So, hi everyone. My name is Amanda McKee. I do front-end development and design at Digital Kidna and today my talk is designing for an empathetic user experience. So, at Digital Kidna, when we're first met with the exciting challenge of designing a new site, one of the first things that we do is create user stories. So, a user story is basically a little write-up about what kind of users we're going to have on our site and what their goals or objectives will be. Knowing this can sort of help us inform the rest of the design process. So, some simple examples that a lot of us have probably come across before. Someone like User A. User A comes to a college website. They want to know more about the course offerings, the tuition costs, and the campus life. Or someone like User B. User B goes to a local news website and they want to know more about what kind of events are happening around them that weekend. These are just some common examples that a lot of us may have run into already, but today I want to talk about a specific subset of a user base that needs a different special kind of attention. What I want to get everyone to do here is try to envision their self as the user that I'm about to describe. So, our user or you are Mary. Mary is a 20-year-old female who has dealt with anxiety and depression for most of her life. Right now she is pretty much in mid-panic attack. So she feels faint, she feels frazzled, she feels scared, she sort of just wants to crawl right out of her skin. She has this skewed perception right now that if she went to her friends or a family member for support she would just be bothering them. So instead she actually turns to the internet. Now, there are certain types of websites that are going to lend themselves more to having users like Mary on them and those are sort of sites based around mental health and I'm going to point out a few examples of sites that I really like. But my hope is even if your next project isn't directly related to mental health you'll see that implementing a couple of the things that I'm going to talk about could help just make a better experience for any user, not just a user like Mary, who has all that anxiety. So where do we begin? So it's actually kind of crazy if we think about the fact that Mary's first point of contact could maybe not actually be a friend or a professional or a family member but essentially a bunch of words and code on a screen. So just because it is a bunch of words and code on the screen doesn't mean it has to feel like it is. We can sort of make it feel almost like it is a human so she can get that sort of compassion mirrored back to her. So an example of a site that I think does a really good job of sort of humanizing their content is the Psychology Today website. Basically this website is a place where you can go and try to find therapists either by specialty or by location but this is what a typical profile page for a therapist would look like. So if we take a look at it there is a nice big picture of the therapist so you can sort of put the face with the name. There's a personalized write-up. It's not just using the same default text. That text was actually curated by Dr. Jinsmore herself. I also like the use of this big happy email me button under her picture. Something about the wording and the use of the button sort of acts as more of an invitation to me rather if she would have used just a simple link saying email just a text link there's something more like that's just more of a statement to me it's not as much of an invitation. I really like below that the special sensitivity that they thought about when they're using their send to friend button. So all of us have put social media sharing buttons on our websites probably hundreds of times but I really like the special thought that they put into this because if you click the send to a friend button it's not just a link that goes right to someone's Facebook wall or something it tweets to someone it's actually just a private form that you can actually email to your friend and put a little write-up about why you're sending it to them. I really like that they thought about it in this way because just a default social media button might be a little too promotional for the context and the circumstances and if someone sent me a tweet for a therapist I might be kind of offended so it's just you got to sort of think about the context and what you're gonna use it. So overall I think there's ways that we can change our content in simple places just to make it feel a little bit more human so instead of just the default placeholder text or teaser text or button text instead of just something like search how about how can we help you today instead of just view more or read more how about learn more about Dr. Dinsmore's philosophy. All of these things may seem small in minuscule but when you think about how many labels how many buttons how many teasers you have on a website if you curated those to make them more personable it can have effect when it's all compounded together. So of course another way to sort of give that human touch to a website is through authentic imagery and video. So at Digital Kidnaut one of the other things we do when we're first designing a site is we define a set of keywords. These keywords are sort of going to be the brand essence or the connotations that we want the user to have with our website so if we were making a site for mental health we might use the keywords like authentic, empathetic, optimistic, soothing, breathable, or friendly. So basically once we have these key terms defined any time that we're going to put images or video into our designs we want to look at those key terms and look at those images and ask ourselves if those are in alignment. So if I asked you to take a moment and think about any imagery that comes to your mind anytime you've seen any products or websites that are sort of related to being calm, soothing, destressing, maybe just wellness in general what do you think of or what comes to your mind. These are some images that I frequently see. So there are people overly excited to be in nature. There are people doing unrealistic yoga poses in dangerous places. There are unrealistic sunset colors, people taking really long deep breaths. There's always a lady dancing on a beach or field with balloons. These are a bit much. If you think about putting yourself in the state of mind of someone like Mary these may actually be alienating to her. She may look at these and think you know where they are internally and where I am internally is so far apart that this website doesn't get me. They don't really understand how I feel. So these images would sort of be one end of the spectrum and ones like this are sort of at the other end of the spectrum. We have people clutching their head. We have weird thunderstorms. We have like abstract smoke coming out of people's brains. People screaming. These are also a little bit much. I'm not saying that either of these picture sets don't have a place in a time but it's just sort of think about the context and what you're going to use them. These images might work really well on a page if it's about someone who is trying to support someone who has mental illness but they themselves don't actually experience it. If they look at these images they might find that they can sort of understand how dark and how deep it really is. But again if we look back at our key terms and I look at these images I'm not really getting optimistic. I'm not really getting soothing. So it's just about being careful how much we want to put images like this into our content. So ideally we would put images a little more like these. These are sort of in the middle of the scale. Nobody is completely desolate but also no one is dancing in a field with balloons. These people when I look at them I'm getting the sense that maybe things aren't great right now but they are hopeful for the future. I think that kind of message is the one that's really going to resonate. So just as images can help give our content a little bit more of a human feel of course so can video. I really like what anxietybc.com did. They have a video on their find help landing page as well as every landing page for every mental disorder type and there's a video with Dr. Michael Catchbull. If you listen to the video a little bit just his tone and just his mannerisms sort of can give you that feeling of compassion. There's like a nice light piano track playing underneath the speaking. He kind of sounds like your grandpa or Mr. Rogers or something. Overall I just felt a little more ease when I heard that video. So it made me start thinking where else can you strategically place video that it would be really powerful. While every mental health site that I looked at has some sort of a page about for someone in a crisis so it has all of the crisis hotline numbers written down. So what if on that page as well as the numbers we also had a video of someone from that organization and that person in that video was saying things like please actually call that number please actually pick up the phone and use the number there are people here to help you we really want to talk to you we really can help you please actually do it. In this sense it could actually just nudge that person a little more into actually getting help and in this sense video can be used in very powerful ways. So another thing to think about when we're talking about mental health is sometimes the terminology can get a little medical or scientific. On the web accessibility initiative website it says complex sentences that are difficult to read and unusual words that are difficult to understand pose a barrier to those with neurological conditions such as anxiety and depression. So essentially someone like Mary is at she has a better chance of becoming disconnected from that content if there's all of these big words that she doesn't completely understand. So what can we do about that? So on the anxiety BC website on their mental disorder pages as well as having the video they also have at the bottom stories from actual experiencers of that mental disorder.  