and we will have more opportunities for comments and questions, I promise. I know the back of the room is getting stressed. It will be okay, I promise. We will come back to it. One of the things that is really important before you begin doing any kind of resource development is laying the ground work. And of the things that you will find if you do any research at all is that people are more likely to give you money if they have heard of you. If they know who you are and they know what you do. Okay? Using social media is a really wonderful way to get your name out there. Having a website where you post information, where people can research more about you is very helpful. Having a presence on Facebook that ILRU folks were talking about. If you are on Facebook, they want to know it, and if you are not, they are recommending that you get on there. Because that is a way of getting a lot of information out to many, many more people. Because if you have a Facebook page and all of your council members like your Facebook page. Then all of the connections they have on Facebook are going to start to see information from your council Facebook page. It is like tentacles. It spreads and spreads and spreads. And more and more people are going to hear about you and learn about you. And the people that are liking, that are friending your page and liking what you post on your page know dozens and dozens and dozens more people than you would ever reach if you are only doing it based on people who already know about the SILC. So use social media and learn more about how to use social media to get your name out there and to get your initiatives out. Your collaborations with others. Your collaborations with centers. That is going to help people become more invested in what you are doing and then when they are asked to support with actual money they are far more likely to do that. One of the things that, if you do, attend any training, do any research about resource development that it is always recommended developing an annual fund. If you don't know what that means, that is like every year the United Way has a big fund drive. That is an annual fund that they are generating. When you annually ask for money, and not necessarily for a specific purpose, but to support the overall of what you do, and you do an appeal, usually toward the end of the year, when people are in a more giving mode. Because it is the holidays, and when they need to give money to get it on the record for their taxes that they are going to have to file the next year. That is a good time of year to do it. When you send that out, however you do it, that is developing an annual fund. And an annual fund gives you hopefully a consistent, reliable amount of money that you can count on every year to support your efforts. So when you do that you are looking at, somebody was talking about asking your board members for ten names of people they know. It is really important that you don't just do some kind of general blast. You can purchase mailing lists and they sort them by the things that help you find people that are more likely to give to you. But I am here to tell you the people most likely to give to you are the people that you know and that your staff know, and that your board members know, and that the center folks know. Because they are going to care more about it. We did it once and one of the things I asked my council for was, send us your Christmas card list. Send us the mailing list of people that you send cards to every year. And we got more response from those people than we did from anybody else. Look at who your partners are. People who used to be on your council. You want to keep those folks involved. Other advocates and stakeholders in your state are all good people that you would want to put on your list for your annual fund. And whether you do it by a hard mailing or by electronic mailing or through social media, those are the folks you are going to try to reach. We talked a bit yesterday about collaborations. We heard a few examples of collaborations now and I would just remind you again, collaborating with other folks who are trying to accomplish the same things that you are doing is going to make your proposals and your efforts stronger. And particularly I would collaboration with the centers for independent living in your state. Identify all the connections that you have. Think about not just the personal connections but the connections as a council with those stakeholders. With the DD Council. With the Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. With the other entities in the state that you work with on a daily basis. Identify those connections in your resource development efforts as well. And then make sure you recognize the people who respond. People who give you money need to be recognized. Every donation you get, the donor should receive a letter of thanks specifying what the donation was and how much you appreciated it. When you get funding from a funder for an event or an activity publicize that is where some of your money came from. Give them some cudos. That makes them feel warm and fuzzy about what you are doing and they are more likely to give you money again in the future. So here is another opportunity. BRAD WILLIAMS: An so with this, this is where you start and this is like the basis that Ann has talked about. And this would be continuous and you would build on. Cause the other thing is you have business partners. You do business. So the business partners should be added in. But you then want to build from this too. And part of this comes from an awareness of where the wealth resides. So as you have this basis. I had that fund development person that I worked with and he is like, well