Good morning. Thank you all for coming. I'm Steve Morrison, I'm Senior Vice President at CSIS, and I head the Center for Global Health Policy at CSIS, and very proud to be part of this effort with my colleague Johanna Nessith in organizing this. We're delighted that today, Tony Cordesman, our colleague from CSIS has agreed to come and speak with special focus on role of food security in Afghanistan and stability there. Tony holds the Arleigh Burke chair and strategy at CSIS and is also a national security analyst for ABC News. He's familiar to many of you, I am sure, for the wide range of work that he has done over the years on security matters. He's an authority on energy on U.S. strategy and defense plans, defense programming and budgeting, NATO modernization, China, the Middle East, Afghan and Iraq wars, and on and on. And his constant ability to stay ahead of the curve on many of these issues and produce very insightful and forward-looking analyses. And we were successful at engaging Tony and asking him to put some thought to the issue of food security in Afghanistan, which remains, as you'll hear from Tony, a vital dimension, but one for which there are special problems of data and for which this is one dimension of security that, in some respects, is underappreciated and under-acknowledged in the discussion. So Tony, thank you so much for being with us. Tony's going to speak for a period and then we will move to some comments and questions from the audience. There's a microphone towards the rear and there's a microphone over here. So I would just ask when we get to that portion of the program that you just rise and come to the microphones, identify yourself and be very brief in offering a comment or question. Tony, thank you so much. Thank you, Steve. I think that probably if you look at the headlines, the focus on Afghanistan still tends to be on the tactical side and on conflict. But in shaping the new strategy we were forced to spend at least as much time on how did we secure the population? How did we create a structure where people could feel secure? And the strategy which is called shape, clear, hold, and build will depend for its success at least as much on the build side as it will on the tactical side. I think it's also important to note that while Afghanistan is a very dramatic case and one very urgent to U.S. policy, the interrelationship between food, agriculture, and conflict affects a very large part of the world, and it is not that unique. Certainly when you look at the numbers they are particularly striking. Right now without the World Food Program, something like 70% of the people of Afghanistan would face a serious food crisis. About 9 million of those people depend on the World Food Program basically for day-to-day food. Another 7 million depend on partial food depending on the season. Without this, the fact is that a heritage of some 30 years of war, civil conflict, and crisis would have created a disaster. And as it stands you have a situation with one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world, a life expectancy of around 44 years, and a case where something like 40% of the children in the country are physically suffering from malnutrition to the point where surveys show they're underweight. And the surveys are conducted in the more stable, more secure parts of the country. The truth is we don't know the depth of the challenges we face. What we do know, however, is the seriousness of what we face. When we talk about just the conflict side, and that's only part of the problem, we have gone from a situation where when we went into Afghanistan and in the early period following the liberation, there was one province that had a serious enough Taliban or insurgent presence to have some kind of shadow government, a network of influence strong enough to be organized. Now, after years of war, that is true in all provinces, but one. The maps you often see of conflict are conflict that is simply where the tactical clashes occur with ISAF or Afghan forces. But that is a small portion of the country in terms of Taliban and insurgent influence. The fact is that a weak international structure has not been able to organize effectively, has not created an Afghan government that has a presence of any kind in much of the country. And when you measure the impact of the Taliban and the problems this creates for food and agriculture, the problem is that it has moved into a power vacuum that is as serious in many ways as the areas which are under conflict, although by UN and U.S. estimates, in the course of a year, some 96 percent of the Afghan population, whether they're rural, whether they're farmers, whether they're people living in cities or urbanized areas, are going to encounter some form of violence that affects their daily lives. And many will find that percentage much higher. Now, these are all laid out in broad terms in the data in the charts that I've provided in this handout, but that can only begin to address some of the issues involved here. We talk about food aid, but while the Taliban and conflict are a serious problem, so is a lack of capacity within the Afghan government. And that capacity in terms of its presence in the field has actually deteriorated over time in spite of aid. The surveys of corruption indicate that Afghanistan went from a state which ranked roughly in the middle in terms of corruption to one that now ranked second from the bottom. And throughout that, there is not simply a matter of leadership at the top. As you move food through this country and the food flows largely through Iran into much of the country for the World Food Program, because today military supplies dominate the roots from Pakistan and the North. At virtually every level, there is a tax. The tax takes up part of the money, part of the food. When it flows down to the local level, at the local level, officials will take part of the food, use the food for influence, allocate the food to their tribe, their family, their group. And the instruments to deal with this simply are lacking. There is no capacity to manage these programs. You have to feed a system which is not only corrupt, but where the U.N. and the United States simply have no presence to measure the scale of what is happening. We know how serious it is, but basically we have no ability in the field to know in detail how much this corruption really interacts with the problem of violence. And we also find within the aid efforts, there is not only an almost total lack of coordination between the countries in the agricultural and food efforts inside Afghanistan, but the U.N. efforts are so stove-piped that UNAMA does not coordinate well with the food program, which does not coordinate well with the food and agricultural organization. We are dealing with a structure, and this is not unusual, where whether it is Oxfam or the World Bank or others, the estimates are that some 40 percent of the aid that flows into Afghanistan is consumed without reaching Afghans in any normal sense of the term. It is consumed in overhead, it is consumed in security, it is consumed in corruption. To actually map what happens in the field both for food in urban areas and agriculture in producing food is by itself a nightmare. At this point in time, the basic aid effort is approximately 24 people from the Department of Agriculture, although that number is doubling, and about 300 people in the United States military from the National Guard and Reserve Structures. The bulk of the aid effort has nothing to do with the normal aid donors, and most NGOs and other groups do not reach most of the country, which is consumed by conflict. These problems are affected by opium, which is a dominant factor in agriculture and diverts resources and efforts from food, from the fact that you can't move anything in Afghanistan without encountering constant physical problems and being taxed by the police, by the insurgents, and by power brokers. It is affected by the fact that the normal problems in agriculture are serious enough, but for example the Taliban pays between four and eight times as much for a young man to volunteer for some act of violence as he can earn in the agricultural sector. And this is essentially a feudal structure. Much of agriculture is dominated by the fact that most people are not farmers in the normal sense. They live in rural areas and they work seasonally, or they live as displaced people in populated or urban areas and find some kind of agricultural job. Most landowners are poor by our standards, but they are the minority. And this creates yet another food problem. When we look at this, we also see the dominating impact of population growth. People often talk about the traditions and the history of Afghanistan. Well in the 1940s it was probably a country of under four million people. When the Russians invaded it was a country of some 15 million people. The best estimates we have today are that this is a country now of roughly 30 million people. And out of that population more than 85% has been born since the Russian invasion. Caught up in a place where at one point or another some 70% of the Afghan population moved, at least in some way as a result of conflict, the Taliban and the other challenges. Dealing with this is going to be an issue which will take more than a decade if we can secure the country. It requires outside aid and support indefinitely into the future. It means dealing with the fact that as the population has increased, the nature of agriculture in much of Afghanistan has been for water and other reasons that what was really needed is larger farming areas, more capital investment and fewer people on the land to consume resources. And at this point in time none of those things are easily possible. Finally, I think that if you look at the end of this presentation you see a demonstration of another set of challenges. It is almost impossible to describe the topography of Afghanistan to somebody who has not flown over it. Or to map out how difficult it is to move in much of the country and to move any kind of bulk cargo. People talk about opium versus wheat. But when you look at the relative weight you have to understand what it means. You have incredible variations in elevation, in climate, in rainfall and in the hydrology or water flow of the country. At this point in time you are some 40 years behind in terms of major efforts to improve water supply and about a third of the traditional irrigation system, particularly the most sensitive areas in traditional structures which are underground tunnels has collapsed as a result of violence and conflict. So these are just one case study. And to make this country work to bring it some kind of lasting security, we have to find ways to change the way we give aid. We have to find ways where instead of project oriented aid or simply making things better for individual farmers, we address the requirements in food terms of the Afghan people. Something for which today the United States government and the UN has no capacity whatsoever. There is no aid agency operating in Afghanistan that either knows with any validity the requirement for food aid or can measure the effectiveness of its agricultural aid programs relative to either regional effects or the requirement. To do this requires a new approach to the way we look at this. It requires a new concentration on