So someone like Mary can come to the site and learn about anxiety almost as if she's learning it from a friend in this sort of story format instead of her almost reading a textbook. So now that we talked a little bit about how you can sort of make your content a little more human how can we help someone like Mary navigate around our content. So complex navigation mechanisms and page layouts that are difficult to understand and use are especially a concern for users like Mary. Of course whenever we're designing something doesn't matter who the user is. We always want to help them find the content in the most efficient way possible. But for someone like Mary we have to just keep in mind that things that we may think are simple for the average user are actually not so simple to her. I really like a talk by Eric Meyer called designing for a crisis that sort of outlines that notion. So essentially in his talk he tells a story about how when he was on vacation his young daughter became very ill to the point where she had to be airlifted to a hospital two hours away and him and his wife were told that they didn't know if she would even survive the helicopter flight over. They weren't allowed to go on the helicopter. So Eric and his wife are frantically trying to get to the hospital and they're looking up for the addresses and Eric realizes that although he can find the address to the hospital he still doesn't know exactly where to go. Hospitals are big. There's many different wings. So he goes on the hospital website and he explains how the way he was looking at the website in that moment is very different than how he would look at it now. He was frantic and his vision was blurred and essentially he wasn't able to really find that content that he was looking for. He talks about painstakingly going link by link through pages trying to find something connected to the information that he needed. He admits at this point what you may be thinking is Eric why didn't you just call the hospital? Well he says that he was actually so frazzled that he had actually forgotten that his phone could actually be used to make actual phone calls. He goes on to describe this notion that we all have a finite pool of cognitive resources. When they're being used up elsewhere we have very little left over to do something like navigate a website. So if you think about how this relates to a user like Mary she's just so anxious right now. She doesn't have as many resources as we might want to navigate our website so how can we help her? One thing we can do is double up on important triggers. On the betterhelp.ca or .com website to get to their help pages they give you four different call to actions presented in four different ways but they all sort of eventually lead you to help. On the Canadian Mental Health Association website they give you three chances to get to their help pages. Essentially in this case and in this context this actually isn't redundant because if Mary misses one of the first triggers she might pick up on the second or third and that could be really helpful to her. So let's say now that we actually have her attention because she's clicked one of our calls to actions. Now what we can do to help her feel the most comfortable is give her multiple ways to engage with the site or to get help. So on the Canadian Mental Health Association for Middlesex what they do is they have this big button that says where to begin need help start here. When you click that you come to a page and it gives you many different options on how you can get help. If you actually feel overwhelmed by all those options there's a form that you can fill out and you answer a couple questions and someone from that organization will actually contact you in your preferred method and they'll tell you what sort of resources they think will work best for you. So aside from having the form there's also the crisis hotlines of course but if we think about Mary being a younger demographic sometimes the millennials don't like making phone calls so they also have a 24-7 chat system if she feels more comfortable to talk in that way. Some other things that I saw that I thought were awesome were on the emmentalhealth.ca if you aren't sure sort of what you're dealing with maybe she doesn't even know if she has anxiety or depression they have some screening tools so basically you go and take a little test and it'll tell you you know you may be suffering from anxiety look for resources connected to that on the Children's Mental Health Ontario website I just really like the visual that they have of the big map that has all the pins with all of the help facilities even just having that visual that can help someone make make someone feel a little better just by seeing oh there's so many pins on that map that means there's so many people around me that can help me. So if one of the end goals of the website is to actually get Mary to get help in person there are things that we can do on the website to sort of help facilitate that outcome. So I would ask you to think about the last time you went on a job interview that you felt nervous for when I think about any job interviews that I've gone on there's one thing that sort of remains the same for all of them and that's that just getting there was actually the worst part once I actually talked to the person I was completely fine what I mean by that is I've had interviews at buildings I've never heard of in downtown Toronto or downtown London and then they always have like weird sweet numbers that don't make sense like go to sweep 302 on floor eight I don't understand that if you've ever if you've ever interviewed at a university sometimes they have just the abbreviation of the college building so you have to go look up their abbreviation first on a legend and then hope to piece it together sometimes you're like is there going to be parking am I going to have to walk 15 minutes from the parking so should I come like 20 minutes early 10 minutes early anyways what I'm trying to say is there's so many unknowns that it can kind of make you feel nervous just as an average everyday person so think about someone like Mary thinking about going to get help there's so many unknowns and she's already in such a vulnerable position so what if we on our website had a page that outlined what to expect if you're going to drop in we could say things like the therapist or the doctor might ask you these sort of questions and we can even go so far as saying to get to our room go in the back entrance near the shopper's drug mart on Glendale Drive go up the staircase to floor two turn left go to room 201 and receptionist will help you and tell you what to do next as I'm saying that some people might be thinking we don't need to put all that on our website that's kind of overkill but for someone like Mary she just really needs that reassurance so anything that we can do ahead of time to sort of ease that transition it's kind of like why not so Eric Meyer in his talk sort of goes on to talk about that as well when he finally got to the hospital he tried a couple different wings and they're actually locked when he finally found one that was open he walked in and there was no one in sight he actually had to end up tracking down a security guard to help him find where to go this is all while he didn't know if his daughter would live or die what he said was if that website had had a page that told him what to expect when you're coming for an emergency after hours that could have just lifted a little bit of anxiety off of him um his daughter was okay don't want to leave you with that cliffhanger but anyways it's just about when it comes to someone like Mary don't ever worry about over explaining so now that we talked a little bit more about humanizing content and wayfinding how do we put our design on top of it to make it all come together and be a soothing experience so as designers we know that color plays a huge role in your feelings and emotions we also have sort of cultural norms or cultural associations with certain color palettes if i asked you to take a second and think about the color palette that you would think about for any products or websites that have to do with calm soothing it's likely that you'll be thinking of a certain color palette the color palette you have in mind for soothing colors probably isn't this one if you felt thrown off by seeing red right now it just goes to show how much we have expectations around color when i return them to their original state everything seems to make a little bit more sense so essentially blue and green tones sort of canote calm so if we have a client and their site has to do with mental health ideally in their branding guideline all of their colors are going to be really nice ocean blues maybe some nice mint greens but what if your client's colors look a little more like this there's nothing wrong with this maybe red means something really significant to that organization but if we know that blue tones are sort of more soothing what can we do at this point wow we could ask the client if we can use blue as a secondary color palette for accents but let's assume that they just they don't want to add any more colors to their color palette what can we do then what i would suggest is using those very bold energetic colors as if they actually were an accent color and not the main primary color in this hypothetical example on option a i just went for it with the color i put the dark bold red everywhere that would kind of make sense and then option b i only use the red for sort of accents and anywhere else i implemented very light grays a lot of white space and i took the red shade and i moved it up until it was a very very light orangy ready tone um overall when you look at the difference just even at a far you don't really even have to see the details to kind of know that option b just gives you a little bit more of that airy field again if we think of those key terms breathable soothing if we zoom into the content a little bit you can see that on option b instead of implementing the full dark brand color in the button i just used it as a border and in the vent section instead of using the full dark color in the date box i just used a little line with the accent