where do you think the wealth resides? And it is like, you start thinking about it. And hands down, it is with individuals. The individual wealth in this country is where the, it is just where all the wealth is. So as we have heard from Sha and the individual in the back with the alumni, it is the individual appeal where the vast amount of the money is and where you want you to put forward an effort and that is where the discretionary money is. You can think about organizations. You can think about foundations. And they certainly are options and alternatives, but the time and the effort is with the individuals. And then I was then told, okay, where do you think the individuals with all this wealth have their money? And so I, this is when I was young, I was in my 30s at this time. So I felt, you know I was like, wow, I was being quizzed here. Underneath their mattresses? [laughter] No, most of that money is not in liquid form. Some of it is, right? But where is most of that money, especially people that have a lot of disposable income. It is invested. It is in mutual funds. So it is like you need a stock account. Because if you get to actually develop these relationships, right? And they actually value you, you know. You don't want to make any assumptions, you can continue to maybe build a relationship and get a nice gift. But if they really value you and you have a stock account, it is really a stock account to receive a larger gift because when you then have your campaign and you say you can maybe do online or give a gift this way. Stock account? You know option, they can then call their broker and transfer gift of stock to your account and $5,000, okay? They can't do that if you don't have a stock account, right. And then I would say if you do that you then have to have fiscal policies that then talk about how you are going to manage gifts of stock and whether you are going to liquidate them in a rather x amount number of days or whether you are going to manage them and whether you have the capacity to do. Cause you do have a stock account and you do have a broker. That is the only other thing I would add into that. But these are things to consider down the line as you become more sophisticated with your ability to do this. For consideration. ANN MCDANIEL: And clearly Brad is the more sophisticated out of the two of us. He has a lot more experience with resource development and I have learned a lot from him over the years. I have gone to trainings that he did on resource development so I would strongly encourage you to network with Brad and stay in touch with him if this is something you are wanting to pursue. But now lets talk a bit more about your alls experience and we have to start in the back of the room so they don't explode. And then we will continue to move around the room. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, I am Beth James, I am the chair of the SILC in Tennessee. But my job before that, I spent 15 years as the director of development for a nonprofit and the final year I was there of a staff of two and a half we raised $500,000. So I want to say just with fund raising, always remember that people like to give money to people. As great as organizations are and as great as what you are doing is, it comes down to personal connections. Not that you have to know people with a lot of money but that when you meet people that you really can share with them the importance of what the work you are doing is. And we all have all these numbers and we provided this much service and this much this, which is all great and you need that, but a success story, a really down to earth success story that touches people makes so much more of a difference. Cause you know, we can all, I mean that is why when they are raising money for hungry children on TV, they don't show you thousands, they show you a close up of one child. And I think that is the same thing to think about independent living. It is too broad to like just say, oh it is about independent living because that is hard to nail down. But they, somebody does understand making a difference in a few people, this persons life and then that is, they can relate that to the numbers. So I think that is something really to work on. And whether you are doing events, you still have to have those stories, they need to be in your programs. Or if you are doing your annual campaign you need to arm people with that so that they can really make that difference. And the stock is great, I have done that in the past. It sounds complicated, it is not. People will do that because they don't have to take the capital gains. They can not have to liquidate the stock to give you the money. ANN MCDANIEL: No more hands? AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name is Will O'malley. I am with the Ohio SILC. A story and then a question. About ten years ago, I was part of this church committee for a local outreach and the question, or the issue that kept coming up was the lack of after school care available for kids essentially from kindergarten to their teenagers. And so we decided to apply for a grant to see if we could come up with the funding for it. Cause there was latch key, but that is expensive if you have children and in addition all the available latch key spots were filled up and there was about 2/3 of the school untouched. So we did get the grant which was written by my wife and ten years later, exclusively on grants the program has gone from being pilot project run by our church to a program that has been passed off to the local community group and it involves four elementary schools and it is year round now and it is all free. All exclusively on grants. And when looking at SILC, at least in Ohio, I am not seeing