I'm tempted to do stand-up comedy when I'm out of mic. You're stuck with me, sorry. Welcome, everyone. It's such an honor to have you all here and sharing this night with us, where we are paying tribute to not only what we've done this year, but also to the League of Women Voters in Amherst. So welcome to Amherst Media. So this is partly a welcome, but it's also our year report, and we'll also have partly on video. So if you could just bear with me, I'll get through it. Thank you all for gathering with us today. It means so much to have each of you supporting Amherst Media and the League of Women Voters. As you will see as of late and as we've experienced when you see the video, we've had quite a bit going on in terms of production. But Amherst Media is a place where you can have transparency, be assured of community, and where truth is not the first casualty of politics and journalism. So we have a deeply rooted institution here in the community, like the League of Women Voters, and we feel that like the League of Women Voters, we provide a sense of civility and meaning, even when it's difficult sometimes to get there. So thank you for returning to your partnership, the League, with us to provide the results for the nighttime election results. We're really looking forward to resuming that and resuming that partnership. Personally, I know I missed it, and I know folks have commented that they have also missed having the League give the results, so we'll resume that, and I'm really pleased that that's going to happen. Amherst and perhaps we can say the country in general is facing unprecedented challenges and opportunities with big changes on the horizon, and at a time like this it is increasingly important that we make sure that all people have a voice in the decision shaping our community and the nation. Local news and community media are struggling in western Mass and around the country, and Amherst Media, like the League, are important cornerstones in the region for civic engagement, information, and that transparency. Amherst Media, despite some very challenging obstacles this year, has made great strides in terms of building our new facility. We have worked really hard to recruit a diverse board of directors that we're really proud of that reflects the rich cultural and ethnic makeup of our town, and our board has worked extremely hard to launch a campaign to not only raise funds for a new building, but raise the profile of Amherst Media in the community. Since November last year, the board has thoughtfully designed and created a fundraising campaign which includes new branding, development, and outreach materials. Created with our capital campaign committee, these materials are available in print and hopefully you saw some as you entered and includes valuable information about how many shows we produce each year, how we're funded, and why we need your support to continue informing the public in producing independent news and content. We also successfully planned a fundraising event with the Women's Club of Amherst, many of you attended it, partnering with our future neighbor on Main Street. More of these events are planned in the very near future, so stay tuned. For 11 years, our Executive Director Jim Lesko has led Amherst Media through some very tough times. Right now, our new staff members, Jeff Mastrioni and Faith Gregory, are helping to upgrade the station, updating the equipment, and preparing us for the future. Our members, volunteers, and extremely competent and dedicated staff and interns have provided the needed support through the year to produce live and taped shows which are broadcast, of course, in our three channels. But they're shared throughout the world and watched online. For 42 years, we have fostered civic engagement in the community, taping just under 180 government meetings, surpassing, as in previous years, our contractual obligation for the town. Prior to the hire of Jeff and Faith, Nick Ring, Joa Moore, and Jody Jenkins helped to keep things working at the station, training over 36 interns and community members. Every year, we seem to surpass the next in terms of those we serve, content production, and outreach in the community. Hopefully, you have noticed some of the positive changes our staff have helped to introduce, such as the clear broadcast signal and improved picture quality. In addition, Jody Jenkins has expanded the online zine, the collective. If you haven't seen it, please go online and take a look at it. It's really a high quality magazine, very informative. And with the help of interns and community contributors, it's fast becoming a go-to source for news and cultural content here in the Valley. In addition, commissioned by community and Amherst media member Dr. Elsie Federman, we will soon have a showing of a documentary about her hometown place of worship, Temple Beth Israel and Danielson, Connecticut. The documentary edited by Jim Lesko tells the powerful stories of the founding families, many of which who were Holocaust survivors. There have also been significant changes in our programming this past year with the loss of longtime producer to Amherst media, Bruce Smith, with his signature program, The Bruce Show, and his dedicated taping of high school basketball. We will miss his unique commentary and music that made him and his show indicative of the deeply personal and sometimes quirky programming of local public access. So again, welcome. I think we're going to have a video now to highlight of the year and enjoy your evening. Thank you. This past year we have witnessed the vocal rise and the condemnation of news as being fake and biased across the nation. The objective is clear, to destroy the credibility of all forms of media by portraying them as the enemy of the people. Here in Amherst, Massachusetts and in many other communities across the country, diligent and mindful work continues on a daily basis, providing not only transparency of local government, but also ensuring all citizens and organizations the access and opportunity to exercise their freedom of speech. Throughout the historic decision to change Amherst town charter, Amherst media recorded and broadcasted forums and debates held by the Amherst League of Women Voters and the Democratic Committee, as well as hosting our own. All interested parties were allowed to record their viewpoints for broadcast. To assist the area municipalities, the Massachusetts Secretary of State came to Amherst to provide workshops and trainings for the upcoming elections. This effort to inform continued with the broadcasting of forums, debates and statements of the candidates for Third Hampshire District State Representative. Amherst media recorded and broadcasted debates held by the Food Bank, the Amherst Educational Foundation and the Amherst League of Women Voters. Candidates for the New Town Council were invited in to record statements as well as Town Council candidate forums were broadcast around the clock on Channel 17. But local politics weren't the only voices being recorded by Amherst media. Mount Holyoke College provided the venue for former Secretary of State John Kerry to speak about his recent book and for Senator Nancy Pelosi to preside over commencement ceremonies. While Mount Holyoke had San Juan Mayor Carmen Cruz report on the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, the Hampshire College Art Gallery hosted the Museum of the Old Colony. Amherst media featured a short promotional video and a full studio interview with the exhibits curator Pablo Delano. The Fourth International Conference of Cast and Race was recorded at UMass and in turn Sharon Chen interviewed international students to gain insight on what adjustments people made to integrate their lives into American society. Joe Ronca, host and producer of Creating a Human Rights Culture, interviewed Dr. Rhonda Smith about racism, policy and micro intrusions. Additionally, Joe talked to Amherst Middle School students who worked on the Human Rights Mosaic project. The humanities are often described as the study of how people progress and document the human experience. Greg Guantanabe was kind enough to be interviewed in our studio after his dramatic theater performance in Jean Sakata's One Man's Show Hold These Truths about Japanese internment during World War II. Poetry continues to inspire and move people to feel and imagine which is what Michi Serrano did with her piece The In-Between Race. Poet Magdalena Gomez combined forces with musician Diana Alvarez and actor-writer Janice Astor de Valle to produce Latinas on stage at Springfield's Bing Theater. WMMJN interviewed Christy Soares and two of her students from the Latinx Theater project at UMass. Our studio is the scene of a widely diverse representation of music. Live at the Grid, spearheaded by our own Jody Jenkins, is giving local bands the opportunity to record their music and share it with the wider community. The styles and genres are diverse and the music is passionate and inspiring. In conjunction with Live at the Grid, we took our interns on the road to record bands at the local North Fire recording studio. One intern took a different approach to production. Nathaniel Gavour, Amherst-raised and former Video Vanguard member filmed his stand-up comedy to try and make sense of the world around him, titling his series Did You Hear the One About? We received a trophy. It was participation trophy for bowling. We are very proud of our ongoing series such as Theological Devotional and Hourglass Trails as well as Going Deeper. These shows inspire deep thought and introduce our audiences to talented and accomplished individuals. History Bites is bringing their lunchtime participants many lecturers of local lore. A window into ARPS continues to introduce the viewers to the people in public schools to educate the children of Amherst. The ever-popular Curious Giraffe show continues to engage our youthful viewers with music and fun, including environmental issues. For the slightly older audience, Science Cafe continues their series exploring topics such as why soils are super. Critical Connections, in conjunction with Karuna, introduce Shaheen Pasha and Gina Bevers, discussing what the Me Too movement represents for women of color. Critical Connections also introduced Combatants for Peace, an Israeli-Palestinian NGO committed to nonviolent action. In an episode of Difficult Dialogues, Dr. Amal Kar Shabao spoke with Zayed Abbas Samrush, the program manager for cross-cultural programs with the Middle East Children's Alliance about bringing clean water to the children in Palestine. Our cameras and reporters were also covering local news like Montee's March for the Food Bank of Western Mass, the Net Neutrality Office, and the First Congregational Church of Amherst Software to provide Sanctuary for Lutio Perez. And don't forget the remarkable interview of Teriyaki restaurant owner, Yuche Hyuk, who spoke about the Korean community within Amherst. Amherst Media was there to capture the Women's Club of Amherst's celebration of their 150th anniversary, as well as finish a promotional for the organization A Better Chance and their 50th anniversary. Congratulations go out to both of these stalwart community accomplishments. Hands across the hills attempted to bridge political differences between residents from Kentucky and Leverett Mass as they tried to understand each other's reasoning on who they supported during the 2016 presidential elections. One new series included the co-producing of the Valley Advocate Podcast where editors interviewed people and discussed issues in the news across the valley demonstrating potential for cross-collaborations across regional news providers. The attacks on the freedom of the press amendment will continue and escalate. Amherst