color so just like color can affect our emotions of course so can typography we know that changing font type can help give context to our design i don't think anyone here would ever suggest a joker font for a financial website or a healthcare website i don't think anyone here would suggest comic sans for anything but there's still some choices that we can make between seemingly neutral fonts that can help to make a more soothing experience so something that i like to do when i'm designing a site and sort of looking at different font choices is sort of make some mock-up teasers and i'll play around with different fonts but also with different padding different line spacing even putting different call to action buttons around it because i just want to see again before committing to a style are my font sort of in line with my key terms that i defined earlier so i made these hypothetical teasers and i sort of changed those things in both of them one of them may be exaggerated to make you hate it but so in option b what i did was include less buttons you'll see that in the event section on option a we have those call to action buttons whereas in option b i would just be relying on the title to take you to the actual mode i have shorter teasers more space my text that i chose is less condensed less bold basically it just makes it feel a lot more breathable what i sort of like to do is think of this as a metaphor for a physical space before mary and we're going into a therapist office option a as a metaphor if i walked into that room it would be sort of crowded and cramped there might be like seven different assorted couches kind of like a frat house there might be three different lamps papers everywhere a coffee table that's just too close to the couch so you can't get around to even sit on it maybe there's like three different receptionist windows they're all calling out to you it's not a place where you can go and take a deep breath if we think of option b as a literal physical space you walk in it's just spacious it's clean there's a single couch a single accent chair one lamp one receptionist window you know exactly where you have to go overall it's a place that you can take a deep breath i kind of like making those analogies just because i want my website to feel like taking a deep breath so overall there's a lot of things that you can do to sort of make your content a little more human make wayfinding a little easier and there's some things you can do to add to the design of the site to help suit a user like mary but even if your next project isn't directly related to mental health hopefully there's some things that you can implement that will help any user feel better and thank you everyone for coming if you want to have questions or talk any more we can do that now if not have a question so we're like so when you're trying to find your inspiration for your design so you know referring different types of colors and how you're finding the psychology behind those colors there's always a lot of conversation about how colors affect people's you know same deal with fonts right is there a specific place you're going to kind of get some research on it is it a gut thing like how are you approaching that there actually is some research on it that i did read it's sort of culturally based but north america western it's sort of more blues are calming reds are energetic i forget who exactly was it that was saying that but other than that it is sort of more anecdotal that's why i showed all of those products all of those products are for calm and all of them were using blues so it's sort of even making that loop stronger we see more products that are calm we see them with blue so then we even associate it even more right how would you approach kind of testing this and kind of to get a good proxy for what you know someone that's in an emergency in order to know if it did that actually work well yeah back from a user that's see that is what i was sort of thinking of a lot of these things it's anecdotal you can take it or leave it it's just some of like my insights but i was thinking of how these things would actually be tested you can't really force someone to have a panic attack and then use your site so morally morally i don't think i would force a panic attack on someone for this so i'm honestly not completely sure about that let me think about it and we can talk later like user testing at four o'clock on a Friday in the morning before coffee yeah these are good ideas i'm going to do this in the field something interesting that might play into this too if you notice the exit signs it's like the older ones are red the new ones are now green and i'm not sure if that was the red was a you know it gets attention to get out but it might have inspired panic along with the green is the here's the way out it's like please make your way out rather than get out that's interesting right there's oh my god there's another one so you mentioned a while ago about crafting content for for for hospital websites i'm just curious to know if how would you be able to mitigate for example the supposed tendency among doctors to really like no it has to be this super specialized super specialized language and stuff because we are a hospital we want to be known to be these experts in the field so are there any kind are there any say for example any collaboration sessions that you have been into just drill this this sensibility that is not necessarily about your great expertise or the letters after your name or how did you approach it well i would see that sort of being approached where you can still have the sort of textbook speak but like i showed there is also those stories so having both maybe just to make both groups happy we can still sort of explain it scientifically but then also have those stories at the end of that person just saying it in terms like oh i had a tight chest i feel out of it i feel really scared just to have sort of both that's probably how i would approach it if they really were like we need to have the super scientific speak in there thank you okay lunch


Incontrovertible Facts by Anonymous Red for LibriVox.org by Alan Davis Drake No monk too good to rob or cog or plot, no fool so gross to bolt scotch-collapsed hot. From Don John Topps no Oranooko rolls, logwood not lotus floods a porto's bowls, troops of old toss-pots oft to sot consort. Box tops are schoolboys too do flog for sport. No cool monsoons blow oft on oxford dons, orthodox jog trot bookworm salamans, bold astragoths of ghosts no horror show. On London shop fronts no hop blossoms grow. To crocs of gold no dodo looks for food. On soft cloth footstools no old fox doth brood. Long storm-tossed sloops for lawn do work to port. Rooks do not roost on spoons nor woodcocks snort. Nor dog on snow-drop or on coldsfoot rolls, nor common frog can cocks long protocols. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Incontrovertible Facts by Anonymous RedPhilippivox.org by IcyJumbo No monk too good to rob or cog or plot, no fool so gross to bolt scotch-collapsed hot. From Don John Topps no Oranooko rolls, logwood not lotus floods a porto's bowls, troops of old tospots oft to sot consort. Box tops, odd schoolboys too, do flog for sport. No cool monsoons blow off on oxford dons, orthodox jog trot, bookworm salamans, bold astragoths of ghosts no horror show. On London shop fronts no hop blossoms grow. To crocks of gold no dodo looks for food. On soft cloth footstools no old fox stuff brood. Long storm-tossed sloops for lawn do work to port. Rooks do not roost on spoons nor woodcocks snort. No dog on snow-drop or on coldsfoot rolls, nor common frog can cocks long protocols. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. In Controvertible Facts by Anonymous Read for Liberbox.org by Leanne Howlett No monk too good to rob or cog or plot, no fool so gross to bolt scotch-collapsed hot. From Don John Topps no Oranooko rolls, logwood not lotus floods a porto's bowls, troops of old toss-pots off to sot consort. Box tops are schoolboys too do flog for sport. No cool monsoons blow off on oxford dons, orthodox jog trot, bookworm salamans, bold astragoths of ghosts no horror show. On London shop fronts no hop blossoms grow. To crocks of gold no dodo looks for food. On soft cloth footstools no old fox doth brood. Long storm-tossed sloops for larn do work to port. Rooks do not roost on spoons nor woodcocks snort. No dog on snow-drop or on coldsfoot rolls, nor common frog can cocks long protocols. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Incontrovertible Facts by Anonymous. Read for Leaverbox.org by Mark Smith. No monk too good to rob or cog or plot. No fool so gross to bolt scotch-collapsed hot. From Don John Topps no Oranooko rolls, logwood not lotus floods a porto's bowls, troops of old toss-pots off to sot consort. Box-tops are schoolboys too, do flog for sport. No cool monsoons blow off on Oxford dons. Orthodox, jog-trot, bookworm solomons. Bold astragoths of ghosts no horror show. On London shop fronts no hop blossoms grow. To crocks of gold no dodo looks for food. On soft cloth footstools no old fox doth brood. Long storm-tossed sloops for larn do work to port. Rooks do not roost on spoons nor woodcocks snort. Nor dog on a snow-drop or on colt's foot-rolls. Nor common-frog concocts long protocols. End of poem. Thank God. This thing is in the public domain. Incontrovertible Facts by Anonymous. Read for Leaverbox.org by Sean McConnell. No monk too good to rob or cog or plot. No fool so gross to bolt scotch-collapsed hot. From dungeon tops no oranooku-rolls. Lago and not lotos flood a porto's bowls. Troops of old toss-pots off to sock-consort. Box-tops are schoolboys too. Too far for sport. No cool monsoons blow off on Oxford dons. Orthodox, jog-trot, bookworm solomons. Bold astragoths of ghosts no horror show. On London shop fronts no hop blossoms grow. To crocks of gold no dodo looks for food. On soft cloth footstools no old fox doth brood. On storm-tossed loops for london to work to porch. Rooks do not roost under spoons nor woodcocks snort. No dog on snow-drop or on cul-foot-rolls. No common frock and cocks long protocols. End of poem. This recording...