food and aid. With that, Steve, let me close. Thank you very much, Tony. Perhaps you can offer us a little more insight into what you think such a strategy would look like because it's a very daunting picture that you paint. It is a picture in which the U.S. government is attempting to put another cadre of USDA officials on the ground and to engage on these issues. Perhaps you could offer us a bit more commentary about where strategy is going and what it is that you see as these essential new elements. And then I'd like to open the floor for a few comments and questions from our audience. I think we need to be very, very careful because when we talk about the surge in civilians, we're talking about essentially a very significant increase relative to what we've had. But at the fall of 2009, the total number of civilian aid workers that were actually involved in the field and provincial reconstruction teams, these are the people in the field as distinguished from people in the capital, was less than 60 people given the rotation in leave times. Out of the PRT manning for the U.S., you had over 1,000 people in uniform. When we go to the so-called surge, we'll end up with about 253 people that will rotate in and out of the field as civilians. Out of this, a small portion will deal with agriculture and none will work with food distribution and the World Food Program. That basically in a country of 30 million people as diverse and spread out as Afghanistan means that you are basically concentrating on a very narrow range of districts where you need to focus for military purposes. That's 80 districts in total. We'll begin with areas like Kandahar, although you will attempt to improve the capabilities in other areas. And Kandahar itself, which is one city, will be a phased effort which will take over a year and it will not affect the agricultural output or the food output. That will have to continue to be an aid project. So until you have substantial security and you have been able to squeeze out the insurgents and expand the range of aid workers to cover much larger areas, you don't make a beginning. At that point, there are important areas which are quick. Road systems, food processing make an immediate difference in the flow of food and the willingness to sell and grow food as distinguished from opiates. But to do that in much of the country, you're still making a start. To talk about moving toward what Afghanistan once was, which was a food exporter, is not clearly possible given its demographics, but if it is possible, it will take perhaps a decade of stability and peace, and that is at least something four to five years in the future as a best case estimate. Thank you. Do we have any comments or questions from our audience? If we do, please come to either the microphone in the back or there's one up here. Please just identify yourself briefly and keep your questions short. Yes, please. I'm Mitzi Worth. I'm with the Naval Postgraduate School. It seems to me one of the problems turns to be overpopulation. I mean one can look at that from that perspective. So is it impossible to deal with this whole question of limiting the population by birth control or is that out of the realm of any thinking over there? In the real world, it is simply out of the question. Yet, in terms of priorities, we can have all kinds of legislated attempts to improve human rights and Western values. But in terms of impact, one of the realities is that when you survey where the courts are and where this is actually put into practice, you find that it is wonderful to legislate and it has almost no meaningful impact on the Afghan population as a whole. Just getting to core values like women's education is a major challenge. Going to deal with Afghan values and problems in terms of something like population education and birth control is not a matter of reaching the educated Afghan. It is a matter of reaching the other 95 percent or more of the population. And to do that, you have to find some way to be able to reach a people that are relatively at peace and you have to find a way to deal with what is in many ways a feudal structure where the whole problem of birth control is almost the 180 degrees out of phase with a society where having the maximum number of children is a critical sign of wealth and status among the bulk of the population. To begin to educate is one problem, but the other is at this point in time, there is simply no structure in Afghanistan which can administer any program in most of the country. It is not a matter of a lack of capacity, it is a matter of zero capacity in much of the country. Alan, did you want to have a, and Tony? Why don't you come up right here? I'm Alan Jury, the director of the World Food Program Office here in Washington D.C. One of the challenges is that you've mentioned is the monitoring and access to the countryside. And we face kind of a dilemma this year, for example, we dramatically increase the monitoring, mainly through third party monitoring because as you've correctly pointed out, there are vast areas of the country where for security international staff can't get to. The challenge is that when you look at a budget, when you increase for monitoring and all these types of things, you actually end up spending even less on the actual food because you're spending so much more on the monitoring. The question I guess is given this challenge and given the monitoring difficulties, is it still the right direction to go even though if you're looking at it, the cost per ton of food delivered actually goes up because the monitoring is mostly personnel, staff, logistics and things like that. Because that's the challenge we face as people have looked at our new AFGAM program and said, well you're moving the same amount of food as you did last year and you're saying it's going to cost us more, but the monitoring challenge is so great that I don't think we need to develop new systems in both monitoring and assessment, particularly in these difficult areas and I don't think there's really much of an alternative to go in that direction, but I'd be interested in your thoughts on that. Well you raise a critical question and I think it is not unusual because one of the problems we have is the tendency to assume that if it is aid you don't need to worry about corruption, theft and all of the problems that you get in actually handling the issues you've raised. I think the truth of the matter is first, you can't get meaningful third party monitoring in some of the highest risk areas which also are the areas where people need it most and actually trust third parties period. It doesn't matter what the program is, you simply have an issue where you can do third parties, the problem for any one program is that you are attempting to monitor virtually the entire country as part of one single effort. One of the great difficulties we have is that Unama, which is in theory supposed to be coordinating aid efforts, has never issued a single report on aid and frankly does not do anything with its list of corrupt officials other than occasionally keep it. I think the problem that we have here is first, we can't do this in part of the country, second to do it at all should not be the responsibility of your program or any one program and then the nightmare we have of different UN agencies that are not properly coordinated operating in a 42 country alliance where each aid team operates to different rules in isolation from the others and more than half of the countries do not comply with Afghan law in reporting their aid programs to the Ministry of Finance is a structure which simply shouldn't exist. So the honest answer to your question is what we need is a coordinated effort that doesn't put the burden on one group and with you I think the only answer is you have to do some sampling to try to trace this but your problem is pushed down on you through the lack of effective aid coordination within the country. Let's take one last question, Tony Carroll. I'm struck by the, I'm Tony Carroll the Manager of Trade and I was thanks to Kristen and Steve a part of the Advisory Committee or Task Force behind this report. I'm struck by the comparisons between Afghanistan and Ethiopia, a country that both Steve and I know quite well. They both have feudal land ownership. They don't have a massive conflict, they don't have massive corruption at least to the extent that you describe but they have many of the same land ownership issues and transportation issues. What we've found in Ethiopia through the years of agricultural technical assistance is in effect the ability of being able to grow high value agricultural products for export but at the same time also improve land practices at the most basic subsidence level. One of the Ethiopian spheres is that if they open up land ownership to any extensive sort of modern way there will be a flood of people from the agricultural areas into the cities and therefore create heavily social burdens upon the government society to sustain that migration. So I'm wondering you know if we are, have some sort of hope at the end of the rainbow here by maybe slowly concentrating our technical assistance not only subsidence agriculture but also finding spaces where we can grow some high value added agricultural. Well first at this point in time you have a number of high value efforts underway but they are very narrow in focus. They are essentially not boutique projects but they are limited to the areas which are secure and where there is transport and food processing capability which is a relatively narrow part of the country. The basic subsistence problem is the key problem and the problem for subsistence people is often that about the only thing you can move and process is something as small as an opiate. So you already have a high value crop and it is achieving miracles in terms of export capabilities. Unfortunately it is not exactly the crop that any of us would really like to see. One of the other problems we have here and it's not unusual is we already have had the flood of people. If you look at the sort of open source data on Afghanistan you'll see figures saying that 70 to 80 percent of the Afghan people are in agriculture. The problem is that there is absolutely no basis for that number because what we know is from simply satellite mapping there are extremely large parts of the Afghan population who've already been pushed into the cities and are living essentially on aid, welfare and food supplies. But what we don't have is any ability to characterize this and part of the problem is that on the one hand we had development people who looked at this as a classic long-term development program and ignored agriculture for about the first five years of the program in Afghanistan and the other is that when it comes down to field work a very large numbers of the people in the field operate in an extremely limited area which is the area where they're protected by troops. Moreover they operate according to national aid priorities and they are on rotations of three to eight months which means that the bulk of them in something like an agricultural program come punch a ticket, get status in their aid structure in the capital and leave having accomplished very little. Well we're going to have to transition on that note. Please join me in thanking Tony Corisman for this presentation.