Media has worked tirelessly for 42 years to safeguard these rights, but we need your help. Right now, we need financial and political support from you, our residents and local organizations, so that we can continue to exist and to build to promote government transparency and ultimately to make sure our public has access to community, educational and governmental programming and information. Become a donor and a member today to ensure Amherst Media can continue to provide its vital services to the greater Amherst area. Hi, I'm Jim Lesko for those that don't know, I'm the executive director. Very proud of this year in review as every year when we're able to show you some of the work that we've been up to. And of course, I'm just the one that's the executive director, it's really the interns, the staff and our members, our community members that produce this amount of work. And you look at this and I measure this against a lot of small investigations, quite honestly, of covering local events, covering the kind of speakers that come through this area. We would like to do more. We're stretched out as far as we can, but we like to do more. I want to give a special thanks to Faith, Gregory, who's in the control booth. She put together what was, she told me it would take her four hours to edit. It was a little bit longer, Faith, but it was well worth it. Thank you. And also did the voice over for us. So I'm not going to say a lot tonight. I just think it's important at this point in time to talk about the freedom of speech. A few years ago, the board of directors here, very different from those that are on it now, said to me, I really don't think you need to be out there talking about the freedom of speech first amendment. We've got to talk more about what we can do for the economic development and that. And I said, well, what do you think everything's based on? What do you think is really what we're really about here? And I think over the years, I'm very proud for the 11 years to say that we haven't wavered from that at all. That the voices that you get to hear in Amherst and elsewhere are in many times people that would not have been heard given any other opportunity. There is no other opportunity. So with that, I looked up the first amendment and I think that, you know, I was surprised of how much is actually in it. So if you indulge me for one brief minute or two, first amendment guarantees freedoms concerning religion, expression, assembly and the right to petition. It forbids Congress from both promoting one religion over others and also restricting in individuals' religious practices. It guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely. It also guarantees the rights of citizens to assemble peacefully and to petition their government. Extremely important amendment that I feel we all know is under attack. And I think it's more important than ever that we and others like this organization continue to be here for the communities that we serve. So with that, I really encourage you as our friends and as our supporters to reach out to your friends and supporters and people you know in the community and tell them that we need their help now. It's not we're not always going to be here unless we get the community to fight for us to be here and to help us. We have to move. This isn't a choice. We have to move. I got a call from Eversource this morning saying, do you realize that you've had the fourth amendment to your extension of your lease? So, I mean, I could get emotional, but I won't. I'm always emotional. I just hide it well. I would like to thank and say a few words before I sit down to our friends at the League of Women Voters who will be receiving the Gene award. Gene, I only knew for a short while, but she was on the committee that oversaw the hiring that I was reviewed and was given and we joked afterwards I said, well, you know, my mother's maiden name was Hagerty. She says, well, I knew we were related. So, and that was it was very nice. She welcomed me to the community very early and very readily. But in all honesty, Alice Swift who's here joined us tonight and Jane Laus were already here long before I arrived and we were videotaping, taking equipment out and covering League of Women Voters events and I got to say that's the true heroes of what Access Television has always been about. Citizens are saying, well, if you can't do it, we'll do it and we want to do it because we believe in it. So, Alice, I credit you and Jane for Mary Jane for all the work that you did, even when we kept going, well, we have new equipment and you know, I just learned this last one. You know, it was a difficult decision time and when you stepped aside and we agreed to do as much as we could, I'm so glad we were able to continue our work with the League and continue right up until next Tuesday where we are going to be doing a really good show out of the studio and I'm very excited and I'm very excited that the Hagerty, Jean Hagerty award is this year recognizing the Amherst League of Women Voters and I like to turn the microphone over to Vera, the Vice President at this moment. Thank you. Created in honor of our beloved Amherst Media Producer and Board Member Jean Hagerty, the award recognizes individuals and organizations that believe in and demonstrate the importance of community engagement to obtain social change. This award is in honor of Jean's lifetime dedication to community betterment and advocacy towards free speech for those without a voice. This year, Amherst Media has selected the Amherst League of Women Voters to receive the Jean Hagerty Award for Community Service. We feel that recognition for the important and meaningful work conducted by the League to better educate the electorate and foster civic engagement at all levels of government is long past due. For 80 years, the League has served the community of Amherst. It continues to provide a voice for citizens and be a force for change, actively pursuing their long-time mission in the community. The League of Women Voters is the ninth recipient of the award and joins previous honorees including in 2010 Isaac Ben Ezra, 2011 Cynthia Brubaker, 2012 Our Treasure Ed Severance, 2013 Founders of Student News Joshua Wilson, Jesse Jason Tabor, Charles Brewer and Graham Churchill. In 2014 we honored the late Judy Brooks, 2015 Jerry Gates in 2016 Representative Ellen Story, 2017 the Rotary Club. Please welcome Adrian Terizzi to accept the 2018 Jean Haggerty Award on behalf of the League of Women Voters and Adrian will be making some remarks. This is really a very a personal emotional moment for me because all the names that you heard mentioned receiving the Jean Haggerty Award are people that I know, respect and have worked with so I'm going to go away from my particularly planned and scripted notes just to say to all those wonderful people who came before the Amherst media board selected the League we're in a great company. I knew them all in fact I served on the board during that period of time when we very carefully looked at all the talent across Amherst all the community groups and organizations that could really have been any one of your choices so thank you for selecting the League of Women Voters I am very pleased I'm privileged as a matter of fact to stand here tonight as just one member of the League of Women Voters and accept the Jean Haggerty Award on behalf of the League and I want to thank those League members who were here tonight to accept the award as well so thank you I'm going to go to my formal remark I've got to go back to my script so thank you so much Vera that was lovely and I thank everyone for being here and you know it really is quite an honor for the League to accept the Jean Haggerty Award and I do so on behalf of wonderful people who came before me I stand here tonight representing decades of women and men but I knew Jean Haggerty I worked with and admired her she came to town as a senior citizen about the same time you did Jim Leska and Jean epitomizes the fact that community service is really what we really should be about in our private time in the free time that we have to give a sight of family and the necessities of life and Jean really tutored me well I'm going to step aside for a moment to say Jim I met you when you first came to town you may not have remembered but I came in to introduce myself and to welcome you to the community and I'm grateful that you have served the town of Amherst as well as Amherst media as well as you have been tireless in building Amherst media local access television is the truth in providing all of us within the community our knowledge of what is going on inside uncensored transparent and freely available so for that my hats off to you Jim and to the Amherst media board I mentioned that Jean arrived as a senior citizen in the town as I am now she didn't stop she got very involved and I loved meeting her in her apartment as she tutored me and talked about what was important to her and in accepting the award tonight I want to say that the League of Women Voters of Amherst is paying tribute to her memory as well as to the memory of the Amherst women who in 1939 19 years after the 19th amendment allowing women the right to vote after decades of women in Europe and the United States fought for our rights well this group of women in Amherst gathered together in the living room and organized what is known as one of the earliest chapters of the League in the state so we really stand on those women those of us who are here tonight and I want to thank you for joining us the committee members and the select board people who are here so we organized as one of the earliest chapters of the League and next year as I think you mentioned we're going to be celebrating our continuous year of service I only stand here representing those on the current steering committee on the shoulders of those who served so well before us we've learned from them we organized around their principles and we serve to this day to their mission and to their principles I have to add that the League of Women Voters is particularly honored to be acknowledged by you by Amherst media you are our community partners in civic engagement and civic information and you have been for your 42 years we're older than you are ever since you came on board 42 years ago you've never turned down any request to show our programs or candidates nights I've approached you on many occasions Jim and no matter what the schedule was heavily scheduled whether it was for an international women's night or an affordable housing program or many many candidates night you never turned me down so I appreciate that and accept that on behalf of the League tonight and you've been televising these shows for all 42 years I hope you continue well into the future the League depends upon access local access television as is our very own Amherst media all the more important for accepting this award tonight is the fact that is indeed awarded by Amherst media and your board and I thank you board for allowing us to be the recipients this year it is the first award that the Amherst legal women have ever received I checked the archives I checked the archives I communicated with many of our 50 plus year members and it was very sounding to me but not not in the fact that we weren't awarded we do our work very quietly as you do as Amherst media it just underscores the reason why it is so meaningful to us to receive it from you our community partners as I mentioned in civic education and information so this award is the first for us tonight we're thrilled to accept it and I am on behalf of the steering committee and so tonight we celebrate this honor but tomorrow we get right back to work because you know and we know that we're going to go live for election night