and HDA, write that down. It's going to be the final exam. I'm Jay Fytale. This is Think Deck. It's the military in Hawaii. We're going to talk about the 2022 Mac and HDA partnership and conference that took place a little while ago. And we have for this discussion, Connie Lau, the recently retired CEO of HEI. And she learned a lot in that period of time. And we're going to share all of that knowledge with you today and welcome, Connie. And we have Jason Chung, who is also a member of the Mac Committee for the Chamber of Commerce. And we're going to talk about this conference. We're going to talk about this partnership. We're going to talk about what it does for the military, for the country, and for Hawaii. Welcome to the show, both of you. Great to be here, Jay. So, Connie, let's start with you. You've been involved in the Chamber of Commerce Military Affairs Council since 1922, am I right? 1922? Oh, my God, Jay. Now, in that case, I can say I wasn't even born then. Tell us about how you got involved in it and what you've done for it and with it. Sure, yeah. No, but I have been involved with the Military Affairs Council, the Chamber of the Mac for quite a while. And actually, the guy who got me involved is the current Board Chair of AQI, Admiral Tom Fargo. And he, of course, was the commander of the ACOM Pacific region, now the Indo-Pacific region. And he told me how important the military was to Hawaii. And that AQI is the largest publicly traded company here. Really needed to get involved and understand the significance of what they did here. And so it's just been amazing to me, Jay, to have gotten involved. I, frankly, have learned so much about the significance of the military, which, of course, is the second largest driver of our economy. And during times like COVID, actually becomes the driver of the economy. But I grew up here. And I got to say, even though I grew up here in the military's been here ever since I was a little kid, in fact, behind me is Kanioi Bay. I grew up right across from the Marine Corps base there. I had no idea about the significance of what is done out of here. And also, to Hawaii's advantage, there's a ton of investment that has been coming in from Department of Defense and the federal government into Hawaii because of our very, very strategic location. Oh, you know, when I was a kid, and I was a kid here, Kanioi. Not a young kid, but a kid, nevertheless. Some people think I'm a kid now. Back in 1922, right? Yeah, right. In the good old days. They talked about Hawaii's economy as a three-legged stool. One was agriculture, of course. One was hospitality, of course. And one was the military. Well, agriculture ain't what it was. And so we have two legs left. We have hospitality, which is struggling right now, but still an important part of our economy. And we have the military. And I wonder if you could comment on that, on exactly how the trajectory has been since, say, statehood, in terms of that particular leg of the stool. Has it gone up? Has it gone down? Has it gone sideways? And where is it going? Yeah, so, Jay, maybe I could start a little bit earlier, or not earlier, but later than that because it is quite clear with the whole pivot to the Pacific and how important this region is. I think there's a lot of people who talk about the Indo-Pacific region as being the most consequential for the United States because, of course, it had some of the largest economies. It's got some of the largest armies in the area. And it's got our largest adversaries. And we know who those are and how concerned everyone is about it, including the general public, when you start talking about issues like potential cyber warfare. And so that's the reason why I talked about all the incoming investment into Hawaii to help ensure national security. But also, that really benefits Hawaii because we automatically benefit by getting a much more secure location here in the Pacific. We're here to talk about the partnership conference. And it's interesting that this is the first year that it is not only the MAC partnership conference, but also the Hawaii Defense Alliance or HDA partnership conference. And the reason for that is that as more and more investment is coming in here, it's bringing very high, it's bringing jobs that require a high amount of expertise and also, thankfully, pay very good compensation. And so what the MAC has done under a grant from D-Bed is to look at really building out the job pipeline here in Hawaii to ensure that some of these great jobs that are coming in don't just go to people that are brought in from the mainland or wherever because we don't have the skill sets here in Hawaii. We're trying to work really closely with the universities and with the businesses, the folks that are already involved in the defense economy here to help small businesses build up their skills so that they can compete for those federal contracts, build out the school system, starting from when kids are just in secondary school, right through college and graduate school, so that they can earn the degrees, the certifications, that will position them well for these jobs. But something Jason's really, really involved in is that creation of the partnership and it's going community-wide. Like I say, it's academia, it's a private sector, and of course, most definitely it's military. Very important that we, the community, understand what the jobs are in the military. And when I say jobs, I don't limit that to individual employment. I include the contract jobs, the work we can do. We are companies can do it. And my impression over the years has been that there was a time when we really didn't read the manuals. So we didn't feel that we could compete with mainland companies that wanted to come in. And then I guess it was around the 90s when local businesses started to read the manuals. Yeah, we can do this, we can get the qualifications, we can meet the contract specifications, we can be involved. And so it's been an upward trajectory ever since those companies did that. But Jason, let me go to you. How did you get involved in this? Did you have a military career behind you? What did you do for what service? Hey, Jay, thanks. While I was in the Army, I was born and raised here, like Connie and grew up here, but then I joined the Army about 36 years ago. At whose count? Army. It was about 1923, I think, when I was in the Army, and I was an intelligence officer in the Army. I spent a lot of time of my career in the special operations community. But when I retired, my last duty station was here in Hawaii. And when I retired, I already had a job lined up with a tech company. In fact, that's my primary employment. But I was approached by two individuals, Jennifer Sabas, one who I think you know, and also my classmate from college, now retired Major General Suzy Bar-Islam, West. Oh, you mean East-West Center Suzy?  We love her. We absolutely, not as much as Connie, but we love her. Oh, I love Suzy too. We all love Suzy, right? So then they approached me about, you know, belonging to the Mac and joining the Mac. And I knew a little about the Mac, but then I just researched a little bit and I thought, what a perfect fit, right? Two things that have been a big part of my life that I care a lot about, right? The military and obviously Hawaii. And so I started working also with the Mac and got exposed to people like Connie too, as well, right? Which was just amazing. And so that's how I got initially involved in the Mac. Help us understand, sorry, Connie. Sorry, can I break in just for a moment because I remember when Jason, he was really like the perfect person for us because coming out of the intelligence community, he really understood that whole universe and the military universe. And, you know, going back to our small businesses and getting the contract and working with DOD, it's not necessarily easy. Boy, you know, there are so many rules and regulations and particularly now with concern about cyber, you've got to have all kinds of standards to keep your, the information safe. And so it was really good to have somebody like Jason who understood that. And that's frankly a lot of what the Mac can do for the small businesses that are here, the academic institutions that are here, is we can kind of be that bridge between the two worlds so that we can actually take much better advantage of what is being offered. Yeah, part of that is training and familiarization. And that's the DBED grant, isn't it? To try to outreach to local companies and give them comfort, give them training, give them familiarity, it's all there. So Jason, I could ask this to either of you, but I'll ask you, who exactly is the Mac? What kind of an organization is it? And do you enjoy spending time there? And how much fun exactly do you have? Well, yeah, it's kind of fun.  Connie Lau and Susie Varys-Lem are members of the Mac. And so being associated with professionals like that is just extremely rewarding, from a professional standpoint as well as a personal standpoint. But to get to your question about who is the Mac, right? So with the Mac, if you look at it, it's a cross-section of a lot of key stakeholders here in Hawaii, you have business leaders, right?   You have academia, right? Academic institutions, you're a part of it. You have folks from the Coaldale and Staffdale that are members of it because they see the significant importance and this consequential relationship between Hawaii and the military. You have the military and then you have community stakeholders, folks from the community who realize the important role that the military plays here in Hawaii and how important it is to kind of stay linked with what the military is doing. So in a nutshell, that's basically the Mac, right? It's a group of really key stakeholders that come together to advocate for the military here in Hawaii but also be kind of that element that links the military back to the community and gets it ingrained within the community and within a multicultural and partnership perspective as well. I take it from the Mac is... Let's not forget state government. Sorry, let's not forget state government too because Senate president and speaker, they all are very involved and it takes the village. And of course, General Hara, who's head of the Hawaii Department of Defense and also our National Guard here is very, very active in the Mac. So it really spans the gamut. How many people? How many members? Roughly, roughly. Roughly, it's about 80 folks. That's impressive. Yeah, so now let me compare that with the HDA, the Hawaii Defense Alliance. I'm making a guess here. I'm guessing that the Hawaii Defense Alliance is more like the military players. Am I right? Actually, Che, it's very similar to the Mac when you look at it. I mean, as Connie lined out, like what the Hawaii Defense Alliance is doing but why, what the Mac also does, it's almost a more formal arrangement of many of the initiatives that the Mac was pushing, which was how do we integrate business with federal government in terms of all the different opportunities out there? So Hawaii Defense Alliance, is the grant between D-Bed as well as with the Department of Defense to go, hey, if in fact the military Department of Defense is their second economic driver, you really need to create a defense alliance that specifically looks at how to grow more opportunities for local businesses in Hawaii. So one correction to a point that you made earlier, Che, about you said in the 90s, people start to read the Mac and says, hey, we think we can do this. It's not just the mainland companies. It's actually, the military recognized that back when they stood up Pearl Harbor back in the 1900s. You know, when they stood up Pearl Harbor, they started to realize, hey, we're having a difficult time getting these critical trades really to support the shipyard, right? Well, there's ship repair folks, pipe fitters, et cetera. They realized that the only way forward was to build that cave built here from which was born the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard internship program, which is very famous here. And so they recognized