For today's Monday Makeup lesson, I'm going to show you how to create an eye makeup look using no eyeshadows. So let's get started. For the first step, we're going to take a concealer that matches our skin tone or matches the foundation that you're wearing basically and apply this all over the lid to work as a base. I would recommend using something with decent coverage because we're using this as a base we want to make sure it disguises any discoloration on the lid, so go for something with medium to full coverage. I want to be applied that with your fingertips or even your foundation brush. You can then go in with your blending brush that you typically use to apply eyeshadow and just buff and blend this in. And this will give you a similar finish to what you would expect from using an eyeshadow. Next, I want you to take a darker shade, so like a contouring shade of concealer. And I want to apply this in the crease of the eye and then take your blending brush and sweep this over and back just the same way that you would if you were using a darker shade in the crease area. Don't worry if it drops onto the lid where you can do a slight cut crease in a second. So just blend this over and back making sure to get a soft effect that's deep in the crease and then fading up into nothing towards the brow bone. Now I want you to take a concealer that's a little lighter than your skin tone and you just want to apply this all over the lid in a sort of a cut crease kind of motion. This is basically going to create the illusion of a highlighter almost, but we're just using a lighter shade of concealer or you can use exactly the same shade that we were using earlier but just go a little deeper with your contour. And you can use your blending brush or your fingertips to tap this in making sure to get that nice bright appearance in the inner corner. And you can also use the same concealer to highlight underneath the brow bone. So I typically just go underneath the arch of the brow and then I just blend it across blending in with my fingertips. Now we want to set this in place. I'm going to be using a HT translucent powder and just patting this over the lid using my blending brush. This will give the illusion of that powdery finish that you would expect from an eyeshadow. While also setting everything in place and keeping it on those lids. Now I'm going to apply some liquid liner. So this is going across the lash line and I actually have a full video talking about how to apply this in the most basic way. So if you want to check that out, I will link it at the top of the screen. And then I'm going to take another liner and this is a pencil black liner and we're going to tightline. So this is basically applying liner under the rim of the top part of the eye, if that makes sense. This will just create a deeper darker effect. Once you leave that settle onto the eyes, you can then apply a lighter shade on the lower part or darker shade, whatever works for you.  And you can also apply this on the inner corner as well to add to the brightening effect. And then just apply lots of mascara, some falsies if you prefer. And this will really add to the drama of the look. And there you go, some subtle definition. You can use darker shades, lighter shades, whatever works for you. This is just a really subtle way to start applying some creams onto the lid rather than always using eyeshadow. Hope you guys enjoy this. Check out the other videos on the screen and I'll see you in the next one.


Ok, hello everyone. Thank you for coming to the Tweet Talk, a few more Tweet files you see, the better I like your theme. My name is Jorge Diaz and I'll first present myself. So, as I said before, my name is Jorge Diaz. I've been working with Tupo for like nine years already and currently working as a themeer and front-end developer for a company called Evolving Web. We're based in Montreal and you've probably seen or stand on the other side of the wall. So, to kind of break the ice, do you guys know what this is? It's a dialogue model. The one you connect to your phone and get online. Well, that's what I've been using for seven of those nine years because I originally come from a pretty nice place located in the Caribbean, known as Havana, but eventually I followed up with Tupo. I ended up moving to Canada two years ago. So, when we moved to Canada, I started working at Evolving Web and we loved doing Tupo Evolving Web. I was founded like a long time ago, like ten years ago, by Alex and Susanne Degacheva. We've probably made them from previous accounts, they've been around for a long time. And essentially we hope and assist organizations to build multiple kinds of Tupo solutions. I mean, multiple kinds. I prefer to, from traditional portal or platforms, to present information using Tupo, to document management systems, like the one we built for the Canadian government, or a certification platform for Internet of Things devices that we built two years ago for all seeing allies. Many other things. And more recently, we've been like mainly focused on moving Tupo 6 and Tupo 7 websites into DA. This is something that, of course, started after DA was released almost two years ago. We kind of were pioneering on doing this migration process. So, we've worked with a lot of big fish, like the Linguist Nation, the Canadian government, a lot of universities, travel city, and so on. So, I'll be talking about today about Tupo thing. As I said before, I've been working with Tupo 6, 7, and A more recently. I've done a lot of things on top of those platforms, I would say, to 30 and 40 websites in total all this time. And for this presentation, I'll come up with a case study of a website that we recently built and launched called LISCUS Canada. That essentially it's just a car website that came up after the idea of we were looking for a car and then we didn't have any idea what options did we have for a monthly budget. So, we started doing Excel spreadsheets, a lot of things. And finally, we came up with like a slider where you can go and say, okay, let's say I want to pay $400 per month for a car, what options do I really have available right now? So, this started as a hobby and ended up being a product. We built like a manufacturer page and then we built like a huge home page to attract clients, present the information, and build business around it. So, that's what I'm going to be using as a case study today. So, I've just seen in the previous slides, this is a triple site. It seems okay, it might be nice or not, but let's say it's an average nice looking site. But that took some time to ship. So, we have to ship this with either a triple or whatever CMS you need to build a fee. So, going to the most basic definition, what's actually a fee? It's in just more than a folder inside of your project where you're going to have a template folder inside of it and then in there you're going to have a lot of files that define how your site's going to look like for everyone. But before jumping inside of that folder, I would like to go first to what's actually the fee process. So, if we also see it like pretty basically, feeing it's more than going from basic triple site to a final end product that we can actually launch or make life right away. So, essentially this is a process. And this is what I'm going to be talking about today. For us, that process and what principles we follow each time we need to take the product from position A or status A to status B. So, I'll be talking about today the six main theme and principles that I believe should be applied in any triple theme and process. And before jumping into that, let's say I jump into an interview, I'm looking for a theme or someone to work with me in a project which will be the ideal prospect that will really help me if it's important. So, if I would make a definition of a triple A themeer, I would say if someone has front-end developer skills like CSS, HTML, a day query, a JavaScript course, and some other front-end libraries like Bootstrap, Foundation and so on to build up solutions, but at the same time has a strong knowledge of triple site building. It's in just like one site or the other one. It's like this midpoint between the two. And I would say that if a candidate fits into that or a client or someone at hiring to build a triple theme, that would be the most appropriate person to go with. So, principle number one, even if it's using a base theme, it's okay. So, as soon as we saw triple A or seven or any other triple version, we're going to have running right in front of us a triple base theme. So, a base theme is something that already gathers together a lot of features like functionality, libraries, visuals that create a final end product. This might be very simple, but for the triple core developers, this is their end product. For us, might be our start products to come up with a new site right after that. So, plus that, each theme that comes with triple core, let's look at this way. We have core modules, node, each module inside a triple has its own template file. So, we can see here inside of nodes, we have the template folder, and then each module adds to triple the template file that he specifically needs for displaying the features for information, it's going to add to the triple project itself. So, seeing it just roughly, triple itself is a basic theme. It's the most basic of all themes we can use. So, if you want to go further, and that, of course, for us is like the second level of implementation, you can go for additional contributed themes, and this is what people use the most nowadays to build triple types. So, on this specific case, I will be frank into the case study, I'm going to use the bootstrap base theme that is also maintained by multiple core developers that take care of making the best match possible between the popular frontend library