coverage we haven't done that in a while and so we're going to be doing another collaborative effort Amherst media the League of Women Voters so next Tuesday night November 6 all tune in and I don't want to end tonight by thanking you I'm appreciating my people who are here the steering committee members and those of you in the audience for attending but we want to do this we want to go one step further we want to wish Amherst media again our community partners we've collaborated for all your 42 years in wishing you the best for a very successful capital campaign you are set to build a very important visionary 21st century facility that will continue to be a force for community building for information sharing and for social justice on which you have always stood and I applaud your efforts and I appreciate your acknowledging the League tonight with your very important Gene Hegerty award we are grateful thank you so very much I am Steve Brewer I'm a past president of the board of Amherst media and tonight I'm here as a representative of Makers at Amherst media the Makers based community group that we've run for several years here at Amherst media and it's my pleasure to recognize Christine Olson as our volunteer of the year at Amherst media so we set up Makers at Amherst media end of 2013 beginning of 2014 and the first email I have from Christine was in February of 2014 that she came to one of the very first meetings that we've set up and wanted to get involved as a doctoral student in communications at UMass Amherst she was interested in studying the Makers based phenomenon and saw a new Makers based being set up as an opportunity for her to get involved in due data collection but also it was something that she could get involved with and participate in as a volunteer and she did basically three years there wasn't anything that Makers at Amherst media did where Christine wasn't right there at the front helping make it happen she was organizing the materials she was showing up as the face of Makers at Amherst media at outreach events at Barnes & Noble at the schools she organized a relationship with the Vila program at Amherst college she set up an after school program for Makers at Amherst media she was coming in for the drop-in sessions from school face to face and it was just a wonderful thing to have her engaged in the program and like I say for three years she has been the face of Makers at Amherst media for the past few months Christine has transitioned from collecting data to doing that analysis of her data for her dissertation and she gave a preview to a bunch of us to see what it looks like the Makers Steering Group and it was fascinating for me to see all of the events that I'm familiar with but run through this different analytical framework this different lens that she's using professionally as a communications doctoral candidate to understand the way that our community works and how the members interact with one another and what kinds of resources were well used and which ones we might have thought of using more and so I really look forward to when her project is finished and we've already seen I think the most important results already it was enlightening for me and so we wanted very much to recognize her efforts and we're glad to recognize her as volunteer of the year but of course now Christine has a new maker project that she's working on and we look forward to finding out more about that in February I understand and so it'll be great to see in just a few months so thank you very much Christine come up we've got a a certificate we'd like to award you with I just wanted to really briefly say thank you we heard in the opening remarks that you can be assured of community here and that's really been my experience working with Amherst media working with everybody as part of this Makerspace initiative has been the defining aspect of my graduate career here in Amherst and so I really appreciate all of the mentorship the advice often the emotional support that I got here and so I really appreciate the award and everything that you've done for me so thank you all Hello everyone I'm Ed Severance on pleasure here at Amherst media I believe this is my 11th I think I came in a month after Jim came in and this is my 11th annual meeting as a treasure I get to do a really boring housekeeping part so I'll hang in there I'd like to begin by thanking our long standing bookkeeper here at Amherst media Julie Shively who gives us monthly updates on revenue and how it affects our budget her long-term employment here at Amherst media allows her to give us insight on previous fundraising efforts and other areas of the budget she's an invaluable member of our financial team and we'd like to thank her she could not be here tonight but thank her I'm happy to say the financial stability of Amherst media remains strong at the end of the past fiscal year which just ended on June 30th of this year we had a total of $82,008 in checking and savings accounts total current assets of $480,331 and total liabilities of $179,072 for a total net equity of $301,259 we also currently have a balance in our capital equipment account for $143,926 and a fiscal year 2018 unfortunately we had a deficit of $7,813 this was primarily as a result of higher rent, higher utility burden from ever source property taxes we were paying until we break ground on the new property and interest on the loan we still hold on the property bright spots over the past fiscal year Comcast revenues remain steady with approximate 1% increase over last year's fiscal year combined with other revenue sources that gave us an operating budget of $355,360 for the 2018 fiscal year our new fundraising efforts that brought in $8,060 in new revenue and were able to raise $17,502 in production services classes and workshops so we continue our fundraising with the goal of having the loan paid up by spring so we can break ground for our new home next year thank you very much I have props I'm sorry I don't have a puppet though if I had a puppet it would be far more interesting pumpkins there we go closest that we're going to get to a puppet I'm Patrice Wilson or Trees some of you know me as Trees this past year I've been on the board of directors and by default I was ganged up on and voted chairman of Capital Campaign you're welcome you're welcome that's it, that's it I know I should, I was supposed to be in the restroom that day and they all looked at me like oh yeah by the way so hey I've been learning and growing and developing a lot looking at a lot of podcasts talking to a lot of people who do a lot with fundraising and things like that and it's just my enthusiasm that I bring and I try to take that enthusiasm and push it all out to you and everybody else I meet and pull you in and hopefully tonight we can work on that with some of you so tonight I just wanted to A return and report very quickly about some of the things that we've done recently just in the past 10 months and then in the next month in November and December a couple of the smaller fundraising things that we have going on and one of my key things that I said is that I bring I bring the fun and fundraising that's my goal because I want you to enjoy the process and to have fun while we do it because together as a community we're responsible for building and creating a future for the next generation and that includes this beautiful new media building in which community can come together, share our stories inspire one another to teach the next generation about freedom of speech the importance of voting the importance of being active in your community no matter what side of the party lines that you're on and that's really what I try to push out to folks is that this isn't just about Amherst media having a new home this is about something really important for the community so I want you to think about that just as I share with you just a couple of things that we have done that we worked really hard on this past year we've worked really hard and labored very intensively and coming up on a fundraising folder one that can be organized and show what it is that Amherst media is about show the history show what we desire to do in the future what we're doing right now and why it is that we need a new building this is a beautiful folder and I really appreciate the work of Matt and Rick who did so much with graphics and they were ready to run out of the building and they did tie them to their seats thanks for letting me tie up Rick I really appreciate that Matt got out the back door you know it was one of those times that Jim turned off the alarm and Matt got out the back door but we appreciate all that he did in helping to bring this beautiful folder this is something that we'll be taking whenever we go to talk to banks whenever we are approaching donors and we do need some heavy hitters we would love to be able to have the opportunity to sit down with folks who have some pocket change of $120,000 $250,000 because you know there's some people with that kind of change those are the people that we want to share their legacy and actually have them donate the funds whether it's an organization a business or an individual somebody who would like to leave a legacy in their will to Amherst media so that a room or the studio could be named after them even the building that would be a beautiful legacy to leave your children and the community to have your name on that I think that would be really, really wonderful the other thing is as you can talk to Rick tonight we're also doing the buy a brick campaign which is so fun Rick tell me if we sold all of those bricks to individuals, to families and businesses how much money would we get just from that see that's not chump change $50,000 that's really decent that would be just a little smidge in that kitchen that I really want to get because you see I really love to put these events together and a break room a break room so that's something that we, that's a major goal and that would be really wonderful to walk into the foyer of that new building and see the wall with the different colored bricks with different sizes with folks' names with businesses the Amherst League of Women's Voters people like that just all different organizations we want to show that you are a part of our community so that your name's on that wall when the newer younger generation steps forward to take our place that they can see your name and be viewed on that wall so this was something we worked really hard on we're really proud of there is some, there are a couple in the foyer you can take a look at, please, please do so we'd love to have you do that in this in this basket that I have here, I have some cards we would love to have your thoughts and your ideas on fundraising no matter how great or how small if you would like to join our capital campaign committee we would love to have you a part of it you don't have to be a part of the actual Amherst community because this is a community center we'd love to have all people from different clubs and organizations step forward whether it's event planning whether it's you have a talent and a love for grant writing we're in the middle of really pushing and putting together a big grant proposal and things like that we have the makerspace and other ideas of how we could formulate of having organizations come in here and pay to have them run workshops and things like that there's all kinds of ideas that are under that heading of capital campaign so if you are thinking of something tonight while you're here, while you're snacking on some of those delicious goodies in there take some time to write down your idea and your contact information and put it in the green basket which I'll put in the fourier again we are grateful for your support and