a bunch of board members that I am really expecting to contribute lots of money or have access to people with lots of money. And so I wonder if a great way would be to go to grants because, again, we have much of the state covered for independent living services but now that we are allowed to advocate for money for underserved or nonserved portions of the state, since our state is not offering more money to open up these new centers nor is the feds. That would seem like a great way to go and I am curious if people have tried that, anybody. And what their success has been because it would be necessary to raise enough money to start but then, with an expectation that more money will come or a center will be started and then die on the vine a year from now. So that is my question to the two of you or to the group. ANN MCDANIEL: I think it is an issue that we have all talked about. It is a lot easier to find grants to do something in addition to what you do, than it is to find grants that support what you already do. Starting a new center it is probably easier to find a grant to start it than it is to find grants to continue to support it. There are some out there. And so I would encourage if that is something you are interested in that you do research about that, because there are some grants that will support operating funds. But they are a little harder to find. Funding a special a project at a center is a lot easier to find a grant for. But, I would also caution and I think I am echoing what you just said, that you don't want to find a funding source to start a new center unless you know, or you are pretty sure, you have a strategy to continue to support that center. Cause it wouldn't, not only is it an unfair thing to the center folks to start a center that can't be continue to be supported. But it also is not going to look good if you start a center, you have a big splash, you get funding and in a years time, the whole thing falls apart because the funding was only to get it started. And we are going to talk a little bit more about researching for where to find money. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think that the resource development provision now in this legislation is wonderful because it gives states that don't have a coordinated effort for resource development through their CIL Associations or in a partnership between their SILCs and their CILs. The one thing that I do raise a little bit of concern with is that if SILCs start doing fund raising activities, they are competing with the same donor base as their states, as their CILs within their state. So I just urge that a really coordinated effort between the CILs and the SILCs. One of the things that we have done is focused our efforts in our state on legislative funding. And we have increased our legislative funding by about $8 million in the last four years. And some of it has been done through leveraging our state GF with a Title I funds through our state VR agency and getting those returned back to us in the form of contracts for services. So there is all kinds of innovative approaches but legislative funding really provides the opportunity to raise several, hopefully millions of dollars versus a couple thousand dollars. So I just wanted to get that on the table as well. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, like I said I have had experience in another life. Also people should not give up on community banks because whoever you are doing your banking with they have, I don't know if it is community development money and the person that you give your deposits to. You should be chummy with them and find out what they have to give because one time, one of the groups, we were doing a Christmas Gift Wrap, where we went to shopping area and had information about our organization and we would have people, we would gift wrap and the bookstore, I think it was Barnes and Knoble at the time, or one of them, would give us free gift wrap. They wanted us to come in and actually do that. And then people would donate. And it is not a lot of money, but it gets your name out. And one of those people that came by was someone who was vice president of a bank and they said well we got, it is end of the year, we got some money that is left over that we gotta get rid of that fund. So that is a way of doing that. And you can do smaller price point things like, we, you gonna have a big event, you gonna have potluck dinner where people come and bring a meal and then you have them write checks and that way you can have your IL community involved. Everybody don't have to have different kinds of money. I had spaghetti dinners where people we used to call waistline parties, where you come and you pay according to your waistline. There is also, I would have to pay a lot. ANN MCDANIEL: That gives a new meaning to the term 'fat cat.' Doesn't it? AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have used even personally for myself, I have used, there is something called crowd sourcing, you should look up and become familiar with it because if you really build up a good base in your social media you can get online and do gofundme for your organization or kickstarter. And believe it or not on Facebook, people can send money individual by the personal messenger. But a gofundme account allows you to do a story with pictures and video and it allows you to be able to control the campaign. You can go to youtube and get tutorials on gofundme. Just like you can do on Facebook and you know you see every once in awhile on TV where something happened to somebody and they got a $100,000 or $200,000. And you know you might have to do one or two campaigns to learn something about it. But there is all kinds of ways and I