and the triple core. So, a lot of times I come out in discussion, why don't we move the library into core? That's a separate theme. So, whatever external third-party library that wants to be added to core should be maintained in trick, because triple is one thing, and then whatever you want to add to it should be separate. And that's a philosophy pretty well followed with this template. The fact is that it ended up that bootstrap is the most popular theme used by the triple community. It has that many amount of installs, and you can see how many it has so far for the eight. And, of course, why is it based theme of that level? Because this third-party frontend framework provides us a lot of tools and functionality that doesn't come with triple by default, or not that easy, like this kind of drop-down navigation, like building advanced grids and content containers inside of the site. The actual responsive behavior of all these elements, like models and many other things that we might need to use in our project. So, going back to the file I showed before, we were inside of no templates, and then we have the list of template files. As I said, core comes with its own template files. But, at the same time, we have running core, then we have the template file, sorry, the bootstrap-based theme running on top of it, and then we have our theme. So, that file I was referring before, the node-specific template file, it's using all three levels of this stack. So, core helps its own template file. The bootstrap theme has its own template file that matches the best possible with the framework, and then our theme is going to have its own template file. So, this heritage is heritage all the way bottom up, which means that, of course, it has a file with the same name also, in the main theme, and then we have another one. Our final site will be blindfolded for whatever is from this level down. So, if you're using bootstrap theme just natively, we will be ignoring core files, but that's okay, because bootstrap theme is maintained by a community or by a sub-community inside of the trooper community, and they take care that this works well. But, they are creating our own theme, we need to be sure that we're doing things right, because we will be blindfolding our site for everything that's right below it. So, if we come up with updates, whatever we update core, if there was an update on that file, our site won't use it. And the same with the base theme. So, as I said before, core is maintained by a community, the bootstrap theme is maintained in the issue queue for one site, and on the other side it's maintained by the bootstrap community, which is totally separate, and these guys on the issue queue take care of providing us the top level users the best integration possible, and then, right on top of it, we are. So, we have to do it right. First thing, we always need to sub-team. That's the first thing. You always need to have a third layer on this stack. If you're going to use a base theme, you need to ensure to be always separate from the actual base theme. That way you will support future updates and be a wouldn't get hurt if you actually update your own core. Of course, second, stay where you need. If you really find something that is broken in the actual sub-team, then go to the issue queue and notify, hey, there is something broken here, do you mind taking a look at it? The community is pretty active, all the people help, and it's better to do it that way. It's like the right way to address that issue. Don't move things around. I mean, you can go into core, take an old file and put it right on top. And that's going to work. But that doesn't mean it's going to work right. You might be breaking even the bootstrap behavior or relationship chips between your files. Number four, first update as regularly as possible. Stay up to date with core and the community theme too. And the same goes for modules. And number five, as I mentioned before, if you find an issue and you can't identify by yourself, that it's core-related or it's bootstrap theme-related, go to the issue queue and report it. So you can go to our blog. Our blog goes from almost a year ago about planning how to choose a Drupal-based theme and another one doing an analysis of why Drupal bootstrap-based theme is so successful. So, principle number two, theme, it's side-building. As I said before, side-builders, working on theme, it's really, really important because they will save a lot of time. Doing side-building, it's using themes, it's using modules, it's incorporating libraries, it's creating content types instead of going to Twig files and creating fields and things. And a lot of people do it, that needs to be... It's hard to maintain and the proper way to do it, it's always to follow the Drupal-8 structure way of managing things. So, one of the main things when doing side-building, it's checking what's available out there for modules. When you use a module, you will then need to know what library will require, what else, or what additional set-ups you will need to do. With modules, it will save you a lot of time on doing things. I've seen people trying to reproduce during months like a shopping cart, things like that, instead of using commerce or using Uber cart. So, just to mention an example. In Drupal 7, there's a really popular module called Webform that is used for capturing visitor submissions on many things like actual polls or contact form submissions. And when Drupal 8 got released two years ago, Webform wasn't available. In fact, Webform is available since six months ago. So, this doesn't mean that you cannot use Drupal 8 if you want to get a message for one year and a half. So, you have to look for options. And instead of jumping into building your own custom module, you need to actually research what's people doing. So, using combinations like the contact core module, contact storage and contact lock, people were able to reproduce most of the functionalities of Webform and achieve the same objective because the key is to actually reproduce functionality. So, like, building a form with Drupal 8 is not that hard. We're just setting up a few things. How many modules are out there? Well, Drupal 8 only. If you filter, more than 3,400 so far. We have an envelope, of course, talking about some Drupal modules without my colleague Susanne. And, sorry. And some other one that I wrote. Okay, number three. And this is where I'm going to spend most of the time of the presentation. Theming is building views. Okay, so probably most of you, if you've worked with Drupal before, are aware of what a view is, in case to set ground. What is a view? So, if you go to Google right now, and you Google for something like Drupal 8 themes, you're going to get a set of results. Now, if you look closely, you're going to see that there's first set of results that have this app blocked in the beginning that it spares results. And then, you're going to have the rest of organic or natural results on the page. If you do YouTube, you're going to see that there's also a list of videos. If you go to Twitter, you're going to see a list of trends on the left, a list of tweets in the middle, and then who to follow right in the right side. Sorry for the Spanish side. If you go to Facebook, this is a little bit more advanced. You're going to see like a notification list on the right and then the active shot on the right too. The wall, and many few other lists on your site. And even if you go to Google Maps and you do a search, you're going to get the paid one, the organic ones, or the ones that are inside of this context. But then, this is also a list, but it's a geographically set of items. It's not just using biffs or containers or whatever we can call it. It's just a set of dots geographically located where they're supposed to on the map. So a view is just a set of data that's being represented in many different ways. And I'm just showing you the top four popular sites of the internet. So everything today is a view. And Trupal was conceived to create views. So everyone can work on it. So this is a sample page of the car site. It's like the page starts here and continues over here. I have to split it into you to make it more like a Twitter. And then this car page has multiple views. For example, this is a view showing the prices. This is a view showing the prices within this count. This is a view showing related models of how to save it. Another one. Another one. This is a view of feature cars. This is a view of blog posts. So everything in the site is actually a view. If you go to different pages, you're going to see the page of a view with all the blog posts. And then the page with a single item view that's showing the feature model of the brand. And then more views, more views. Everything inside of the site is a view. So now I'm going to show you a couple of samples from the live site. Okay, so let me just refresh multiple displays. Okay. Let's go to a car page. I'm logged in. That's why it takes so much time. Okay. Okay. So take a look at these views over here. I'm going to maximum. So I'm seeing right now, I'm seeing a Subaru car that it's all wheel drive, that it's from, that it's an SUV. So based on this context, I'm also displaying four additional blocks, those four that display additional or related information to the car I'm seeing right now. For example, here I'm showing all base offers from the same top level model, like the 2017 Crossteg, the 2018. This is the manual. This is the automatic. And here it's saying this model. So this is the one you're seeing. If there are more, this view right over here, it's displaying all these results with JavaScript. It's just being resumed to the first three items on all views. So if you want to dig more on each one of the contextual views, you can just expand it and see more. I'm going