I appreciate the words that were spoken earlier they were inspiring because all of the volunteers that come here but those of you who have been honored this evening, this is why we're here and I'll probably get a little emotional but I'm a little selfish when I think about why I work at Amherst media so hard my husband's family came to Amherst in 1800 we live on the last 50 acres of his family's 200 acre farm my grandson is the ninth generation to be born on that property and I hope and pray that he grows up in this beautiful area in this beautiful town and I want him to be the recipient of this new building I want him and the generations of young children that will grow up in this area to be able to come to this beautiful community center and to be enriched by the stories that we are capturing and the new stories that will come about I want him to know who else he is and her organization in Connecticut and that wonder those beautiful stories that Jim's been working so hard on putting together in this documentary it's so important to have this community center and so when I think of it and when I work so hard on this and I do want to have fun doing it I think of my grandson Declan and I think of those other little children his age who are going to be coming up and they will be able to come and be like these young men and young women who I was also like who came here as interns so I want to do this for future generations because this is an important community and this is an important organization and we want this to be here not for 42 years in the future but for 142 years in the future so we appreciate your support and we need it and thank you so much for being here Thank you Patrice I think we knew that your heart would always be in it and your creativity and that's why you're our capital campaign chairperson so thank you now I get to introduce my board members and again we have a diverse board on all levels but what's really wonderful about it we have a dedicated and really hard working board they're working for you members and they're working for the community so you've already heard from me I'm Demetrius Shabazz I'm the president of the board and very honored to serve in this position Ed is our treasurer Vera is our vice president you've already heard from Patrice Wilson she's our chair of the capital campaign Anastasia Ardennes she is our school committee representative we have appointed positions on our board and Anastasia is serving in that capacity Rick Hood is our long time member on the board and Charlie I'm trying to find you there Charlie Schweik is also a member of the board Charlie agreed as a volunteer to serve in the capacity of another member who had left to make a film and so Charlie agreed and volunteered to serve in this capacity and so am I missing any other members Steven sorry Steven and you've already heard from Steven who served in the capacity of the president of the board before I stepped into this position and was elected I think and Jacqueline so I'm going to read the rest so those are the members who are here so thank you again board we also have Jacqueline Faizon is a member of our board she's not here tonight and Marisha Parham is serving in the capacity of the president position the five colleges is represented on our board we try to have like I said a diversity of people opinions and serving in different capacities because this again is a community station so I am introducing at this point Charlie is up for election so he'll no longer be a volunteer he has been nominated to serve on the board as an elected position and then also Andrea battle here and she's also nominated for the board so these are our two elected our two nominated members and if you can come up and take a couple of minutes to introduce yourselves so Andrea and then we'll have Charlie I'm going to say this publicly like my daughter did to me when she told me the audience that I had told her since her name was Whitney that the museum in New York was named after her and until she got to junior high she didn't realize that I was just making that up D had asked me to look at the board at the Amherst media I think it was in 2011 or 12 I had just gotten involved at the housing and sheltering committee and I was just doing a youth action coalition which by the way was a wonderful thing that we're trying to reprise the young people from there some went on to tish at NYU and other things due to Amherst media and all that they gave so my heart was very much with Amherst media I just didn't have any time tired and everything and she got me one time when I was with Elsie who threw me under the bus and said okay I'll do the capital thing with her if Andrea will do the board so then of course I felt guilty because we know we have to raise this money so but anyway I'm no longer with housing and shelter I felt very proud to have helped create the municipal trust with them and I'm stepping down from one or two other things but my heart has always been here and I really do care about the future and I want to see that building built and I want to see the youth I have three grandchildren here so the oldest one is twelve I do expect to see them being able to utilize this also and I'm a retired teacher who came here to hang out with my grandchildren and obviously do everything else I can to make this a better place so I thank you this is a box call me by surprise a little bit but I'm good at it I'm ready my history so I've lived in town for about ten years I've lived in town for about ten years and I've got two kids in the school system currently when they were in middle school I got active in the middle school working on Lego robotics and I started seeing the glow in those kids' eyes as we were doing this after school and that led me and I knew Steve Brewer who was already active here in Amherst media and Steve among others started the maker program here and right around the same time Christine started I joined and it really motivated by trying to make the connection in after school programming to our youth that gave me a wonderful several years interacting with Amherst media people and I got to everything we've heard about the people that are here I just learned over those two years the other thing for me was as an Amherst resident and everybody in this room I'm sure has the same feelings there's times there's periodic times in town and you want to hear some big decisions being made or something and one that pops into my head that was just so important there was a big active town thing happening I went down to the town room couldn't get in it was standing room only down to the basement this was before I was really interacting with Amherst media but there were media there were televisions in that hallway and I was with people watching what was going on in that room because we couldn't get in that room it's those kinds of things that have given me tremendous appreciation for this organization the last thing I'll just say is that there's that history there in terms of the footage and the archival of the last town meeting I volunteered and helped with that and was just really appreciative of what Amherst media does in terms of archival of our history but one of the things that's really motivating me for working with this terrific board in this community is the future as people have talked about and there's just in my opinion so much untapped potential in this community that we haven't even leveraged in Amherst media around the training center that this could be and so I'll leave it at that I just see so much potential for growth and I'm just honored and grateful to have this opportunity to work with everybody so thank you so real quick Charlie is being nominated for the three-year term elected seat and then Andrea is being nominated for the one-year term elected seat and Ed has some ballots for you and I just wanted to say as you're receiving your ballots and you're filling them out serving on the board takes a lot of energy takes a lot of working with one another and I just really I'm so appreciative of each and every board member we have also besides the appointed position for school committee there's an appointed position for five colleges there is traditionally an appointed position for the town and I so appreciate our former member Adrian Terese who has served with me by my side in battle with Comcast and negotiating for the 10-year contract so Adrian served in that capacity for the town which is an appointed position we hope to resume that after the town council is seated it's a very important position so we will be looking for someone hopefully folks will self-nominate as well and could the former members of the board as again you're filling them out could you stand up and be recognized former members Adrian Terese former member of the board there's also another former member that I met for serving while they're tabulating the very serious ballots I totally forgot to tell you about a couple of our upcoming fundraisers on let's see Saturday, November what date is that not this Saturday but the next Saturday I apologize the date is not on that thank you Andrea Tulip Chowdery one of our Amherst media community members as well as one of our producers she's actually going to be hosting an open mic small concert fundraiser here right in the studio there'll be actually a number of different styles of music from all over the world it's going to be a lot of fun I believe that is going to be from is it two to four I didn't see the time that was on here I apologize I believe it's something like three to five but we'll make sure that that gets on our website also we're getting ready to launch a really interesting and different fundraiser with Valerie Damersky she is a wellness advocate with doTERRA she also is one of the owners and operators of Amethyst Brook Wellness Center just down the street here we've seen her setup in the four year we're actually going to be selling small little essential oils kits those kits are being sold for $30 and we will receive $10 for each one so that's actually a pretty decent return it's a great time to get those kits it being the holiday season and she also has a handout that will be given to you with 101 uses for those three oils that are in that container that's pretty fabulous you've got allergies, illnesses whatever you want to clean your house those are fabulous oils and then I want to remind you on Tuesday November 27th that is the National Day of Giving which we're going to be part of that for the second year in a row that's a day in which people can actually donate to their favorite charity nationally we hope that you donate to us and again we'll be pushing that out as well and that's on Tuesday November 27th giving Tuesday so thank you we have a couple other things that we're looking for in the future of wine tasting and some other fun things like that that we'll have probably after the New Year starts so we'll let you know thank you so much we'll be closing out I just wanted to say that if you haven't had one of Patrice's cookies this is the other reason why we put her on the board we found out her cookie skills you need to get one it's delicious and as I was telling someone we just have events just to have Patrice's cookies normally so we have Charlie Schweik had enough votes for the three-year term surprise, surprise and Andrea for the one-year term so thank you for agreeing to serve on our board thank you Amherst Media Board so I want to close out again thanking League of Women voters and thanking thanking all of you that are here as we've seen we're building our new home it is going to take some heavy lifting but we know that with the community's help we can do it from our research of the building it's going to cost $850,000 Amherst Media is that place however that brings people together a place where candidates and local state elections can introduce themselves so you saw poets can bring peace and healing or a place where retirees can gather for a class in photography no other site no other site in this community provides these services at little to no cost that is why I'm here and I hope it's why you are here in this room to continue to make Amherst Media a place to build create and bring people together our new home will house a large studio as well as the break room as you heard that's it and a small podcasting room a computing center and will include an energy saving HVAC system LED lights and a water retention and runoff system that goes beyond what is mandated by the state of Massachusetts we hope that all of you will join our efforts to build a new home for Amherst Media creating and helping to build a place that will serve as a long term home for community gatherings and a hub for information education and civic engagement and more importantly that you go out in the community and you tell our story we really need that support you tell folks why you support us last thing election night we will have Stan Rosenberg the League of Women Voters telling us who's won it's always a really exciting time if you have never tuned in to the League of Women Voters in election night please tune in it's at 7.30 on Tuesday 17 the league knows yep and that's it and we're gonna go live so thanks again for coming and thanks again for your support good night