that that was actually part of, it helps really your readiness of the force when you have a very strong local industrial base. And that's why when you look at the federal government, federal government has a 20% set aside for small businesses, specifically trying to target local businesses within that area because they know it plays a significant role. That's good policy. Readiness, correct, right? Because if you have the community there, you know, especially when you look at in Hawaii, you know, when Hawaii, because of the cost of living in some other things, if you're able to actually recruit people who are from Hawaii and want to live in Hawaii and know the expense and the other things associated with living in Hawaii, you're really able to kind of stabilize and have a much more stable workforce than if you're constantly trying to hire and bring folks from the West Coast or from the East Coast. You know, and as Connie mentioned, there's a number of jobs now that yes, Pearl Harbor is still the largest industrial employer here in Hawaii, but there's a really good data points, that point that there's this new emerging industry that's primarily in this technical field. So that includes things like cyber, it includes things like intelligence, right, my former life, data science, which is really huge and just information technology at large. In fact, we're calling it really the second Pearl Harbor in terms of the amount of jobs and opportunities that there are. And the services here and the organizations as well as the contracting companies are trying to figure out, how do we attract this high level skill labor here in Hawaii to fill all these jobs, you know, that are emerging now within these different, within this... Oh, that warms my heart. We've been trying to do that for so long. This is a very noble cause and good for everyone involved, especially the state. So Connie, how much of this was discussed at the conference between the partnership of MAC and the Hawaii Defense Alliance in the first week of January? They had a big conference. Is what Jason is talking about, was that discussed? And if not, what else was discussed? So it totally was discussed and was probably half of a conference, Jay. So as I mentioned, normally, it's just the MAC partnership conference. This is the first year that we had MAC and HDA because we really wanted to highlight the fact that there are these great jobs and there's a lot of work that's been going on to link our community to those jobs and build pathways. So that was, in fact, almost the entire second day that went on. On day one, we had our keynote speakers. And of course, our kickoff speaker was Admiral Aquilino, the commander for Indo Pekong, who has his office up at Camp Smith. And then from our own Hawaii National Guard and Hawaii Department of Defense, we had General Kanahara. And as you know, it was great to hear Kenny talk about how active forces were during COVID because we saw them at the airports helping out with security, we saw them at the vaccination clinics, you name it. In addition to their regular jobs where some of them were deployed overseas, they also went to the capital in DC to help provide security there. So they were our two kickoff speakers and then we did have some speakers on Red Hill because as we all know, that's a huge issue. It's been very hot, yeah. Yeah, very, very hot. And really important in those kinds of discussions to make sure that everybody really has a handle on what the facts are and what areas still need to be investigated so that we can determine what real facts are. And then the folks that need to make the decisions can make good sound decisions. And we talked about the other big issues like training leases. So yeah, you name it. All the things that are important to the military presence here. Well, it's intertwined with everything in the state. You know, my recollection is that Pearl Harbor which was the first military facility here was established in the year 1850 originally. So it's a long cultural tie between the military and the civilian communities. So I wanted to get to one other thing. And that is, we live in geopolitical transitional times as you mentioned earlier. And Asia is more important now than it was. And we heard about the pivot during the Obama administration but then we got sidetracked maybe into Middle East a little. And now we're back to look at Asia, it's really important especially because of the rise of China and the change in circumstances around China. But how does that, the geopolitical, what do you wanna call it, transition? The geopolitical changes. How does that affect all of this? Because there was talk a few years ago about moving a substantial part of the military force from Hawaii to Guam. I don't know if that happened or it could happen. If there are changes in the way the military is deployed around the Pacific, then there would be changes in the way that touches Hawaii, right? Well, so why don't I start and then I'll let Jason take over. And I think probably the number one thing, Jay, is as I mentioned, this has clearly become the most consequential region in the world for the United States. And because of that, that's the reason why the investment is being in. The movement that you were thinking about was really from Okinawa. The Marines were gonna move out of Okinawa to Guam and Hawaii. And that has been happening albeit at a slower pace than what people had originally thought. And that's primarily because the infrastructure needs to be built out in places like Guam and Hawaii in order to have those troop movements to those locations. But that is underway and it is still the plan to have them come in. One of the other major, major shifts is, everybody talks about asymmetric risk. And probably the biggest asymmetric risk is the change in warfare from the kinetic or physical war to cyber warfare. So much easier to penetrate software systems and missile systems than it is to actually take over that weapon physically and so that's why so much focus has gone into much more of these technical jobs. We should mention that our universities here have been doing a very good job in positioning to help develop these careers. In particular, University of Hawaii has several of its campuses that have been named schools of excellence by the NSA. And also hopefully they have an application in from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to become named centers of excellence in the intelligence field as well. So yeah, everything that happens around the world and particularly in this region, J puts more of the focus on Hawaii and more of the investment directing towards Hawaii since we are one of the most forward deployed physical locations that are still US territory. When you add Indo to Pekong, which happened a few years ago, how does that change the mission, the role of the military in Hawaii? Because it seems to me this more geography involved or issues more geopolitical activity. How does that change things? You know, so I said I was gonna let Jason have some of your words. Okay, well, let's go to Jason. I can see that Jason was winding up to answer that. I know. No, I mean, that's a great question, Jay. I mean, it's because it's the recognition of how significant India is to the region, right? Especially as you start to look at the trends that Connie had mentioned in terms of economies of scales of militaries, economic flow of goods that go throughout the area and the region. And quite honestly, the expansion of China as it moves out into other areas with their One Belt, One Road initiative. And it's really becomes, you know, how they start to really compete. It's not just asymmetric what Connie talked about. It's what's been termed as, you know, great power competition. It's using other instruments of national power. It's diplomacy, it's information, misinformation, disinformation. It's economies at scale, right? So when you look how China is investing in the 5G network within Indonesia, under the guise of, hey, let us help you with COVID because we can help you kind of do the contact tracing. But now it's their 5G network in there when they put up a rail network within Malaysia or they invest in fisheries within Oceania. And it's really a debt entrapment kind of tactic that China often uses. The other key component of that is technology, right? So technology is good and technology has also equaled the playing field. Because one thing that is really critical when you talk about geography, Jay, is that, you know, our military now, the United States military is really no longer Ford positioned, right? If you look a number of years back, we were Ford position in key areas. We had a lot of folks in Korea in the East because we saw that as a potential significant threat a lot in Europe. But when you actually look at the forces that are there now, they're not that significant, right? And so we are a force projection force that has to go to an area. Now the implication of that is that quite honestly, many of our competitors and potential adversaries have a geographical advantage in terms of positioning, right there already positioned in critical areas in these different regions of the world, right? So imagine playing basketball and someone basically gives you the key to the center court and you have your geographically positioned, we have to now try to outmaneuver them to maintain our advantage. But what technology has done, it has leveled that playing field. So when you look at China and Russia primarily and what they've done in technological advances. So as we're talking about data science, we're talking about cyber, you know, China is very or leaning in terms of artificial intelligence and machine learning and developing very sophisticated algorithms that are being able to leverage, you know, very large swaths data. And I think anyone that you talk to now, whether it's in the business community or in the military, will tell you that the new goal, the new oil, right, is data. It's being able to manage and effectively leverage a data to your advantage, to have a decision advantage. So that is our challenge. And it goes back to Connie's point of why the focus is so relevant here on Island now with the military in terms of how do we counter those things? And that's why you're seeing this big push now in terms of modernization, innovation, and disruptive technologies. And how do we leverage that here in Hawaii to more effectively compete, right, in the most consequential region in the world today and in the future? And that requires a whole bunch of stuff. It requires, you know, how do we move that workforce that is still kind of in not in a legacy world, but how do we modernize that workforce to be able to support those different types of jobs as well as the, you know, the infrastructure to support our new techniques and our new systems that the military wants to bring on to try and counter and mitigate, right? What China and Russia have been able to develop over here in the last 10 years or so? Oh, fabulous. You know, Connie, we love having techie guys on the show. This is think tech Hawaii. And when people talk like Jason, whoa, this is center of the channel for us, you know? Yeah, now you know why we were just so delighted when Jason joined the Mac. But, you know, I was gonna add, Jay, and everybody, and you mentioned it earlier, have been trying so hard to diversify this economy, diversify this economy. I mean, frankly, when you hear the kinds of jobs that Jason's talking about, my gosh, this is the best opportunity that Hawaii has to diversify our economy. Because in this case, it's not a matter of creating the jobs. The jobs exist. We just gotta figure out how we can fill them. Yeah, yeah, it's true. I remember a recruiter from the military came out here because they were having trouble. This is 10 years ago. They were having trouble finding people who were interested in qualifying. Hopefully we can meet that demand. Hopefully we can provide everybody. But let me ask you this, Connie. I mean, it seems like such a ripe pomegranate, I used that term, that people on the mainland, you know, young people, people who have just graduated with computer science and cyber and what have you, would find out about this and would come here and would look for those jobs. This seems, this is what happened under Act 221 back 20 years ago, when it became clear that there was investment to support development of tech companies, people would come from far away for those jobs. Wouldn't that happen? Isn't that happening? Won't that happen here? Yes, absolutely, Jay. And that's the reason for this HDA effort, this Hawaii Defense Alliance, to build that out and get the word out there. But, you know, it's not just getting the word out there. I mean, we have to build the infrastructure. We have to build the programs. We have to build the pathway so that when the people come, they can actually realize it and they can actually get into those jobs. Yeah, great, all good, all good. So we're pretty much out of time, but I wanna ask you guys for takeaways. That is what you would leave with our audience for them to remember the show by and to carry with them as they think about the subject going forward. I mean, there's a lot of people do not know about the MAC or the HDA. They do not know what the military does. They may be carrying around negative feelings about it. Who knows? But we have to show them the way and we have to teach them about it. We have to have more shows like this. That's why the military in Hawaii is here on TinkTek, you know?   