to hide it. So this one is the same, but it's all SUV vehicles by Subaru. So I'm seeing, from the context, I get the type of vehicle, SUV, and the brand. And that's another contextual view. Then we have these more automatic all wheel drive SUV vehicles. This view for sure, it's way longer. But you expand it if you really need to do it. Let me talk about performance. And then this one featured deals, this is the same for every car page. You just expand it and all featured deals are going to be listed right over here. So now I'm going to go and I will edit this view. I'll maximize to make this more. Okay. So you may notice, as I show here in the slides, you can create multiple displays for the same view. So these four views, these four views right over here, they use the same CSS, the same HTML, the same exact structure. The only difference is where they are placed and actually the title works on the top. But all the rest of the elements to show more and every single item is being reused all across those views. So based on that, using views, you can have like a common set of fields to display. And then you can have multiple displays to reuse this view everywhere. And then after building those four, we say, okay, how about if we go now to the... Sorry, brand page and I go to Subaru right over here. And I want to display the cheapest cars on the right. We don't need to code again. We haven't viewed that. It's 90% set up for that. We only need to change which partner we want to use. So right here on the manufacturer page, we added this cheapest offer to Subaru Canada. It's the same list, but it's displaying all cars that match that brand. And then we have the exact same view. Instead of displaying three cars, it's displaying four, to make it match with the height of what I'm showing on the left side and make the visual more balanced. And then you have an additional information that people can browse through. You don't need to have a page for the cheapest offer for each one of the manufacturers. You can contextualize all of that on different places and build multiple things. So the same way you can do this, we added a lot of things like... This is another view. This is geographically located view using clusters. So with clusters, you can, for example, right over here in Thunder Bay, you click on it and then you're going to see the dealer that's right over there. But if you click on the Ottawa area, Google Maps API integration with views, it's going to expand. There's no coding over here. To ship this, there's no coding. You just need to add the API key. You have to set up the margin. You have to set up a few things. You have to test. You have to use CSS style for setting up the ground to be black. The green word to be blue. The rose to be another color. But the actual coding, it's zero. You don't need to do it. You just need to set up the database components to it. So I'm going to drag. I'm going to go to Ottawa. Then I'm seeing Subaru. Yeah. I'm going to see, I don't know. I'll give you Subaru. You click on it and then you're going to go to the dealer page, which is just a node like the car is. And then each one of these nodes has a geographic position. You can use again to create this kind of contextual blocks. Like closest dealerships to this one. Each one of the nodes knows where it's geographically located. And you can say, I want to display the proximity from the main node. It is only this about the performance thing. I want a view that shows the four items, four items, any items, but sort by distance from this one. And then you get the closest dealer server. So using this, you can do a lot of things. Like this exact functionality over here. You can create an additional complementary view that will give an idea if you see this dealer, how far away is the closest dealer of the same brand. This may seem like you've given too much information, but you don't know. Sometimes people might read it, sometimes they don't. And it's not expensive at all. Setting up that takes probably more time doing the CSS than actually maybe work. And then you can go again. I don't know if you've seen this block before. Well, here they are all of them again. Each one of the models of the car with all the available options on the dealer page. So it's a huge mesh of information that views allows you to merge and present in many multiple ways. Either geographically, by different sorting purposes and so on. It's definitely amazing the things you can do with it. So as I said before, I'm a front-end developer. I'm not a back-end developer. And most of this has been CSS and view set up. Okay, so I'm going to go back to the presentation. Okay, 2x and view, sorry, I missed that part. Let's go to a complex. Okay, have you seen each one of these? It's a row, that is a result of a query. So triple, it's asking the database all the models of Subaru prospect and this and here. So this results like this in sequence. When I say simple, it's an image, a title, a model of the transmission, the payments, and the term. But I'm going to go for one that is a little bit more complex, like this one at the bottom, that it's on every page. I'll just sum it out a little bit. So take a look at this one. This is the feature deals of this month. You're seeing now four items. So each one, four items are featured on this section of the website. But each one of those rows or results, it's explained like a label of this month, photo, price, additional description of the card, and a few other things like contextual pop-ups and so on. So this is not something you can easily track from the database. It takes some HTML customization and it takes some templating. So you have multiple ways to do it. This might be a little bit arbitrary and for some people might be a little bit uncomfortable to do it, not. It's not the ideal way to do it. But many people like me do it. So I'm going to edit the view. And then as you can see right on the left side, I will maximize to make it more readable. These are the list of all the fields I'm using. But as you may notice, I'm going to search in my browser for hidden. Most of the fields are hidden. So I'm displaying something on that view of work because it displays something. But each field I'm getting from the database is hidden because I'm going to use it eventually at the end. So this is the thing. On my query, I didn't return the price and make the year in multiple things. But then I want to handle and manage that on my own way. I don't want to do it using the default views way. So here I have this global custom text field. And if I click on it, you will get where everything comes from. See, this is a custom view scale. Custom view fields allow you to use tokens from a few other fields that you have and build your own custom HTML. And then how to put all these fields in your own custom way. So this is like really variable. You can do it either here or in the template file. But I personally prefer to do it here because somehow I need a new field. I just go in the view, I add a new field, I hide it, and then I have the available token right over here. Like the make, the model, the term, the IDs that I might need for something, not visual. I mean, you can do a lot of things if you are inside of this complex. Just imagine you have a strong database query tool that is view itself and then you have this not so nice HTML editor. That's why I mean that's probably the most uncomfortable side of this approach. It's that you don't have maybe the coloring or the tab or the actual wireframe management. But the good thing is that TripleA allows you to export configuration. So you can export this config and you have your git track of every change to do on this layout. So that's definitely something that's amazing. So going back to the slides, I won't change anything. I don't want to screw the slide side. Sorry. So this approach, it's pretty flexible, it allows you to do a lot of things and it has two main benefits. The first one, we already saw it, is how much you can reuse the things you do. So you can reuse things like, I don't know. We were not expecting to have a recent blog post block, but we had a menu and we said, okay, let's do the slides with the new blog in the homepage for every page. And that worked. And it was a compression rate and people were going into blog posts from different places. And the effort was minimal. It was just setting up blog for a system view. The choice we are going to start all over. And you've seen this case already. Okay. So here's the question now. Okay, you've seen a lot of things that can be set up easily and it's a lot of database queries. And here's the question. How fast is this? Is this feasible to take this approach? So let's take a... Let's do some post analysis on this. So this is the card page. The card information is just the photo and this text over here. The rest is external nodes and additional nodes. And you can see this is related information, the offers, it's a separate node, all that is split. So we have the card page and the manufacturer page. So what does this mean? That this query or this set of blogs and views over here, they need to pull from the database some information before display. So now the card. And this card is named as a feature bar manufacturer. As the first one of the cheapest. As the first one of this full list of cards. And also as the card itself in those created blogs over there. That's a lot of SQL queries running in your MySQL or whatever server you use. Every time a user goes into your page. That's heavy, heavy, heavy. But okay, even in the home page, if I feature the card, that's a query too, also in the home page. So it's a lot. But what happened? Triple eight has something called tag-based cache. And it's amazing. How does it work? I'll share the slides at the end so you can go and see the URL. How does it work? If I have this card displaying all those views, the first time the visitor goes to this page, all those data queries are going to run for the first time. But the results are going to be stored in a cache table. This means that the second time that a person goes into the page, that person won't run all the queries. That person will be getting the HTML that was sent to the first person. So this makes everything crazy fast. I forget.  