Hey folks, my name is Aaron Rapolo. Thank you for joining me today. I'm excited to speak on behalf of the product school and share a little bit about the power of soft power. When this event was listed, I was still the head of mobile product with Amazon or I guess with Alexa Auto, but now I'm the head of mobile product over at Love Every. You can reach me at my LinkedIn here, but I'd love to share a little bit more about myself before kind of diving into how I can help you through building relationships, repairing them and kind of putting some of that on automation. So very quickly we've all done the tell me about yourself in an interview and this is mine. I was born and raised in Miami in Fort Lauderdale across a couple of homes and stayed in Florida for a good period of time. And I went to the University of Central Florida and I earned a bachelor's and master's degree in exercise science and coaching. So very atypical background for a product manager, but as I came to find, it was a lot of the same skill sets about being able to empathize with your users, about being able to lead without authority, being able to form really solid relationships and oftentimes being able to manage both up and down. So through about a six year career, I was able to found two new recreation centers and turn some defunct recreation centers around for a variety of colleges, such as the University of Central Florida. I also did it for Red Rock Community College and probably my favorite work was with the Maryland Institute College of Art, where I got to build one from the ground up and ended up training, hiring and developing a staff of just under 30 folks. So really cool there. And I've had over 50 direct reports in my time and have helped many of these leaders grow and become managers now themselves. But like many folks who are career switchers, clearly I'm in tech now. I got a little bored. Education and recreation don't necessarily move all that fast. I wanted greater reach to be able to help more people. I've always been a geek and I found the opportunity to pivot into tech through the MBA with Duke's Fuqua School of Business. Is able to secure an internship with T-Mobile where I got to launch the T-Mobile Trucks Program. Think of retail stores on wheels, kind of like an ice cream truck that show up to music venues, show up to farmers markets and help folks out with their service plans or get them enrolled in a new one. So launched about 26 of those trucks nationwide during my internship. Heck of a good time. And taught me a lot about working in a Fortune 100 company, which I was able to parlay into working retail with Amazon Business International. I was solving the exciting problems of tax and invoicing customer experience for our international customers. As you can imagine, things like VAT and GST if not refunded properly account for massive expenses for a company. So it was my job to make sure we did that. And I pulled together a cross team coalition of about eight different product leaders. Got all of the directors and the requisite VP's on board was able to push a significant project into several roadmaps over the course of 2020 and 2021. Sorry, 2019 and 2020. We're joining Alexa Auto where I got to work directly on consumer-pacing goods which is more my passion. During my time there, I launched Auto Mode and started a massive mobile program, my first direct hires. And then shortly left to work on something near and dear to my heart. I've got a two-year-old toddler here at home and being able to work with a mobile app program being able to lead a mobile app program that's going to aid parents like myself and help them to work with their children between ages zero to four is something that I felt very strong about. I'm able to take those skills that I learned at Amazon and at Duke and work on a project that resonates with me. But that's not what you're here for. You're here to hear more about why relationships matter, how to build them, how to repair a relationship that maybe you broke or maybe you're not at fault but is a broken regardless. And then for me to share a couple of tools with you to simplify your relationship workflow because this, fitting this into your existing nine to five or eight to six or from any of us, especially at larger companies, the seven to tens as they end up being, can be very onerous. So I'm looking kind of massage that into your existing workflows or at least make it a little more automatic. The first, why do relationships matter? Especially for a PM. We've all heard this phrase, leadership without authority. I get tired of hearing it, but it's very true. As a product manager, you're often trying to convince folks in UX, folks in QA, your developers, you're trying to convince other product teams to do what it is that you believe is right for your customers, what you think is important and what your roadmap needs to succeed. And oftentimes we don't manage any of those folks. So it is in essence, your ability to cultivate relationships with all of these various leaders and their cross-functional verticals that is the currency that gets this work done. But in addition to that, there are some other perks. First and foremost is stakeholders will defend your interests when you're not in the real.  Excuse my explicit, but I think that that's the right way to look at it. We all are familiar with CYA and when you can have somebody CYA for you, that is an incredible tool. To give you an example, this happened today. I was given a company-wide presentation at Love Every. The president of the company mentioned something offhand that would require a massive amount of work on my team and it kind of went over my head. I didn't notice it at first. It was a simple request essentially that when we release something that all of the employees are going to get involved. I have to be a bit vague, but what that meant is that my head of CX, the folks who aid customers, I would say customer success, but we call it customer experience here, reached out to me individually on Slack and was like, hey, do you do realize that that's going to be XYZ for your team? Oh shoot. I was so glad to have her bring that up to me now and to find it out in three weeks later and have to do a fire drill there. So having somebody to bring that to my attention and having that level of relationship where I didn't mind being wrong was a real asset to me and it's something that you'll gain from having solid relationships with the folks around you. Next, similar to that, when you goof up and we all do, folks usually assume positive intentions if you have a good relationship with them. We've all been there where you make a mistake and immediately this becomes an escalation to your manager or to your VP and there's a correction of error that you have to write because things went wrong. We'd like to avoid that. That's a massive amount of work and ultimately the net reason as to why did something go wrong is because somebody made a mistake. Somebody omitted something, somebody forgot or we learned new information we didn't anticipate. It's always a little bit of a goof up and you can avoid a massive amount of the corrective actions and steps just by having a solid relationship in place. It's the simple, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry that I goofed but when people assume positive intentions then they start working on solutions as opposed to putting up barriers and as opposed to requiring a massive amount of reporting. Great example of this is when I was working on auto mode for the Alexa app, we missed something. This was a small back end feature that enabled communications on third party devices and it didn't come out until very late that we had missed it. Of course, somebody from that team let us know months in advance but we all didn't see that email or got lost in the shuffle and didn't make it on the backlog. And because we had a solid relationship with the 3P team and with the communications team when this came up late in the game and was a launch blocker, we were able to rally the troops and get everyone together to knock out the necessary work, communicate with our third party OEMs and get them to make the necessary firmware changes so that we could have a successful launch on our existing timeline. And this would not have happened if I didn't know that people on the 3P side and have an existing good relationship with them. And frankly, if they didn't have a good relationship with the vendors we work with. So that launch came down to the wire and it made the line because of the relationships. I think it's also important that you have good relationships not only because you'll get to enjoy your work more, frankly, but because your colleagues will feel comfortable telling you that you're wrong or telling you that they don't agree. And ultimately that leads to the better product in the end. I can think of countless times where I've had my peers across UX or engineering come to me or even maybe not peers but junior engineers come to me with a better idea than the one that I started with. I think many of you probably can too, but if you've got a strong relationship that happens a lot more often. And what you end up with is a coalition that creates product requirements and a coalition that creates a prioritization and multiple viewpoints on what it is that the customer needs where the product manager is now relying on those relationships and shepherding those relationships to create the best end product rather than it being the product manager being a bottleneck or being the only source of truth. So I think that by investing in relationships you make your job easier and you get to the right answer a lot more often. Frankly, from a self-sterving standpoint, tech is small. If you do not invest time in your relationships then they're not going to pay dividends for you later. I think of a good friend of mine, Diego Granados. He's somebody who I was able to kindle a really great relationship with and he helped me to earn an internship which I didn't take at Cisco. And then that worked the other way where I was able to help him in his interviews for Microsoft and networking within Amazon. And that's just a simple and easy one that was a friendship from class. But these are the same type of relationships that