would say try to have different price points. If you have the big event and then you can have things for people are smaller things where your IL community can be involved in it. Another one was, another organization that I was involved with, they went to business people and had them pay for a plaque, like on their place of business. Like the little ice cream parlor, whatever. And they had different levels, if you gave this amount you got 250, if you gave this for 1,000 you got a bigger plaque. And so they put that on their business. And I did that one time for one hospital because they gave us space, we just put that up there. So there are all kinds of ways if you just sit around and have people to talk. You can do different price points and that may not even involve a lot of money. BRAD WILLIAMS: I think it is a community reinvestment act. And I think a lot of people think that the banks, certainly it is a good practice to have their employees go out and volunteer and stuff and they think it is soliciting business for them. But I think you are right on. What it is, they actually calculating the number of hours that their employees go out there and volunteer and they go out and it is because they have to comply with this thing. And they give out the money. And it is really. AUDIENCE MEMBER: You want to get agreement with the bank, that they not charge you for each check that you deposit. BRAD WILLIAMS: Yeah. AUDIENCE MEMBER: So they can give that to you and you can get these little things called square up or something, where people can use a credit card and it costs you a little bit but, you know you could use that for your car wash, or whatever else and you learn by doing the little small events. BRAD WILLIAMS: Absolutely. AUDIENC MEMBER: I am Wendy Swage and I am from the Arizona SILC and I hate fund raising. So I have the easiest idea. If your state has tax credits, because even if a person does not want to give, does not support your mission, everyone hates paying taxes. And in Arizona the state tax credit is $400 for an individual and everyone LLC that you know is individuals and they get a dollar for dollar tax credit. It reduces their taxable income by $1.00. So that is $400, all you have to do is have everyone on your SILC find five people and you can guarantee that those people will continue to give. We did it with our Area Agency on Aging and it is going tenfold. Increasing tenfold each year cause it is such a simple thing. People hate paying taxes. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, I have a question. I need some clarification. So the resource development that SILCs can do now would be from Part B money or I&E money and if we raise money then we can use that for discretionary funds? ANN MCDANIEL: If you use your resource plan money to raise money, then the money you raise has to be used for purposes consistent with the SILC duties and authorities. But if you remember that the authorities have given us a lot more opportunity to do things. That money that you raise is a lot more flexible than it would have been previously. Does that help? BRAD WILLIAMS: There is one other nuance. See before 2005 we could do things, but like from 2005 on technically speaking we could not do resource development on the federal dime. Right. So we could do things like have a development committee work with our volunteers because our council members are volunteers. We could use a personnel activity report, our PAR, for our time and we could track that. And we can, what we do on nice weekends, is our matter, right. ANN MCDANIEL: And what council members do on their own. BRAD WILLIAMS: Right, and we could do through a development committee, cause you can do through things in a committee and do business in a committee but then do business ourselves as volunteers on. And that is how we would have to coordinate some things, okay. Now we don't have to do that going forward with the authority. We can do some work in our office on the federal dime going forward, right. ANN MCDANIEL: Yes. BRAD WILLIAMS: Yes. ANN MCDANIEL: Now if you are wanting to generate unrestricted funds, which are things that you can use, funding you can use to do things that you are not allowed to do with federal or state dollars, then you still have to work around strategies to do that that don't touch your resource plan. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay. And I totally get what you are saying. I think part of my issue is that we are not looking to do things that are necessarily unrestricted according to federal guidelines. Our state has really restricted us on some stuff and that is kind of where I am going, but I think maybe I will just try and grab you personally so I don't take up a lot of time. But I do have one other thing. In Kansas we are kind of looking to use some of our money to look at contracting out resource development. So some of you guys have said some really amazing things about the amount of money you can raise and how you do it and so here is just kind of like a throw out there if any of you SILCs or whoever is in this room are looking to contract that type of thing out to other SILCs that might be a really good thing. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, this Shelly, I am staff at the Oregon SILC and I really liked, Brad, what you said at the beginning about planning and not just money chasing. And you know starting out with what is it you are trying to accomplish with your state plan. What is your mission, what are your goals? And so in Oregon, I think that the successes, maybe that there are, are more around looking at what are the consumers need. And going back to needs assessments, the things that you know about. A couple of examples knowing that consumers really need some peer support in knowing their role in hiring and managing, directing personal home care workers. And then working with another entity in the state that really develops the programs for training home care workers and develops the home care worker registry. And starting to develop a contracted approach for centers for independent living to be able to provide training for people that are employing their home care worker and need to direct their home care worker. Helping those consumers understand that they don't just have to sit and let someone else decide how everything is going to go in their home. And another example, consumers who may want to work but are fearful to even approach that. Because they are fearful of losing certain benefits. Need information about the work incentives that are out there. And need to understand how they might be able to go ahead and search for employment and so developing through your VR program perhaps. What has happened in Oregon an approach for funding people who work in centers that are experts in social security law and work incentives that can be there to provide specific services to people who want to take a look at their options to work and how that impacts their benefits. Those are in Oregon centers have been working under contracts like that now for some time, and so it does not even have to mean money coming through the SILC, but you developed a resource, you helped to develop a resource. So those are some kinds of different ways of thinking about it too. ANN MCDANIEL: And good examples of collaborating with your centers, thank you. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, this is Emilio from Washington state. And I need everybody to think really hard, Seahawks, Seahawks. [laughter] Cause they are struggling. Needless to say, couple of things I want to point out is that, and I am talking cause last time when I was talking the Seahawks started scoring, so I am going to be here awhile. Just kidding. On statewideness to me is an issue. Why shouldn't the state, I agree with many of the principles about strategies. We have a resource development subcommittee that includes the CIL director representative, our secretary/treasurer, many members, a good variety of people to strategize. I disagree, and this is from my nonprofit background, that you use council members to do fundraising. Okay. In my work in some states and for nonprofits, but we are a state entity and even then I question the issue of, excuse me, we are not state entity. Let me correct myself. We are within a state entity, my colleaques over here, Mel, is the only state entity. So she is paying for dinner tonight. So the whole issue of how we use volunteers is what comes into question to me. A volunteer in a council like a nonprofit board is a governing member. Okay. Then you organize this fund raising subcommittee and then you work on these things and things like that. So it, many of the strategies are very good strategies. I always think about small, medium, and large donations when I think about fund raising. And we should approach 80% of the funding for nonprofits comes from small donations. So thinking from that standpoint and going to the mission, and the vision, I agree with many, on the statewideness issue, in Washington the centers only cover 54% of the state. Only provide services, out of 39 counties, we only have centers that Part B and Part C funded that their little state funding like 10% on the Part B that cover 21 counties. And even then they really don't cover all the counties because of the funding allocation. So there is an opportunity there. The new rules say you may collaborate with centers for the SILCs to. So that is good, it is a may, not a shall, I want to remind us of that. In supporting each other means each other not one way. Our focus and in the roles is underserved populations. And guess what in our 12 years that we did, the number one underserved population is rural communities and I think I have heard many states have the same issue and it was rural communities. So how do we get and develop more centers and work on the bigger funding like from the legislature like mine Region Ten, I think Washington is the only state that does not do that so that is one consideration we are doing. And to me the last thing I want to say is that somebody mentioned about competing SILCs and CILs competing for funding. There is no possibility to compete where we collaborate we work together. But there are certain specific funding, and I will give you an example. In emergency management the funding that we received the CILs wanted that funding to go to them. How can a local agency have a statewideness about that, it can't. As an executive director for a SILC, my counterparts are private and public directors. I have access to the emergency management director you know and things like that so it is how we work together to effectuate that as we look forward to it. Yes, my number one goal in the SILC and with the SILC as well staff is to go after that capacity building for the CILs so we can get the funding so that the CILs can hire staff do inclusive emergency management and work in their communities and blah, blah, blah. So with that said you know it, I will leave you with this. The important thing about raising money, and I am one of those people I got no problem asking for money. So, cultivate your sources and then when you receive funding from those sources which is how we got the current funding and we did an inclusive emergency management was show your results. Show people what that money did and remind them consistently and thank and all that. So part of is tell the story. I think we need to learn to tell the story and