Because the second person that goes into the site, is going to get the generated page. It's not going to get all the queries again. Except that I go into my site and I update the year from 2017 to 18, then you know what I can say is going to go, you are invalidated, you are invalidated. It's going to invalidate all views. And then when a new person goes into the site, he's going to update the page again for himself and for everyone else. So that's known as cache warming. So the cache to exist, someone needs to create it. I'm going to talk about later on how to warm your cache. And keep your site fast. But let's jump down again to the next page. Have you heard about this tool? Web page test. It was created by Google in the years to test website performance. They have a cloud set of servers that emulate browser loading to compare page space. For example, if you're running YouTube.com, you're going to get four seconds of page load. That's the time YouTube takes, or the fastest time that YouTube can take load. And it makes 67 HTTP requests to YouTube servers. If you go to Facebook, just the login page takes two and a half seconds. If you go to Google.com, you're going to get 2.0 seconds. Two seconds. And 12 requests. It's pretty small. Okay, you can go to all these URLs. As I said before, I'll share the slides and verify all those results. I'm not making up any number. And here are also the results of the one I'm going to show now. So, okay, Drupal 8, come in please. Oh, okay, this is a simple Drupal 8 site, a fresh one, just installed without the caching in it.  Okay, now if you go and just say, okay, I want to enable caching and I want to enable aggregation, that it's all CSS files into a single one, all JavaScript files into a single one. And then I run again.  Even that site takes SQL queries. How many blocks go into the home page? What menu items go here? What menu items go into the contact menu? So each one takes also, it's a small number, but it's SQL2. But when it's cached, it takes this time. But CDM1 request is highly reduced to 7 from 105. So a lot of CSS files and JavaScript files are simplified. So discuss. I'm putting the page, for example, to get in a little bit better. Okay, so each one of these vertical columns is a block. And let's say that this one, it's a SQL query that involves multiple entities, like cars, prices, merged together. We have the latest block forms. This is also a view that I'll talk about later. And these three are just blocks. And then we have the menu structure that is a drop-down menu. So there's an SQL query that fetches all items. And the load mode and the footer menu. There are multiple things that require an actual data besides this. So without aggregation, it took 4.7 seconds to actually load. And with aggregation enabled, it took 1.8 seconds to load the page. It seemed like a little bit sorcery, but it's then fast if you use it the right way. So I'm going to show a different example. This is the car page. It's a little bit more complex. It has the same footer as any other page on the website, including the homepage. But then it has this a little bit complex view with multiple prices. And then it has four heavy load views that you saw you can expand again like 50 or 60 results in a column. Just a single one of them. And you get four. So for this page, with caching... Sorry, without caching, it took 2.6 seconds. And with caching enabled, it took 1.8 seconds. It's pretty fast. And it took more requests. Because there's a lot of files and many other things. More car images and so on. So this is the cache forming app I mentioned at the beginning. It's free. It's developed by a colleague of ours. It's called Cache Ready. Essentially you go into it, you set up your sitemap.xml file into it. And then you will go running through all your pages. And we will be creating the first access to your site. And whoever comes after your visitors will receive cache pages pretty fast. In the Google or whoever gets them all. So of course, a Drupal is fast if you put it where it's fast. So in this case it's using the Drupal caching system. It's running on Phantium that is really optimized for hosting Drupal sites. And it's using Cloudflare for caching files to all these services. Drupal is free. Cloudflare, it's using the free Pantium. And Pantium is like 25 hours per month. And you can see how fast it can be. And I'm not talking about any HTML simple site. I'm talking about a Drupal site that's using HTTPS, phone calls, Bootstrap, web phones, high resolution images. So it's a heavy loaded website. It doesn't make any sense to spend time trying to simplify it if Drupal by itself can be fast. So Drupal is going to be slow, of course, if you don't do it right. So it can actually fly. So remember, you have to use the caching system. Because for using the caching system you need to use something that's ready for the caching system like Views. If you do your own custom HTML queries by your own, you're getting out of that. And then you're compromising the performance of your site. So if you use Views, then you can use Cache. If you use Cache, then you're going to get a really fast site. If you're fast and your SEO optimizes, then you're going to be highly ranking, highly ranked. And then you're closer to succeed as a website online. So that was the longest I've ever seen it for. So FIMI is improving your information application. There are things that you don't expect to be actually entities on your site, but somehow you can do it, and then you can optimize your site. There was a presentation before this one about paragraphs. That was really good. This is the blue stripe I mentioned at the beginning. So this is like an informational text you can put in any page of your site. Traditionally, you will say, okay, blue stripe, I can create extreme depths, and each one's going to have, I call md4 to have three columns, and then this, and this, and this, and each one's going to be arranged. But then somehow in the future that leads to the change, then you need to ensure that the client can either contact you to fix it, or they know HTML to fix this. So one of the nice approach you can do is just in views. You can have, as I mentioned, paragraph to create these kind of entities that you don't want it to be a page. You don't need to have a page saying 15,000 million years, blah, blah, blah. You don't need to have that. You just need to have something to store your information. And then you set up a view to display three items showing those blocks in your homepage. So initially, you didn't conceive, or your client didn't conceive, I wanted to have a content type to manage three pieces of information in the homepage. And if you, as a theme maker, as a developer, can provide that kind of flexible solution to that, because that can be multi-envolved, can be editable anytime, and the actual website management experience gets definitely boost. So, yes, yes. This is like the image they have in the Paragraphs module page. With Paragraphs, you can create multiple things. I just showed text that you can create images. You can re-sort things, re-arrange them. It's really useful. Or, slash, project, Paragraphs, to learn about them. And then, theming is doing CSS. There's not really much to talk about it. Theming is doing whatever I talked before, plus doing CSS to achieve the visuals that you really want to do. So, if you want to make your site beauty, I mean, if you want to use the default look, that's good. But if you want to improve a little bit, arrange things, even to reuse the CSS and so on, then that's, if you have to use CSS today, there's no way to escape from it. And finally, theing is doing tweak. When the five previous principles didn't ship what you needed to. Like, for example, you need to add a region. You need to do a really custom function, then use tweak. I'm not saying don't use tweak. It's the biggest power you can give to a front-end project in Drupal. But see how many things you can ship without using tweak out to this point. So, you're not authorized to go inside this folder to whatever you want. So, the Drupal community has pretty good guidelines of how to work with tweaking templates that they're really good. As I mentioned before, you might need to create a region. You need to customize things inside a thing that's not in place, or even to adapt to bootstrap. There may be modules that doesn't fit nicely with bootstrap, and you might need to do it in your own thing. Then, that's the proper way. So, those are the six principles. As I said before, always remember, if you start using views, your project has a really high chance of being able to succeed either with search engines or future maintenance and many other things because you're going through the right path. So, my phrase is, if you use cache, you know what happens. In case you want to learn Drupal, we're doing a lot of training in the next couple of weeks here in Ottawa. This is in Ottawa. There's a theme training next week. Online, site building, Monday, module development, in two weeks. And another theme training. Sorry, these three are going to be actually in Ottawa. These three are going to be online, but you can be in Ottawa and do it here. And that's it. This is the euro for athletics. Thanks for your time, questions. I'll be happy to answer. Yep? Oh, sure. It's all right. Any other questions? Thanks a lot for your time. I hope you had a good one.