you're going to be creating with your colleagues. I mean, realistically you spend more time with your colleagues and probably any friend and probably any family member or most family members. This is worth investing in. These are the people who will come out of the woodwork for you when you lose your job suddenly from a layoff or will help you to develop as a better leader. I can think of four instances just from Amazon business. I was only there from a year, but two peers, one director and one skip level stakeholder all of which have since come out they've moved to different places and have all doubled back to me to either ask for a job or I'm sorry to ask me if I wanted a job or to ask me if I knew anyone that I would recommend. That's trust. It's an amazing currency and it's well worth your time. Even the quick coffee chats and the one-on-ones are a way to really build the same. This one sounds a little silly but your direct messages get read first if you have solid relationships. A really poignant example is the program manager I worked with for a while on one of the teams I was at at Amazon. They were very frustrated with a particular stakeholder. They couldn't get this person to respond to them. They needed to know what was going on for the weekly or the monthly report and it was a very high stress situation for this person. I was having a one-on-one with them and they're like, you know what's going on? Is this person sick? I said, give me just a moment. Ping that person on Slack. Got a response within about three minutes time answering the program manager's question. That's an amazing currency to have. What it tells me is that their relationship in some way was crossed. They had a broken relationship. They had lost that trust and it meant that the direct messages that they were sending to this other stakeholder were getting ignored. They were getting put to that three o'clock hour when you're all tired. They were simply being read and forgotten about whereas the relationship I had established with this stakeholder meant that my direct message got read immediately. They saw that it was urgent and they got me the answer I needed and that will happen with you if you're able to invest in relationships and handle them properly. Final later, I think if you are not convinced enough, great, I've got a little more reason for you and see this slide of advance. I think it's important that if you're investing in relationships with all the right folks that your engineers, your devs and your UX don't see you or themselves as a service. What that means is that you're a collaborative team and the folks work to fill in the gaps. It means that developers can and often do start to make decisions based on the customer and not just what's the fewest lines of code.  You end up with all three parties in the room at the same time, helping to groom one another's work and it again just spreads the wealth, it makes the work easier and it's important because what it means is that all of these other five benefits that we saw are things that get accrued with your devs and with your UX. And it's something that I think a lot of product managers miss and I can say very much that, especially with UX, this ends up as like a point of contention where instead these folks could end up being a very strong partner for you and someone who does defend you and someone who helps you find roles and develop later. But let's assume you're bought in. You think, yes, relationships do matter and despite having countless reports to write a massive backlog of requirements, I wanna invest in them. Great, I've got a couple of tips for you and for me, they're based in the language of Amazon. So we've all heard this idea of cross-functional stakeholder management. It's like a buzzword, it ends up just kind of compounding a lot of ideas but ultimately it is relationship building. That's what a product manager does. I think that there's two Amazon leadership principles that will really speak to building relationships and the first one is ownership. Took this directly off Amazon's website but I think it's important that we highlight this thinking long-term and not sacrificing long-term value in terms of short-term results. What that means is that you're not being brusque with your requests, you're not treating people as a service, you're treating them as humans. You are acting on behalf, sure of the entire company, but you're acting on behalf of the relationship. You're acting on behalf of the person that you're interacting with and you're also taking responsibility for the mistakes that you make. So I think ownership is a principle that weaves very strongly into your relationships. And I think that there's a couple of tools that we can tease out of here that are gonna serve you well. First is that long-term interaction, right? Take a moment to think about the words you're saying and how you're saying them, whether they're resume call or a Slack DM or even just a Jira intake and make sure that it's not speaking to something purely transactional but it's also bringing a little bit of your personality and a little bit of empathy into the situation. Next, when you're looking at your squad, so whether it's your two pizza team or your standup crew or whatever you wanna refer to you always wanna be the first to do. And what that means is that you're not requiring others to always pick up the Slack. If a one-on-one needs to get set, you pop it on the calendar. If an intake needs to get done and it could be UX or it could be PM or it could be developers, put it in there. Get it into Slack channel and show folks that it has happened so they can scratch it off there to do this just as well as you can. Sometimes it's taking and sending meeting notes out even when nobody's doing that. I think when things are ambiguous, it can cause a little bit of animosity because folks don't want to say, well, this is my job because then they get forced to do that. But if you're the first one to do especially early on in a relationship, especially when you join a new team, this shows a high degree of ownership and it helps you to earn trust without others. And that's kind of where we're heading is this other LP of earns trust. I think this last bullet point though is one that I really wanna drive home and that is ask people about their day. Hey, how are you? How was your weekend? Up to anything fun lately? What are you looking forward to? There's a lot of ways that you can foster just small bits of relationship and it's so much more important now that so many of us are working at a distance. I mean, I work from the Denver Boulder Metro right now but my developers are across Boise, Portland and the Bay. So we don't get to see one another face to face except through a camera and these little moments can easily get erased that normally they would happen automatically in a conference room scenario or in a hallway standup because you've got a little bit of downtime. Now it's something that you have to do intentionally whether it's through your email or your Slack or in the 90 seconds before standup starts. I'll be giving some examples of what these look like in a moment but I do wanna touch on the other leadership principle here that I think is important and it's simple, it's Ernst Trust. I truncated this one because it's a very long description if I'm being honest but ultimately it's this idea of being attentive. I can't tell you how many times this happens and I'm sure you've had it too where you're in a meeting with your stakeholders and you don't start listening until somebody says your name. What that tells me is like great, this person is not invested, they're not showing up, they're looking at a retail website online or they're trying to write up the report for later today, they're not attentive, they're not present. And that can be a really dangerous thing for trust. It tells me that this relationship doesn't matter and that whatever it is that's on your screen is more important than the people in front of you. Easy, easy mistake to make and I do it often and I have to catch myself, look at the camera and not at my screen and by doing that, I really have helped to build relationships fast, repair relationships and tend to get a much more attentive audience myself when I'm speaking that way. So I encourage you to do the same. I think the other is to really speak candidly. This means simply to not feel like you have to always have like the best jargon. It doesn't have to sound intelligent all the time. Sometimes it's just getting the ball rolling or getting the idea out. I think it's much better to speak naturally, to speak candidly than to either not speak at all or just speak in a very proper way. Now, everybody has a different personality and very proper maybe your thing. And if that's you being authentic, that's great. It'll probably take a little longer for folks to realize it but once they get that that is you presenting authentically, I think that that would be okay too but it's about that candid and authentic behavior that ultimately is going to lead to success. And one thing that you can do, especially if you're a very proper, very business jargon oriented individual is to take this other part and be vocally self critical when things are awkward or embarrassing. This will tell the folks that, yes, I do present as very formal but I'm also here as a human, I realize I make mistakes. And I think Amazon's jargon in here has something along the lines of, like they don't believe that their body odor smells like roses, I think it's awkward. But ultimately what we're saying is, I don't believe I'm infallible. I don't believe we as a team are infallible. And by being vocally self critical, you show folks that you're willing to be vulnerable and that is ultimately one of the keys to making a relationship work. Couple of examples here of what you can do to earn trust. I mentioned this a bit before but you can join a meeting just one or two minutes early. I think it helps to ask people about what excites them. And if you don't know, leave it open-ended. It doesn't have to be terribly personal but I think that these conversation starters are something that can really help. Now, reading anything interesting lately, doesn't pigeonhole you to books, it doesn't pigeonhole you to a blog or to a Reddit that lets folks kind of be open-ended. You could even make that broader, like consume any cool media lately. So we're going to say it, but you could say like, well, if not read then watch, listen to any cool albums and what your Spotify Discover Weekly got going for you. What you're ultimately trying to do is get them to share a little bit about themselves and then oftentimes have them open the door so that you can reciprocate. And it doesn't have to be the personal details of your relationship or where you're going with your friends this weekend. It can be as simple as like, I got a dog or yeah, I read a really cool article about park passes in Colorado. Like it doesn't have to be intimate, but it should show a little bit about you and hopefully show a little bit about them so that you have something that ultimately, like one of these areas of interest will overlap and it can become a topic of conversation before you would get into the future. Speaking of future, I think that it's really easy to just ask folks what they're excited about, what's coming down the pipeline for you and your world that you're stoked about. People love to talk about vacations or having family come in town or maybe they're going to try a new recipe. There's a lot of ways to do this, but if you don't open the door and you don't show up this one to two meeting, you don't show up to that meeting one to two minutes early, you typically will miss this opportunity, especially while we're all still working virtually. It's also very easy to show up to meetings one to two minutes late and be the person everyone's waiting for. So I think it's important to consider that doing the inverse of this is usually going to actively erode a relationship. The other here, when we talked about that, making sure that you don't feel or come off as infallible is be the first to admit that you don't understand or that you made a mistake. It's okay.  