Tell them what you would like to leave with them about this discussion. Thanks, Jay. I think it's what Connie said. We have a tremendous opportunity that's big right now with all the available opportunity that's out there, the terrific partnership that we have throughout the MAC, the HDA with the state. We really need to take advantage of it right now. We're just at the cusp of having the dialogue and discussions with all the key stakeholders, right? We're building those different programs that are gonna kind of lead sector partnerships, workforce development, educational pathways that support all these technical jobs that are coming up because of what we talked about. But we've got to seize the moment and we got to keep talking and engaging and collaborating. Thanks. Connie, you are, you know, been watching the business community in Hawaii being a part of it for so many years. You probably have a lot of thoughts about the future of our economy, you know? Dan in no way wanted this to happen. I'm sure he would be happy hearing this discussion. Hi, Dan. And I'm interested, so interested in how you see this unfolding going forward. How you see this second or third leg of the stool functioning, the trajectory of the military business connection under the MAC and under the HDA going forward. What's it gonna do for us? What's it gonna do for our economy? I think we've already described how it's getting off to a really solid start with all the right players at the table. And that's what it takes. You know, it's the old takes a village. And so I think we have the right players at the table. We have the interest from everyone. And, you know, I hate to say this, but a lot of times they say it's all about self-interest. And as you can hear from this whole discussion today, everybody has a self-interest in making this happen. Clearly the military wants it to happen because they need the functionality of intelligence and data science and all of the operations that are here. And they need people for that. So they've got an interest in it. Hawaii, our legislatures, our governor, state government, they have an interest in it because we want to diversify our economy and particularly we wanna diversify it with much higher paying skilled jobs. And by the way, you don't have to have even a college degree to have some of these jobs. Part of the HDA is creating a certification program. And sometimes particularly when you're dealing with computers, those certifications mean more than just degrees. And of course, you know, the private sector here, not only here, but also nationally, you've got the big defense contractors that are helping participate because they have an interest because if they're going to win some of the contracts here in Hawaii, they've got to have the workforce as well. And as Jason said, it's much better if you've got a local workforce that tends to be more stable. And we all know that Hawaii people can compete with the best from anywhere in the world. You just have to be given the opportunity to do that. So that's what I would say, Jai, I definitely see it coming. And I think we've got all the right players at the table to make it happen. Well, thank you, Connie. Thank you for many things. Thank you for being on this MAC committee in your retirement end quote. And thank you for coming on a show. And thank you for your supportive think tech over the years. It's been wonderful from the time we first opened our doors, you were there. And here we are again. I remember everything so well. And thank you, Jason. It makes me want to go back in the service or at least join the MAC anyway. Thanks for coming on and sharing. It's been a great discussion with you guys. Thanks, Aloha. Thanks, Jason.


Greetings, colleagues, delighted to have you with us again to take up the third of our sessions on this workshop on the implementation of the United Nations third or social economy sector satellite account handbook, and I am Lester Solomon, I am the director of the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University. And as I have pointed out before, we were involved very deeply in the development of this new United Nations handbook, and it is a pleasure for us and for me personally to present it to you through this series of workshops. The workshops are being provided as a service to the field, and we are also prepared to offer technical assistance. We will need to make a modest charge to cover some of our time, but we have found in working with other countries, statistical offices, but it's very helpful to have this kind of technical assistance to make sure that we are all understanding the words in the same way, and are implementing the handbook in an identical way so as to produce comparable data from country to country. This third session takes up the important topic of volunteer work. Volunteer work was one of the big surprises out of our research that was explained to you and described in our first workshop session. We discovered, first of all, that nonprofit organizations are significant employers in countries all around the world. And what's more, and perhaps most important for this session, that a very significant portion of their workforce is made up of volunteers. We count the number of people volunteering and the amount of hours that they spend volunteering and divide that by the average work, full time work of a worker in the different countries. With the conclusion that well over 40% of the total workforce of the nonprofit sector is made up of volunteers. And this makes volunteering a very crucial part of the third sector. And we have been able to convince the statistical authorities that they must do a much better job of measuring and counting of volunteer work. What makes this especially important is that the treatment of volunteer work has really been very limited and awkward. Both in the core SNA, but also in the work of the labor force statistics that is overseen by the international labor organization. As far as the core SNA treatment is concerned, as you can see from this first slide, it's very limited coverage of volunteer work. And partly that's a function of the way in which the SNA has gone about valuing volunteer work. So first of all, you need to recognize that there are two major types of volunteer work. Some of it is organization based that is it is work that is done through and for organizations. Obviously nonprofit are the type of organization that most commonly makes use of volunteers, but they are used in other organizations as well. And also what is referred to as direct volunteer work direct volunteer work is work that is done for people individual to individual without the intermediation of organizations. And it turns out that in the SNA there are very significant differences between these two types of volunteering. And then so far as the direct volunteer work. There's even a difference between two types within the direct volunteer work. So let me explain for a minute how the core SNA has long been treating volunteer work and I think you will understand why there was a need for a very significant change in the treatment of volunteer work. A significant change was embodied in the 2003 UN nonprofit handbook, calling for a satellite account on nonprofit organizations and in that handbook. It was recommended very strongly that volunteer work be calculated. So far as organization based volunteer work in the core SNA. The idea that they came up with was the idea that volunteer work for organization should be valued at the actual cost to the organization. And it sounds very reasonable until you recognize that volunteer work almost by definition is work that is not paid. And therefore, when you say it's valued at the actual cost, you're essentially saying that it's valued at zero. Of course, poof, it disappears. And so organization based volunteering by theoretically is supposed to be valued in SNA, but the value that was put upon it essentially is zero. And that simply would not work to measure it in any significant way. The correct volunteer work is concerned. Here again, the SNA said yes, we should value it. How should we value it. Well, the only thing they could come up with was to value it at the value of any physical structures that volunteer work produces. And so a volunteer workers are building housing for people without the ability to purchase housing. That could be valued you could find out what the value is of that kind of structure in the country in which it's taking place. And you could put the value of that physical structure down as the value of volunteering. The problem with that, however, is that much of volunteer work, particularly direct volunteer work person to person is for services. These volunteers are medical doctors that are providing free service to people in need. They may be lawyers who are fighting for free legal advice. They may be accountants that help people with their taxes. Lots of work that is done by volunteers person to person is actually service work. And the SNA has no place to record this and it has put a value on it that is impossible to discover. Essentially, the SNA has ignored the measurement of volunteer work, though it has not really recognized that it has been doing that. The result of this is that the data on volunteer work has long been virtually non existent around the world. There are some countries that do specialized surveys, but there is nothing that has been systematized in the measurement of volunteer work. In the 2003 SNA called on countries to measure volunteer work in the satellite account for nonprofit institutions. People were at a loss to figure out how to do that. And they therefore came to us. We had written the UN nonprofit institution handbook. They thought we ought to know how to do it since we recommended it. We in turn went and talked to the people at the international labor organization and to our amazement. They were not measuring volunteering at all. They were measuring employment and employment was defined as paid work. They simply did not have a category for volunteer work. And so this enormous body of work that is taking place, both through nonprofits and person to person across the world was simply being overlooked in the basic labor statistics that were generated by our statistical agencies. So we went to work with the ILO. They were kind enough to give us permission to try to develop a methodology and a definition that could be used to bring the measurement of volunteering into labor force statistics and through the labor force statistics into the SNA. And what we came up with, first of all, was a series of goals that we wanted to embody in whatever we came up with in a way of definitions. We wanted to count