that is how the council members really help us to cultivate those funding sources is by telling that story. A success story of how an 18 or 21 year old after so many years was able to move on their own and now they have a job and they take public transit to work and those kind of things. Thank you, I appreciate the good strategies you share. AUDIENCE MEMBER I have only been in my position for seven months so I have only been with the SILC for seven months. I came from Protection and Advocacy, but I did a lot. I was grants manager so I did a lot of resource development. For me, as a professional my greatest weakness in resource has not generally been money, personally money, but professionally, generally not money. It is time. The grants that I managed in Protection and Advocacy I was the staff for the grant that I managed for the whole state. So how could I get more bang for my buck? How could I get everything I could without trying to be all over the whole state at once? And so I worked in the voting access grant and also AT, they complimented each other very well. Had worked on voter education projects across the state, coordinated those, we always had the difficulty we would go train people but then just prior to the election the counties had to have their machines back. So we could not really train people right up until the election. So then they started changing machines, machines aged out. We have a really unique thing in Idaho, we have 44 counties, probably other states have it too. We have 44 counties and they all get to do voting however they decide to do it in each county. So machines aged out, they are a pain, they are huge, they are heavy. I thought lets do a pilot project, see if we can get a loaner, we got a loaner. The Protection and Advocacy system now has like 20 machines that they have contracted out all over the state. We gave them away. I was smart, I did not want to own these things. I wanted other people to own them so I did not have to get rid of them. So Mark, you have three of them right. That set up some really great relationships. One, people were getting to voting access sites which were not accessible oftentimes. They are often in schools, churches, all these places, you make all these connections in these places and got to talk to them about accessibility, not just during voting but all the time. So we made all those connections in the community. We had some county clerks coming to us to come and do large voter education, how to you know, be nice to people when they come in to vote. And that was great cause we finally had them coming to us. So we got to talk to all these groups and they reached other groups. Then we had the vendor of a particular machine who was supplying us with our ink and our ballots for all the testing. Well then because we can have different types of machines in different counties, vendors were competing to get their machines with us taking them out. So now, I am gone from there, but the person who is there, he has got, they own three different kinds of machines that the vendors have given them because the vendors were competing cause they want every county to have theirs. And so one person can't do all that, but all these other people are taking all things out. And so when I think of resource development I think first, I gotta dream big. I gotta dream where I want it to be years down the road, not what I can do today. Cause today I can't do squat. But what do I want it to look like in ten years. And then I have got to be open to all the people who come to me and so do I have all that contact information for all those people I worked with all across the state in county government, state government, city government. You bet I have that contact list and you bet I am leaning on them. One thing if I am going after stuff, or I am going after bodies, I don't have all the accounting issues to deal with because I just push it off on somebody else. They can deal with those things cause I am not a nonprofit, I am the state entity, not you. ANN MCDANIEL: Okay, we are going to move on cause we are getting close on time. Thank you all for all of the information you are sharing. That was our hope for this session was. BRAD WILLIAMS: Thank you. ANN MCDANIEL: That there would be a lot of sharing. But in terms of searching for funding, just to hit on some highlights here. How do you search for federal and state sources for relevant opportunities? Did you know the Federal Register announces all opportunities for federal funding? It is the same place that published the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for the regulations on Independent Living. If you don't have anybody looking at that on a regular basis, you need to because there is so much information that goes through the Federal Register and so many opportunities. That is a good place to look for that. State funding generally has individual departments have processes for announcing opportunities for funding. And so you want get your finger on that pulse. Find the ways that they release that information in order to be able to find out what is going on. Foundations, businesses, and private funding sources. There are lots of different ways to search that, and I hate to fall back on it, but the internet is an amazing resource to help you search for opportunities and funding that is available. I am sure there are many search engine type things, programs, I am particularly familiar with one called grantstation. And grantstation will search federal funding opportunities, foundation funding opportunities. They have a really wide range of entities that they search and you have the ability to plug in the different factors that apply to you and what you are looking for, whether it