Hey, simple question, silly question. I have a question. What's in PS? That's net promoter score. Aha, I can Google a wiki that later, but if you didn't even know what the acronym was, now you're going to go down a rabbit hole on wikis to try to find what it was. It's also okay to pause a conversation and ask somebody to explain something you're not familiar with. More often than not, somebody else in the room doesn't get that either. And by being the first to admit that you don't understand, you help to make others more comfortable when you foster an environment that people feel okay being themselves. And when folks all feel okay being themselves, just fosters better relationships. So it's like a flywheel in a way. The other thing, and I'm going to go into this deeper in a moment, is that you can do this privately too. So if you don't feel comfortable doing it publicly, you can direct message that person and ask them. At least that one individual is going to feel like, ah, Aaron is paying attention or whoever is paying attention. And they're comfortable saying, I don't get this and they want to know more about the area that I'm a content expert on or the thing that I brought up, the concept and idea. So it makes you feel invested and it helps to build that relationship stronger. This last piece, there are some automatic ways that you can share something about yourself that makes for an easy conversation starter. It can be as simple as having something in your background. Maybe you ask me about my wireless router. Cool, I am in the networking, I'm a bit of a geek. I've got a cool setup that I like to share with folks. You can wear a garment, they had a hat or a shirt, but you can essentially create your Zoom palette, as it were, to encourage folks to ask you about something. I've got a couple of friends who swap out the books that they've got on their shelves or they swap out the pieces of art, pretty routinely just to mix it up. We've got one colleague at Love Every Right Now, massive Disney fan, and they will wear a different Disney set of ears to every major event. And it's always a great conversation starter and I think it's something that stands out about them. And while it's quirky, they're showing up authentically and people connect with that. Now, while those are some of the ways to rely or piece apart Amazon leadership principles, the ownership and the arms trust to work for you and some of the things that have worked for me with examples in the past, doesn't mean it always works. Sometimes things get broken. It could be your fault, it could be the other person's fault or maybe just the system is broken. There's no mechanism to encourage this relationship to function properly. I think we've all heard the idea that product management is firefighting. You kind of go on from one fire to the next until you can get your feature out and then the next one is there. I think we have to look at relationships in a similar way and they are a fire of equal or greater priority oftentimes if we're looking in the long-term view that a product manager used to prioritize and fight. So if you take ownership and you say, I'm the firefighter in this relationship or in this situation, then by using these LPs, it means that you're gonna admit you goofed up. It's a real simple recipe. I did something wrong. I am sorry. Here's how I'm going to make it right. There aren't excuses. Of course, there are always times where you might want to explain something. Hey, my grandfather passed away. I left suddenly. My toddler was vomiting. There's a lot of things that you can add to give a personal touch, but make sure that the first three things you do is say, whoops, I'm sorry. Here's how I'll make it right. Because that tells the other person that you understand things went wrong and that you're invested in a solution rather than making excuses. And excuses often looks more like pointing to the other person or letting the other person know that your excuse is more important than their time or than their process. So it can literally read out as like, huh, well, totally misread that, my fault. And then I've already taken action to schedule a new time with you. Or it can say, it can be a report, the way that you write something in like a weekly business review or the way that you phrase something in a meeting. But if you take that ownership and say that you didn't do it, oftentimes the other party feels like they need to reciprocate. You start moving to a position that's much closer and less far apart from them. And this is like the building blocks of repairing a broken relationship also often starts with, I guess, like firing the first shot. That's not the right way to look at it. It's raising the hand and saying, I goofed. I have an interesting example of this from my recreation center days. I had asked for a specific feature in a recreation center. We wanted to have a higher ceiling clearance in the weight room, right? Like folks are getting into very dynamic movements in weight rooms, they're throwing balls in the air, the CrossFit style, they're lifting weights overhead, great. So the ceiling shouldn't be nine feet, it should be 13 feet. The architects said, great, we can make that happen. What I missed in the revised drawings that they brought, this is kind of the same as an engineer bringing a revised tech design, is that by making that ceiling taller, they moved the air conditioner unit and they put it over the climbing wall. So we made the ceiling taller in the weight room and the climbing wall like nine feet shorter. I don't know if I have any climbers out there, nine feet, that's a lot on a climbing wall. They usually average around 30 to 40 feet. So that's like a quarter or a third of your entire wall. So it could have been a catastrophe. We could have been at one another's throats, we could have talked about contractual violations, how they didn't disclose this to us. They could have pointed fingers at me for missing this detail. Instead, we were able to repair this relationship because I said, I clearly missed that. I asked for a requirement but didn't ask for the ramifications. I'm sorry, how can we make this right? Let's take some actions. I've already thought of a couple of ways that we might be able to make this climbing wall more exciting. We can work around the air ducting. We can dig the floor deeper. And what happened is as opposed to being at one another's throats or pointing the fingers of blame, we all started working in parallel to solution the issue because somebody kind of popped the blame bubble. Nobody really cared anymore. We all just wanted to get the right thing done for our customers. Lo and behold, we were able to claw back eight of those nine feet and make a climbing wall that was really cool and worked around the air conditioner feature, which I think was a unique thing. And the customers or the climbers end up liking it quite a bit. The other here looking through the lens of ownership is that you wanna create a mechanism that prevents a broken relationship from happening in the future.  You've got this broken relationship but have to think of it all the time too. So it could just be as simple as making sure that they're on your lists serve, making sure that they're on your meeting invite and that they get the notes, including them as a watcher on your wiki. There's some really simple basic steps that you can take to help prevent erosion of relationships. It's oftentimes just steps that we don't do. I think one of the most powerful is just setting a genderless one-on-one on a recurring basis. And this might be every month, every other month, every quarter, or if you're in the throes of the launch or you're just forming a new relationship, you might want to do this more rapidly and then taper off as you go. But just having a little bit of open space time to discuss what's going on to get to know one another better, these one-on-ones are goal. They're really easy to want to shove off. They're really easy to want to cancel. I urge you to keep them. I think that they're one of the biggest secrets to my success at Amazon, working in a massive cross-functional org. And I think they're one of the keys to my success here. I love that for you too. So I invite you to keep those one-on-ones and to set more of them up, not fewer. The other is that you can set up new processes. Maybe you need to involve this stakeholder in some sort of a grooming process.  These are the type of solutions that help to not only fix the problem the next time, but they help to build trust and it becomes a little bit of a virtuous cycle, a true mechanism in a way. And of course, you're always going to want to treat this stakeholder as a customer, involve them in the solutioning and get their feedback on that MVP solution and make sure like, do we need a V1? Do we need a V2? How can we make this better? And how can we reduce the friction further? And maybe even the time needed to invest further by streamlining us. So with streamlining in mind, you're probably thinking like, Erin, that's great. I get it, relationships are important. You've provided some good examples, Hazan, but how in the world am I going to get all this done? I like to look at relationships as a KTLO, keeping the lights on the function. It is one that isn't necessary. It's a process that must always run in my backlog, but by burning down tech debt, just like you do on your own roadmap and you're able to reduce the cost of KTLO burns every cycle.  These are a couple of mechanisms that we run right now that, and that I've used in the past that I think are incredibly useful. First and foremost is something that we do here. It's not seen anywhere else, but it's a hybrid PM UX developer meeting we call design and drinks. It doesn't have to be drinks if you want to be a little more inclusive, it could be snacks, it could be design and silly hats. Whatever it is that you want as a theme is the thought here is that we have a regular recurring meeting that has some sort of a social aspect to it and involves grooming one another's designs. So I get feedback on my two pagers, on my docs, on my requirements. I'm able to give feedback on the designs for the upcoming sprints. And I'm able to try to help with tech solution and we often come up with easier ways that are less hacky or I'm able to provide a little bit of context from a roadmap item that's like 50 lines down that's going to influence the tech design today that never would have come out in a requirement sheet unless I got all the way down to like P4s or just have a running list of P1s a mile long. So this event alone has saved massive amount of time and it's why we're trending ahead a little bit in the mobile group here at Love Every and it's something I wish that we had in the groups that I ran with Amazon business international and with Alexa Auto I think that it would have overcome some friction that we had between those functionalities that has made me want to invest more day one here. The other obvious one is setup rolling one-on-ones. Is this is something that once you put it on the calendar? Sure, sometimes they get bounced around but it's important to stick to them. It's important to have a light agenda. Sometimes it's going to be more tactical than others but I think it's important to spend time building those relationships especially right now where you can't just bump into them in the lunch room and you can't bump into them in the hallway. This is going to be crucial to your success building a relationship and likely your career success and happiness as well. You can do things like set temporary one-on-one series with new stakeholders when we just have new VP of content come on board and making sure to spend a lot of one-on-one time with this person getting them up to speed making sure that I get to know them and that's going to taper off into frequency. It's not something that needs to be maintained throughout time. So don't feel like you have to stick to a hard schedule. It's something that's going to need to ebb and flow. I think one of the lowest cost and easiest ways to show up authentically at work is to just use your chat status bar right now.  