the number of volunteers, but we also wanted to measure the amount of work that the volunteers were responsible for. And these two are very different. Volunteer individuals are head counts, but volunteering is not a full time job. And therefore, if you don't know how many hours the volunteers are responsible for, it's very difficult to really get a clear sense of the value and scale of volunteering. So we wanted to go after not just the number of people who did any kind of volunteering, but also the number of hours. And one of the curiosities of this field is that many of the surveys that had been done in countries never went to the hours, but simply stopped at the number of volunteers. And so you had no idea of how much work was actually being done. And then we wanted to go beyond those measurements of amounts of quantities. We needed to put a value on the volunteer work. And we were convinced that the value that was placed on it in the core SNA was simply inadequate. It ignored all of the volunteering done through organizations and it only captured the volunteering done for the production of physical structures in the person to person volunteering. And so most of volunteering was ignored. And we therefore push for what is called a replacement cost approach. A replacement cost essentially says, let's find out what the volunteers are doing. Let's find out how much time they're devoting to those tasks. Let's see what the value put on those activities is in the countries in which the volunteering is carried out. And let's multiply the number of hours times the value the wage average wage for those jobs. And we would come out with an estimate of the value of the volunteer work. And then one final thing that we were after as a goal was to calculate the full time equivalent volunteer workers FTE stands for full time equivalent. What we were after here was to know if we were to convert the hours produced by volunteers in their work jobs. We were to take that that amount of time and divide it by the average time of a full time job in their country. We could come out with a number that represented what the volunteers would represent if they were workers. What size workforce does the volunteer component represent both in the economy of the country and in the economy of the nonprofit sector and what is now the third or social economy sector. So this is what we were after numbers of volunteers, numbers of volunteer hours, value at replacement cost, and the full time equivalent volunteer workers in an economy and in a sector. That's the easy part. The question was, what in the world is a volunteer, because it turned out there were many different kinds of definitions of volunteering all over the place. Corporate volunteers, for example, were volunteers that were working because they were trying to work off a a jail sentence or they were in a military but they didn't want to be in the military. And so they were asked to do alternative service. Are these all volunteers? How do we go about the measurement, the identification, the definition of volunteering? It took us about a year and a half working with a technical experts group to come up with a definition. And we had to come up with a definition that did not use the word volunteer for two reasons. One, because if you're defining something by use of that word, you are essentially running around in a circle. Because if people don't know what the meaning of the term is, telling them that you're measuring volunteering doesn't help very much. In many parts of the world, the term volunteering has a unpleasant kind of connotation. There are many parts of the world in which volunteering was required by governments. This was the case in the Soviet Union where workers were expected to quote, volunteer an extra day of work just for the glory of the cause. And that kind of mandatory volunteering created a very unhappy impression about what volunteering is in those countries. And so we had to come up with a definition that would not use the word volunteering but would convey the essence of the concept. The definition that we have come up with is on the screen here. We defined it first of all as a form of work. This is a significant in and of itself it differentiates volunteering from leisure activity.  A person goes to a nursing home for elderly people and plays the piano for that group of people. This is a function that could be replaced by a paid worker. What you do in your home could not be you could not pay somebody to practice the piano for you or to enjoy the piano that you're playing. And so this is the differentiation between a leisure activity and an activity that is work. Work is something that could be performed by somebody who is paid by it by a paid worker. The fact that the volunteer is not paid does not make it not work. It is simply a form of work that is voluntary. So it's work performed by persons of working age. And this was to stipulate that it was going to be not simply children who are required to work for their family. Who during a short reference period and this is a term of art in the labor force measurement arena, where episodic activity is not considered work has to be at least for a reference period, which is typically in the labor force arena at an hour of time in a particular week, perform any unpaid non compulsory activity to produce goods or provide services for other people outside of their family. Now each one of those terms turns out to be a little bit complicated. And so we have to unpack unpack them a while. So first of all, you know, what is a short reference period? Work performed by persons of working age who during a short reference period performed any unpaid non compulsory activity to produce goods or provide services for others outside their family. So we have to unpack them a while. So first of all, you know, what is a short reference period. Well, in the labor force arena as I indicated, it's known that if a activity is simply casual. In the field of volunteering, you help somebody to cross the street and it takes you three minutes. This is not a volunteer activity. If you do it 30 times a day, maybe if you stand on the same corner and do it as a regular activity for more than an hour. Yeah, maybe that's volunteering, but it has to be non trivial. It is significant and meaningful degree of time spent on the activity. Secondly, it has to be unpaid. And like the other features, this also has complications. Unpaid means it's the absence of remuneration and cash or in kind so it can be either in cash or in kind. It could be in some kind of product or some kind of service that you receive for your time volunteering. If that is the case, if you do receive that, that would disqualify this it would not be in scope of volunteering, according to our satellite account. So it's absent of remuneration and cash or in kind for work done, or ours work, but then issues arise. What about if you have expenses let's say to get to the place where you are volunteering. Can those expenses be compensated without disqualifying it as volunteering. What about limited stipends. For example, many people go into volunteer experiences abroad. They have some of their expenses covered because they are not in their home countries and they have expenses. Does that disqualify it from volunteering. What about symbolic rewards what if you get a reward in the form of some kind of plaque, or some kind of other gift that is a kind of token payment token indication that you've done something for somebody else. Does that qualify disqualify you as a volunteer. So with these issues, we had to address what was permissible. Essentially, we acknowledge that expenses are okay. Even limited stipends are okay certainly symbolic rewards, but there had to be limits. So for example, reimbursements that exceeded a low wage in a country. So let's qualify it as volunteering let's say you were living working in a country not your own, and you get wages there that are above the market wages above a third of the market wages. Does that mean that you are actually being paid in terms of the wage scale of that country. Well we set a limit as a indication of the kind of point at which you cease to be a volunteer and begin to be. And begin to be a worker at least in the terms of that country. So we say that reimbursement is okay but only if it's below one third of market wages. If it's incurred for expenses that are necessary to bring you to the place to do the volunteering stipends are okay but only in cases of extended travel and symbolic rewards. So as long as they truly are symbolic and are not of a value that would seem to suggest that they violate this non pay criterion. So this is the kind of thinking and you will see when you go through the chapter in our UN handbook the TSE sector satellite account handbook that these terms are all explained in much more detail. And then I am giving you here. So, what about the non compulsory feature of volunteering which is another. Another feature that's part of the definition what does that really mean. Well, again, compulsion can take many different forms. And we differentiate in the handbook between compulsion that takes a legal form a civil or legal form or an administrative requirement, and those that take the form of fulfilling social responsibilities. So, for example, if you are the member of religious tradition, and that religious tradition obliges you to perform good deeds without being paid. Does that disqualify you as a volunteer. And we basically came to a conclusion this was a technical experts group that worked on all of these issues. We debated them we explored different cultures and different religious traditions, and we came up with what we thought were reasonable conclusions that would allow us to make these distinctions and define them in ways that you as statisticians that could actually could actually operate. So what we essentially did was draw a line between civil or legal or administrative requirements, and those that are fundamentally social responsibilities of a communal nature or cultural nature, or religious nature. And if you are in a society that puts a heavy emphasis on a community expectation that you're going to do certain kinds of health, and you do those help and it's not for pay. We do not suggest that that should be disqualified that there are multiple kinds of communal or social responsibilities that people experience, and that these do not disqualify an activity put it outside the scope. Of what is conceivable blibble and permissible to include in our satellite account. The next tough issue that we had to wrestle with was what does it mean to do this work for persons outside your family. Again, work done for people in the family certainly within your nuclear family if you if you clean the dishes or if you cook the meals and not not paid by it for it. There is a kind of work that that represents but it's not truly volunteer work. How far does family extend, and different cultures have different notions of what a related family is. And in the handbook, we basically initially said that it was work done for persons outside the household, the household in labor force statisticians means people living together in the same physical structure. In the household, but cultures different and how many family members, how broadly it extends living together in the same household in some places that grandparents live together with their grandchildren and their siblings. And in other cultures they are really nuclear families. And so we retreated to a concept called immediate family or next of kin, which we define tentatively as grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren and siblings. But we also in the handbook, basically made clear that different countries can come up with different concepts of what family is and measuring volunteer work. And what we asked is that if countries change the definition from this one here immediate family or next to kin. Just let everybody else know that they are not using the core definition, and so that we can adjust the findings to take account of that. So all of this creates a very difficult standard