Welcome everybody to another episode of the nonprofit show. We're really thrilled you're here today Because we're going to be talking about something really important that we all are involved with and sometimes it makes us uncomfortable To talk about it. Sometimes we recognize it or we think we recognize it, but do we? Our new best friend Anthony Sartori, the director and founder of Evolving Minds It's going to talk to us today about protecting staff from burnout And I think a lot of us are going to be taking notes Anthony for ourselves Okay, what do we do so that we're not? Dealing with this so before we get going into a deeper conversation with Anthony I just want to remind everyone that I'm Julia Patrick CEO of the American nonprofit Academy Here at ransom the nonprofit nerd and CEO of the Raven group is off today. She'll be rejoining us tomorrow Again, we are here today because we have these amazing Sponsors and they include bloom rang American nonprofit Academy your part-time controller Nonprofit thought leader fundraising Academy at National University. They have some really cool ads that are out Nationally, you've got it if you check them if you see them you got to check them out Really beautiful beautiful marketing that they're doing of course our friends over at staffing boutique nonprofit nerd and nonprofit Tuck-tuck. These are the folks that join us day in and day out You know tomorrow Anthony. I think is our 800th episode Amazing, I know it is amazing and I don't even I don't think we're doing well I know we're not doing anything other than maybe saying something but We have a lot of archive, right? We have a ton of stuff going on So if you don't join us live, you can find us on all these streaming Broadcast platforms you can get us on podcast if you like more of an audio experience But the super cool sexy thing is our new app that Our executive producer Kevin Pace created with his team at the American nonprofit Academy You can scan this QR code and then be Notified with a gentle update of what has gone on in the day. It's a super cool tool And we're really really excited that we have been able to launch this so again, thank you to Kevin Hey Anthony Sartori executive director founder of Evolving Minds How did you start this organization and why? Oof well Big question. It is it it is it throws me back a few years So actually yesterday May 15th was our three-year anniversary as a nonprofit, which is really exciting Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. We we started in May of 2020 so right when the pandemic was happening I Worked in a grocery store a part-time while I was building Evolving Minds So I got to be on the front lines be an essential worker and at the same time building Evolving Minds into where it is now And throughout that time we focused working with educators. So throughout the pandemic We were we had 20 to 30 educators for eight weeks at a time building community and connection and Then we started to work in the grocery store. So the same store that I worked in we built a Workplace mental health program for the grocery store employees And from there, it's really been workplace mental health. That's our main focus We've you know really done a lot of work in the nonprofit space, which is you know, a big reason why I'm here to Talk today about You know, it's so interesting. I I am fascinated by folks that looked at the pandemic the global health pandemic and Found a reason to start something new. I mean The nonprofit shows that way we started, you know at the dawn of the of the outbreak because We couldn't go anywhere. And so we we were like, well, we need to keep Community our community going and so it was very very Super sketchy in the beginning and some might argue there are days when it is still sketchy It's fascinating to me to meet people who leaned in and found opportunity in a time of chaos and it sounds to me Like that's something that you've done and actually on the topic of chaos, if you will So first things first, I've got to ask you how do we as leaders and and folks in our in our sector? The beloved work that we do yeah for nonprofits. How do we recognize? Signs of this it seems to me like It's it's like a one-and-done. It's like right we confront it when everybody's left the building or it's like a bad situation Right, how can we recognize that we're going in that direction? Yeah, so I think one of the things you just mentioned kind of preventing a one-and-done by Thinking about long-term strategy. What is our burnout prevention strategy if we don't have one? It's often a sign that there will be burnout It's really it's so it's actually looking at what's going on Can you give us some like maybe some physical things that we could recommend like our people calling in? I think we're crabby are they I mean yeah, what are yeah things that we might see in our organization? Sure, so I think there's when I think about burnout I think about the individual lens and then I also think about culture so the systems the culture in place how the Organization is operating so at the individual level when I'm experiencing burnout. It's usually cynicism just a sense of Anger frustration Resentment at the world at large the people I'm working with the people in my sector the nonprofit space I might be really feeling like you said kind of crabby towards them As well as fatigue, I think fatigue and exhaustion Especially during the workday but when you get home if you're not able to recharge and rejuvenate and That fatigue is just If it becomes chronic then that can be a huge sign of of burning out and also like I communicate a lot with nonprofit professionals via Email, you know in trainings and persons and I hear the language that we're using to describe work and I just want to highlight a few words because The language that we're using is a can generate a sense of awareness about what our work culture is look like and So words I hear often our triage slammed Drowning underwater So those those are very violent, you know words and that just tells us about That workspace and what's going on there? Yeah, I mean those are I Would almost say those are words of desperation Yeah, they're they're desperate and and they don't have an upside. They don't seem like You can get beyond it or get around it And so it's a really interesting thing that you would You would bring language into this It's that's fascinating because I don't know if that's something I would have Overtly looked at So I that's fascinating to me that really really is you know in in terms of this piece of it Recognizing it stepping back and saying, okay. Yeah, we got a problem Talk to us about what that problem implies. I mean, what are some of the impacts? Yeah real situation Yeah So that the culture piece to can really contribute to a sense of burnout and lead to I think this one statistic that was just released by Mindshare partners and the US Surgeon General has released So much critical information about workplace mental health But I think this statistic is very important 84% of workplace conditions have contributed to at least one mental health challenge So there's a strong link between our work our work systems and how they're causing harm in terms of Increasing depression anxiety stress trauma It's making it worse, but it's also creating, you know, new conditions within people that May have not presented itself before those those work environments Okay, so then you use the word work environment so many of us In the for-profit and non-profit sector are still working from home or maybe Maybe ratcheted up and using a code working space I mean, how does that factor in because that's a different cultural issue in itself, which I think we don't We're just trying to figure this out Yeah, well, I actually have a quote here that I want to share which came from the Dr Morthy the the US Surgeon General just released the our epidemic of loneliness and isolation report that just came out And I think this speaks to the moment that we're living in because there are a lot of hybrid virtual in person You know, I've seen them all at this point workplace environments And there's one line in his report that I think is just striking and its social connection Is a fundamental human need as essential to survival as food water and shelter So in these virtual environments When we're engaged in a productivity mindset completing tasks We there isn't necessarily that time and space to build community or connection and that can be a huge Loss It's a really interesting thing and and I think that Um The jury's out You know, I mean I feel as though during the pandemic people were like, yeah, I want to stay at home because It's safe and I'm frightened and you know, my kids are at home or my parents are at home, whatever But now that things are loosening up a little I've got to wonder if people aren't going to be saying yeah, I need To go somewhere.  So what do you see about that? I mean, do you see that we're in this piece of maybe I don't want to use the word reckoning but a redefinition Yeah, I think So there There's culture change that's taking place in the workplace. There's a realignment and a reimagining our work is reimagining the workplace and what's possible and What's the good news in terms of a lot of the hopelessness that we experience and feel on a day to day basis is that over the majority of Working adults, I believe it's 81 percent and this was a study done by the american psychological association Are looking for workplaces that support mental health. So there's just been a giant culture change and workplace and mental health in the workplace is now Becoming more and more common but also a priority Interesting and you know where that would have been such a taboo uh topic and and and perceived as a problem As opposed to maybe a benefit or of a core value Really interesting really really interesting. Well things are changing and and you know We we need to look at this and wonder how We are changing and what that does look like and I'd really like to spend some time on something that you mentioned and And and get you to amplify this concept about connection and community Why is that? Why do you think that that is Part of the solution or approach to making a healthier workplace because let's face it You know when we lose our teams and our staff We can't do our work and we can't serve our mission vision and values So in the nonprofit sector, this is a huge deal Talk to us about this connection and community impact Yeah, so for me, I feel like a team is like a miracle It's like a beautiful thing when people come together and they you know, they work together on a cause or a mission And The I think the unfortunate truth is that social relationships and belonging aren't valued or prioritized in the workplace they might be seen as soft skills or Fun or a nice activity But they are absolutely critical to the mission building trust building empathy listening creating spaces of Where people feel appreciated heard and