And I got a lot of empathy or a lot of sympathy from colleagues who reached out asking about my son, is he okay? And that allows me to show up a little bit just with a very low effort thing. It also helps to manage expectations so that if they are slacking me they know that I might be a little slow. It's a tool that I think is very underutilized and when folks use it this way I'm impressed and I've since adopted. We mentioned before you do wanna show up to meetings early. I can't understate the power of using video not only likely for your mental wellbeing. I think that there's been countless articles that show like if you dress up for work or you treat work as something you have to show up for even if you're on a webcam that it tends to make you more productive or help you to separate a little bit from your work in life. For me, it works wonders but I think it also works wonders for the relationship piece and I encourage you to do so when you can. And the other thing is stuff that we as PMs can easily defer, spend low effort on but it's just spending a little bit of time celebrating. We did it. We got this feature out the door. We launched the app, it's so-and-so's birthday. We went to celebrate. I mean, a two-minute silly song or a $10 gift that everybody chipped in on is something that can really make folks feel connected. And if this isn't already happening it's something I encourage you to invest that minimal effort into just to get it on the calendar and make that happen. Even just the like acknowledgement of someone's birthday I think is a powerful tool that's as simple as running a quick Slack survey having folks put them in and popping them onto the calendar. These are the type of things that really if you can knock the tech debt down by setting these up today or setting these up over the next month they will make that keeping the lights on for your relationships a much lighter lift in the future. Couple of other specific ones that I think folks miss a lot that I wanted to bring up. These are right around just how you're interacting with folks. Please use the direct message preview function of a Slack as a tool. You can always insert a pleasantry. If you don't do that, that's fine. But if you do, please I implore you to be the person on the left and not the person on the right. Pop that in there, but include your ask include the question, include the link whatever it is that you need because it allows that person to think about it and get you the answer that you need in their reply. So it saves threads where now in two messages I've been able to get you not only a reply that indicates I had a great weekend I spent it in the mountains and you wanna chat with Santiago, he's a rock star. Instead, I got a hey Aaron which is the only thing I can preview. And then I have to be willing to open up your message and the can of worms that it is. Read through several messages until I got to what it is that you want to know. And by that time I've already forgot about the great weekend comment I'm gonna tell you Santiago and I'm gonna get out the door. The two very different interactions that from just a small change in your behavior and the way that you approach asking a question can essentially treat your reader or treat your colleague as a customer and make it easier for them to give you what you want the first time. Another one, there's a couple of ways that you can do this but if you know it's past working hours because it's late in the time zone that stakeholders at or it's just late in general and you've decided that your working hours go outside the normal business hours. Do that stakeholder a favor and let them know that this isn't urgent. If I get a ping on a Monday night that says for Tuesday a.m. I'm like, ah, this person gets it. I will read that on Tuesday morning because I can take a quick look, know that it's not urgent and put my phone down and go back to dinner or take it a step further and use the schedule function. This was a feature written for a reason and it's for this exact use case. It's about not violating that trust. It's about trusting that this person will get it done when they can. Use the schedule feature and avoid sending your EU stakeholders a message while they're sleeping for instance or sending somebody a message when it's not urgent and now they're avoiding time with their family. So I think you can use the previews to your advantage or you can use the schedule feature as a way to really like take small steps that don't cost you much to not damage relationships over time. That was a lot to cover. I'd like to summarize really quickly but of course you'll have access to this presentation for later. Ultimately, I do hope these tips help. In first and foremost, I hope that you left today feeling like relationships are a P zero for you and it's something that you do need and want to invest in and that you're going to prioritize. We all know prioritization is a crummy thing. We're always going to cut features or say no to stakeholder groups that we want to say yes to. I urge you to keep relationships as a P zero and you're week to week in your month to month realizing that there will be times feature launches for instance that you'll have to have relied on the investments you made early on because you're going to need to burn down some of that relationship capital to get things over the line through ignoring and through asking favors. So invest early so you've got that capital for later. Two is that relationships are built on a currency of ownership and trust. I think it's all about showing up, being engaged, shipping in and taking ownership and about not being afraid to admit and in fact using admitting that you made a mistake or that you goofed up or that you don't understand as a tool to get things done and realizing that that's often the first step in three, fixing a broken relationship. I think the moment that you take ownership and say, whoops, I messed up, here's how I'm going to fix it but here's how we can fix it together. You flip the script and you become oriented on a solution rather than defending a position. And that's vital to fix a broken relationship. Finally, so much of this work can be put on autopilot if you just take a couple of hours to set the meetings and you take a couple of seconds every time that you're about to send a simple hi or pay air and message to write up the rest of what you want, pleasantries included or not, pick your flavor. You're going to be treating your stakeholder as a customer and doing them a solid by giving them all the context they need to answer your questions so they can noodle on it and get back to you rather than often forgetting because now they've read through too many messages. I want to thank you for your time. I know that it's difficult to find time to take out of your day, to watch a webinar but ultimately I think you're on the right track. Thank you for wanting to learn about and to invest in relationships. Hope you have a wonderful day.


The final mathematical concept I want to present today is idea of natural gradients. How people have noticed for a long time that neural network training suffers from what's called destructive interference. If you train up a network on learning the old days, the times tables, one times five, three times seven, four times eight, and then train them additionally to learn, say, 17 times 32, the new training makes them forget what they learned before, the old training. Humans are pretty good. When you learn new things, it doesn't cause you to forget old things, but think about how gradient descent is working. As you get a new observation, you adjust the weights to do a good job on the new observation, and hence, you necessarily tend to forget how you did on the old observations. You can run through the different training points over and over again and eventually get there, but neural nets tend to be just a little bit unstable in that if you train long enough on new data, you forget the original data you did before. Natural gradients tries to address this problem that adding new training data leads you to forget what you've learned before. So the idea of natural gradients is to move in a gradient direction that tries to keep the neural net from changing, keep it to still do what it did before in addition to doing what it's done before. That is to say, make the outputs of the neural network close to what they were before you changed. So we want to have a mathematical definition of what a similar output is, rather than having a similar squared error of outputs. The idea that seems to work the best is to use as beautiful map behind it, k L divergence. You can view any network which does classification as giving you a probability distribution over outputs y as a function of the inputs x, right? The neural net learns the probability of y given x, the probability distribution of the labels given, say, the images as input. What we'd like to do in a natural gradient is to go in a gradient direction that moves down the gradient, decreasing error, but does it in a way that changes the outputs of the neural net on the other data as little as possible, right? Which keeps the k L divergence between the old output distribution and the new output distribution as similar as possible. So we can look at the equation for that. And what it does in effect is it takes our now very familiar update weights by negative learning rate times the gradient with respect to each of them for each weight, putting in one more term, the inverse of a matrix, the Fisher information matrix. Now the output here, if we do this for a mini batch or a point i, is going to be, there's a d dimensional weight vector. This is a d dimensional gradient. This needs to be a d by d matrix. And it turns out through magical math, which we won't cover in this course, that if you take the k L divergence between the probability distribution over y, the output of the network at the original weight, how far away is that from the weight plus a little change that you get the little gradient piece you add, that that's roughly equal to a half times the change in weight times f matrix times the change in weight. Details, if you don't get them not critical, but important idea is that this equation here magically changes the gradient direction into one, which moves down the gradient, but tries to change the outputs of the weight as little as possible. So it's cool. Why does no one actually use these things yet? Because if I've got a 10 million dimensional weight vector, which is not that big, right, there are billion dimensional ones being used commercially, then f is going to be 10 million by 10 million. And that's too big even for cool to compute. So one has to approximate this in some fashion. It hasn't come into commercial usage, but it's a super cool idea. And it's nice to think about this notion of this is one more thing you want in a good gradient, something that doesn't mess up too much, what you've already learned.