that have to be applied. And to help you all work through this, we have created a mother decision tree. That is the decision tree for determining when you have volunteer work that is in scope of the TSE sector. It is essentially a way to just systematically work your way through all these different criteria that we had to put together in order to get a coherent definition and understanding of what is in scope for volunteering and what is not. The first step in this is, you know, did the activity last less than an hour. And so if a survey has yielded information about volunteering and it included work that was less than an hour. We could not include it. The next step in the decision tree was the person performing it entitled to any compensation. However, they're out of scope. If they're not, they potentially are in scope. The next step is was the activity compulsory. And again, out of scope if it's yes if it's compulsory in scope, potentially if it is not compulsory. The activity benefit primarily the person performing it or his or her family. Again, if the answer is yes, it's not volunteering. If the answer is no, could be volunteering. The next question was the activity required as a part of education or training. Because it's out of scope because we had stipulated that it cannot be a requirement of even a job or a completion of education, only if it is purely voluntary. Was it in scope was the activity performed during paid working time associated with employment. Let me read that again was the activity performed during paid working time associated with employment. If it was, it's not volunteering, because, because if it's work. If it's done during your paid working time you're being paid for it. It's just that the company is paying you to do the volunteer work, but you're still being paid. And so this is really volunteer work or volunteer contributions from the company who's paying you. It is not truly volunteer work. The next question was the activity performed for government or for profit business. The purposes of this satellite account for third or social economy sector organizations. Volunteer activity performed for government or for profit businesses is not in scope. The only activity that is organization based that is in scope is that that is included and done for organizations that themselves are in scope. So volunteering for nonprofit institutions and other in scope. Third sector organizations isn't are included, but not ones that are for other kinds of organizations. So this is the set of steps that you have to go through. And this yields a number of observations about what is in scope volunteer work. First of all, in scope volunteer work. If it's organization based must be for in scope nonprofit institutions or in scope cooperatives and for in scope social enterprises, and all of those types of organizations were the organization types that were taken from our last workshop, in which we identified the in scope, in scope institutional components of this third sector for the satellite account for the TSE sector satellite account. So far as the direct volunteer work is concerned, both that that leads to the production of physical structures, and also that that yields the production of services are considered in scope of volunteering. So both organization based and direct are included, and organization based only those that are work that is done for the in scope institutions. And in the case of the direct volunteering, both those that produce physical structures and those that produce services are included so this is expanding very significantly the range of volunteer activities that is included. Within the in scope component that is included in this third sector satellite account. Not included out of scope of volunteer work for the purposes of this TSE sector satellite account, our organization based volunteering that is done for governments. For out of scope institutional units, or that's required by law, or for training, unless it's for an occupation that itself is voluntary that is if you are doing work that is for an occupation that there is an element of choice in the fact that you have to do some kind of volunteer does not disqualify it. And again here as well. The handbook will provide detailed explanation of what this means in operational terms. So the key in terms of the direct volunteering out of scope volunteering work would include work done for without pay for your own household use, and for related family members where the definition of what is a related a family member is what we described before. So what does this mean in terms of the kinds of examples of in scope volunteer work. It includes all of these items on this slide unpaid work for nonprofits unpaid work for unions and professional association, which themselves are in scope of the third sector third or social economy sector. Unpaid paid work for religious congregations assuming that the religion is not a state religion, and therefore a part of the government. So, assuming that the religious congregations are themselves nonprofits, then unpaid work done for them would be in scope, helping neighbors or strangers obviously would be included taking care of animals would be included neighborhood cleanup communities pro bono professional work that is if you're an attorney and you provide pro bono unpaid work to help people with their taxes or with their property issues. That would still be volunteer work and counseling for neighbors or or friends. So these are all examples of in scope volunteer work. In terms of out of scope volunteer work. Any unpaid work for government agencies, it's out of scope because government agencies are not part of the TSE sector, and therefore, would not qualify for measurement in this particular satellite account. This would be required to complete general education. Again, this would be a stipulation that is embodied in some kind of law that basically says you cannot get your diploma until you complete some type of volunteer activity. In our terminology, this would not be in scope volunteering because it is obliged to be taken undertaken as a product of a rule that is imposed by the education system. There are activities giving directions or a ride. Obviously activity intended to harm people or harm communities or animals there is a sense in which the volunteer work needs to be for the public good. That was one of the philosophical notions that we established early on. That this was public purpose and was not public harm. So what if you were a parishioner in social or cultural or religious events. I said before that volunteering done, for example, for a religious service or religious organization is in scope. But what if you just attend a religious service what if you were a parishioner in a church, is that volunteer work. Well, no. But attending a musical event put on by a nonprofit symphony. Well, attending that event does not qualify as volunteer work, but serving as an usher, for example, would because you are doing more than simply attending and participating volunteer work by persons under the age of 15. 15 years was chosen because that is the rule of thumb in the labor force arena. And as you'll hear later in our workshops. We want to use the labor force surveys as the vehicle for getting data on volunteer work. And so we adopted this as a benchmark. The basic notion is that if you are under 15 years of age you may not really be in control of your life you may be under the tutelage of your parents, and therefore the volunteer work may not be truly fully non compulsory. And that's why we have an age cut off. Obviously, some countries may have a different cut off. And again, the way to handle that is to make clear in the data that you were generating that you may have used a different age cut off paid corporate volunteering. And also not truly volunteering, because, again, that kind of work, since it's paid really represents corporate philanthropic giving in the form of your time that they are paying for, and therefore would not be considered within the scope of volunteering. And legally legally mandated service alternative to military service court ordered work that is imposed because you've committed some crime and you were given the chance to work it off by doing volunteer work. Mandatory legally mandatory activities, and because of that they, they lose the quality of being non compulsory, and therefore they are treated as outside the scope of this of this handbook. There are a number of borderline cases. What about help given to your extended family. And we talked about this already. It truly is very extended and does not typically count as part of the nuclear family or certainly the next of kin. Depending on the social mores of the country, it probably would not be included in the volunteering measurement. Interparenting is a difficult topic this is where somebody takes in a child who is somehow mistreated or is without a parent, or without both parents, and that child lives with a family for a period of time. Depending on the length of that time, it is either volunteering if the length is short and therefore is not this person does not become a part of the family, or is not included as volunteering. Foster parenting becomes a permanent situation that is the person the the youngster is living with the family. As a member of the family then that parenting that that family is providing is not any longer volunteering but rather help the ones family so these are tough choices tough decisions to make to figure out what is truly within the realm of volunteering. What about compensation of expenses that they go over a third of market wages. If you're working as a volunteer, but you're getting essentially payments compensation food even that is in excess of a third of market wages, can it still be called volunteering. There are countries in the world that are doing quote volunteering, where people are doing what they claim is volunteering, but they're essentially earning what is significant wage in that country, even though it's pretty low. They're getting food in a country that has significant food shortages. So, again, these are the dividing lines that the SNA requires that we impose in order to keep the clarity of the data, very, very certain. But if it's unclear if the activity is for others or for oneself so for example if you have a daycare center in which you have your own children as well as some other children from your neighborhood. Is this volunteering, or is it really something very different because you are taking care of your own children at the same time. So, the measurement of volunteering is not simple, but we have developed a set of guidelines, the guidelines are spelled out in this new United Nations TSE sector handbook. They were initially developed and put into something called the ILO international labor organization manual on the measurement of volunteer work. And that manual was essentially incorporated into this 2018 TSE sector satellite account handbook and is available for you online. And we are also as I mentioned at the beginning and as I have reminded you in our previous workshops. We have begun to provide technical assistance and training to statistical agencies, working with them directly on the implementation of the handbook. We are under contract in a number of countries such as Spain and Luxembourg and Poland to work with the statistical agencies to make sure that everybody is implementing these guidelines the same way. The way we do that is we get, we have a number of field instruments in which we put people through the process of making these decisions against their own statistical systems and legal systems. We work with them to clarify the meaning of these different provisions. And through that means we assure everybody that the data that will come out of this process will be consistent from place to place which is a bedrock notion of the SNA. So I appreciate your attention and I look forward to continuing this series of workshops focusing next on the issue of classification of both of the institutional units and of the workforce and volunteer activity. Thank you so much.