validated it's really The I I I argue the most important thing an organization could be doing because People are your greatest asset. You know, you're you're the working people that you work with And so what that looks like for evolving minds and what we do with organizations is we build out a culture building meeting So 20 minutes Once a week usually it's in the all all staff meeting or departmental team meetings 20 minutes and then we Bring in work culture skills Community building skills connection based skills skills that foster Meaningful relationships. So for example, I'll kind of Illustrate what it looks like you're with your team. You're you're around a table, right? And there's about 15 of you and you're all sitting there and you're about to get into the work agenda Right, you're about to get into the work agenda. But first One of your team members says what are we grateful for? And so for 20 minutes people are sharing and connecting and we're using an imaginary ball As the ball goes around the space and people are sharing because people are in the virtual worlds You have to throw the imaginary ball Into the zoom screen to include them into the community space and into connect them with everyone else But then imagine if we adapted that question to what are we grateful for about each other? What are we grateful for about our mission? So I've never heard anyone say that Yeah, it's electric. It's contagious. It's it's powerful. It's transformative Okay, you just like this is a hair and fire moment for me I am stunned by that Wow, okay, so what have you seen when you ask that question? Some of my favorite, you know, I ask this question often But I also there's joy. There's goodness. There's hope inspiration peace curiosity love those are all skills that we share what I see often is Teams that haven't really carved out that time and space to validate each other Validate each other. So all of a sudden it's like a flow It's like a dam has been released and the water is just letting out and I love when someone goes around and just sees the goodness or is grateful for each person because it's just been waiting Right, there hasn't been an opportunity because to share that because you know, that might be awkward if we're just in a like a A random zoom meeting where we're focusing on specific tasks Whereas our sole purpose right now is to see You know the goodness in each other or to be grateful for each other So it becomes a it it shifts from more of like I see you For your work product to I see you as a human being and that can be really powerful Yeah, that is remarkable because I think sometimes We forget while why we are doing our work Because we get so mired in the the problems and the issues and for a lot of us. It's gritty gritty Sad work, right? So, um, this is a really interesting way to re-center on the joy and the hope And I love you also through that word in curiosity Which I think is a super powerful word and uh It leads to all sorts of amazing outcomes when we pursue that Um, these have been really fun. What are some other Ways that we can kind of you know shake things up Ooh shake things up. I like to shake things up um Well I think with there's you know, there's the gratitude. There's the joy. What brings what brings you joy so you can practice in the same way Um, where do you see goodness in the world? Oh, this is a good way to shake things up asking the team to see goodness in themselves That's usually the hardest thing Don't lead with that wait after a couple weeks or months. Oh, I do Yeah, that's a that I like that. I think that's really profound I think that's really profound and I bet That is hard It it's the hardest thing that you know And and what's really great is when we offer these skills You always have the option to pass the choice to participate or not participate. Okay So what ends up happening is someone may not feel comfortable seeing the goodness in themselves But then the ball moves around the space and other people start to take a risk and be vulnerable And that ends up inspiring them to grow Yeah, I love that. You know, it's really an interesting thing because I can see the link between Feeling appreciated and feeling valued and having merit and being part of a team When some of these things are verbalized Yeah, yeah from my from my research I've found that one of the greatest reasons why people leave is because they don't feel validated They don't feel appreciated and just the simple You know, I see you thank you Goes so long so far. Yeah. Yeah, it's so it's so powerful and you know, it seems to me like we're waiting for The ecosystem around us the clients around us the programming around us and we're not looking at ourselves and our organizations Until it's kind of too late, right? And then it seems to me like we We're having this discussion now because it's a problem Right, right versus saying wow, you know, here's an opportunity You know, one of our sponsors staffing boutique They are a boutique firm for HR just in the nonprofit sector And I've noticed that that when we have them on we're speaking more and more about These issues of how do we keep our staffs healthy? Mentally and physically and in the beginning we never talked about that, right?  And so we're having to think about Right, what's in what's in our midst? Um, we don't have a lot of time left and I could talk to you. Oh, wow Yeah, it's client It goes it goes by really fast, but I'd love, you know, you started it off started us off By helping us to identify How we could recognize a problem or potential problem where we're on that trajectory of Of dealing with this concept Now I'm going to ask you the other going the other direction How do we know when things are improving? Because this doesn't happen this fifth Doesn't happen overnight What you may be looking for I think one of the first things that comes to mind is Before we can improve things we we desperately have to slow down the pace of our our work the pace of our work systems They're they're they're unsustainable. Um, so when we slow down we start to we can start to identify the needs And ultimately I this may sound really simple, but when your staff is smiling Laughing and being playful You probably you're the mental health of the community is most likely improving Yeah, yeah, you know, yeah as simple as that Finding joy in that workplace, you know, I it's not too long ago when american Business really felt That if you didn't walk into the bullpen or the area over the office never you didn't have their head down and it was quiet That nothing was happening and they weren't being productive if they were Chatting or smiling or laughing or telling jokes that there was something wrong It's fascinating to me that the pendulum has swung You know and in over a period of 30 years to redefine What a half a healthy Happy and healthy workforce looks like. Yeah, it's different Yeah, no, this is the culture change that I think we talked about earlier and for me You know, it's about nourishing that people first work environment people in planet first work culture that Is a deep investment into the people and to their mental health a well-being and putting people before productivity first Yeah, it's really it's an interesting discussion and I think that We are in the middle of it because of all the things that have gone on you know in the last three four years and It seems to me we're going to be talking about this for a long long time as we get more of a perspective as we move forward You know, like you mentioned these studies. I mean my gosh for the surgeon general to come out and talk about this Yeah, it's huge. I mean it's it's an enormous thing Yeah, it it gives me a lot of hope honestly, um because For the surgeon general to say that Connection and community is a fundamental pillar of a healthy workplace is amazing. You know, it really is it gives me a lot of hope Well, even the that that conversation about the workplace is even Being aligned to health physical and mental. Yes. We think is a huge shift. I mean, yeah I I'm absolutely fascinated by it. Well, I would say that you have helped my mental health today This has been a fabulous conversation and I think that you know, we need to have you back on and review in the future kind of like where we've We're removing and how this is looking because I just feel anthony That we're in the middle of this storm and conversation and and I use the word storm and not in a pejorative way But kind of like for a lot of us. This is the first time we've talked about this openly with our teams as opposed to just Dealing with that person that comes in one day and says i'm done. I'm out of here. Yeah. Yeah Really really interesting. Well, check out anthony sartoris Evolving-mines.org. I should say evolving-mines.org. He's the executive director and founder of Evolving Mines They do some really interesting work In this space of helping our our work environments be safer more secure more productive and and really Aligning to so many of our mission vision and values for some weird reason anthony In the non-profit sector. We're so good at it's saying what we want everybody else to do but we don't always do it ourselves Yeah, it's such a good thing. Yeah, it's a paradox It really is. I mean we're like the last ones to Self reflect and say okay, you know We need to do this internally and not just for our community. So yeah really been fun having you on and And chatting with you about this again This is a topic that is only going to be more amplified and I I believe when when the surgeon general comes out like that it gives Permission and interest to so many other types of businesses to start talking about this So I feel like it's just the the tip of the iceberg. Yeah, you know Really do it's going to be a lot of fun. Hey everybody again. I'm julia patrick CEO of the american non-profit academy chariot ranson my co-host will be back with us tomorrow She's out today conducting a training. So we'll have her back Again, we have these amazing sponsors most of these folks who've been with us From day one and they include bloomering american non-profit academy your part-time controller non-profit thought leader fundraising academies fundraising academy at national university staffing boutique non-profit nerd and non-profit tech talk These are the folks that join us day in and day out to really Help us have conversations like we've had today with anthony which has been riveting. I've so Enjoyed this. Thank you anthony. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. It's been a lot of fun Hey everybody, you know, we we have this mantra that we use at the end of every show And we pretty much I think we've done it from the very first broadcast But today when I say it it I hear it a little differently And because of talking about mental health and our own physical well well-being And like I say every day I plead with you Just stay well So you can do well See you back here tomorrow anthony you made my day buddy. Thank you