is advocacy or operating funds, or what it is that you are looking for. And then so they search and filter for you, so that the things that show up are things that are more likely than to fund the kind of thing that you are trying to accomplish. So look for those kinds of softwares and engines out there to be able to search online. And then the issue in the back about time. You know capacity is huge, is a huge issue for anything you are trying to do. And when you are seeking funding you absolutely need to take in consideration whether you have the staff and the capacity to do what it is that you are telling them you are going to do with their money. You have got to either build it in to your proposal or make sure you already have that capacity. And thinking about almost every funder is asking you is this project going to continue and how are you going to sustain it? So when you start thinking about that long term goal and that new center you need to open. You have to be able to tell that funder what is going to happen after this funding ends. So you need to think that through. And you have given us a lot of examples of things that have worked and not worked for you. And I am going to pass it back to Brad to share some of our examples. BRAD WILLIAMS: So we are going to quickly summarize these. For example, this actually pre 2005. We received 40,000 to serve as court appointed monitor of federal consent decree. That was kind of cool. You are going out there doing your systems advocacy work and you get to then monitor the result. That was access to parks and trails, so that worked out well. So I, we have been picking up and doing an annual fund drive utilizing the process that I talked about. Currently and we actually exceeded our goal for this year. So that is something that we are getting up to speed with. And then looking towards the future. This is something very similar to what Sha had said. You know campaign to achieve a vision. Get 100% board participation, extend the donor base, include the business partners and build savings to kind of leverage it and developed a proposal. I will expand upon this in something I present tomorrow, so I will save that. ANN MCDANIEL: A commercial, I love it. We have done a lot of different things in West Virginia pre WIOA. We serve as a fiscal agent for our statewide grassroots advocacy group. Because they need that support and we get a small percentage of their funding to do that. And it covers our costs for doing that as well as giving us money, a little bit to support other things. We provide administrative support for a state funded program and get a percentage of those funds to that not only supports our actual costs, but then gives us a little more of a float. The salaries of the staff at the SILC in West Virginia are not purely from any pot of money. Every pot of money that we have, has staff and operating costs built into it. We are very, very diversified. It is not huge amounts of money, but it does give us a very diversified base. And then this year we have done this multiple times, but in 2015 was our most recent disability caucus. And after the prohibition on resource development for SILCs came down we looked at how in the world could we do this. And a committee of SILC members and other folks put together a proposal for a grant from our DSU that supported our planning activities in our resource development activities for the caucus. So it wasn't coming out of the SILC resource plan, but we had a base of money to work from that we then used to do proposals to other state entities, to foundations, etc. to generate the funding that we needed to support the disability caucus. And we had a lot of partnerships in doing that activity. We had people with disabilities from all over the state that we were able to support their expenses to be able to attend and participate in the caucus. And actually ended up with unrestricted funds that were generated by the actual fees, exhibitors, and all those things. People participating in the caucus that just starting with that one little base funding grant to give us a place to work from. Not only were we able to cover the entire cost of the caucus, but we ended up with a little profit to boot. BRAD WILLIAMS: So I am going to skip this next panel, cause I think we have responded to that, which will get us to the last panel, additional considerations. ANN MCDANIEL: You want to do it, go ahead. BRAD WILLIAMS: Well, it is describe the process of resource development activities in your SPIL, which we had mentioned. If you are going to do this, it has to be an authority in your state plan. It is very clear. And you had mentioned earlier how the SILC is organized and how the SILC funding is processed affects the opportunities. And someone had mentioned out there, I mean you are a network. And how you coordinate and interact with your centers and your state association, I mentioned this yesterday. We have a very strong state association. So how you coordinate things with your partners is extremely important. It is going to be different in each state. And then, we are right at the end, but cost allocation versus indirect cost rates. We were so used to cost allocation. Of course us SILCs many of us were flat in our SILC resource plan often was just our contract, right. So there was not much cost allocation there. Right? And we do this little bit maybe, some of us, of some additional resource development very little as defined. But cost allocation is the past. Now we are looking an indirect cost rate. So as we move forward, we gave the link here of the SILC-NET did a total training on this and as we diversify you are going to have to look at the impact of an indirect cost rate. So please keep that in mind.