Good morning everybody. This is Donna Frost, our Chief Clinical Officer at the Patient Safety Movement Foundation. Today we're going to talk to you about workplace safety in the operating room. And we're joined by Caitlin Jackson, who is a circulating nurse at Puget Sound Liquid Surgery Center. Good morning, Caitlin, and welcome. Good morning. Thank you for having me. I wonder if you could start by telling us a little bit about your background. Sure. So I've been a nurse since 2013. I started at Medigan Hospital. I was a med-surg and oncology nurse for about three years. Following that, I did mother baby. Once I exited the military, I did about one year as a GI nurse. And then following that, I've been a circulator nurse for Puget Sound for about three years now. Excellent. Well, welcome to the Patient Safety Movement Foundation. Thank you. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about safety in the OR. What are the special needs in terms of patient safety and healthcare worker safety in the OR that are different than other places in the hospital? So there are a lot of hazards in the OR. And we're definitely a multi-disciplinary team. So some of the roles include the surgeon, the circulator nurse, the surgical tech, and the PA, just to name a few. And I think it's really important that we are all aware of those potential safety hazards to ourselves and to our patients and not only knowing these hazards, but how to mitigate them. So just to name off a few potential hazards within the OR, we definitely have potential for physical injuries. So that would look like a shoulder injury or a back injury. This could be caused by not using proper body mechanics or from moving a patient inappropriately. Now that's not to say that that isn't an issue in other areas of nursing, but definitely it is something to be aware of in the OR as well. Another thing to be aware of is the potential for needle stick injuries. We're passing a lot of sharp equipment back and forth between the surgical tech and the surgeon. So just being very aware of how you're passing off these instruments definitely is of major importance within the OR. And I do believe that kind of is something specifically in the OR that kind of sets us apart from other areas of healthcare. Additionally, we have a lot of tripping hazards in the OR. There's a lot of equipment that's being moved around constantly. And unfortunately, we still have a lot of cords in the OR. So we really just need to be aware of where we're placing these cords to ensure safety of the staff while we're moving about in that environment. Moving on from physical potential hazards, we also have radiation in electrical hazards. Again, I think this is something unique to the OR. Radiation hazards can be caused by inadequate protection from our X-ray machine. And of course, we use electrical equipment. An injury could be caused by not grounding your patient appropriately or not checking your equipment out appropriately and there being some faulty wiring going on. Additionally, we have chemical hazards from the anesthesia gases. Cytotoxic drugs can also be used within the OR. And even some of the cleaning agents we use, obviously sterility is very important. So again, we just need to be extra careful that we're aware of those potential for harm. In addition to that, I would like to speak a little bit about organizational hazards. Again, I don't think this is necessarily unique to the OR, but also it's still very important. As an organization, we really need to make sure we're routinely caring for our staff and ensuring that they have a safe work environment that includes making sure they're getting their lunches, they're getting their breaks, they're not working very long, strenuous hours in the OR, giving them bathroom breaks, little things like this. And again, just making sure that we have a safe culture that promotes safety. Yes, just little things like being able to go to the bathroom. That would be great. Absolutely. So in an organization, a hospital or a surgery center someplace, if the executive leadership team or senior leadership team were concerned about OR safety, how would they go about doing an assessment to determine what the gaps are? Yeah, I really like this question. I think it's so important that organizations really look at their workplace environment and strive to develop strategies to gather workplace data and implement improvement strategies based upon that data. So I think just some examples of what an organization could do to assess the operating room for safety, conducting and analyzing routine surveys that assess the staff's feelings on workplace safety. Let's hear from the staff, what are their issues? What concerns do they have? And then following through with those concerns I think is really important as well, not just taking it for face value, just really taking it seriously and making adjustments as needed. I think another important thing is utilizing those incident reports, making sure that these again are taken seriously and that we're making adjustments as needed based upon findings that staff are coming to the organization with. And then lastly, I know this might sound like a small thing, but it actually has a really big impact, especially within the OR, is just ensuring that you're doing your monthly checklist on those routine tasks, such as your deep cleaning of your equipment, doing your outdates of your medications, things like that to really help one ensure that we're promoting safety for the patient, but also for the staff as well. So you brought up an interesting point about incident reporting. Do you feel like the folks in the OR where you work are honest about errors that happen in the OR or do you feel like that there may still be a little bit of fear about reporting some incidents? Sure. So speaking from just my experience in the OR, I feel like we very much promote patient safety. We talk about that. It's a highlight of a lot of our conversations and in order to promote patient safety, the staff need to be safe as well. So it's a matter of in order for us to reach our number one goal, which is to provide safe patient care, we need to ensure we have a safe environment. So we very much promote conducting incidents reports when they are needed and again, following through with them. It's all about having open communication again with our other team members and our management. And I think we get a lot of positive support, which has greatly benefited our environment. Well, good. That's great to hear. So any any idea for for those again who are looking to improve safety in their OR, are there any specific protocols that you would recommend to mitigate workplace injury? Yeah, I think there's a lot of really great resources out there to help prevent injury and illness within the OR. I think just some examples would be again, this sounds kind of small, but it's very important is just providing appropriate PPE to your staff that would include appropriate eye pro with the shields on the sides, gloves, of course, and OR appropriate masks. This would help prevent from, you know, splatter injuries such as blood in your eyes, things like that coming into contact with potentially infectious or dangerous materials. And then the practice of performing a timeout is especially important in the OR. This is a moment where everyone pauses and ensures that we are performing the correct surgery on the correct patient. We are aware of their allergies, any other additional concerns. This is a total must in the OR. I think another thing is maintaining serility in the OR. I think ensuring that your staff understand the importance of appropriately cleaning your equipment is very important. And again, going back to those checklists, we are performing those monthly checklists to make sure everything is clean and working appropriately. I think another protocol would be to ensure your staff know how to label any drawn up medications in the OR. We are using things like epinephrine, you know, morphine. These are serious drugs and we want to ensure that everything is appropriate labeled in order to ensure we're not accidentally giving the wrong medication to the patient or expired medications. I think another thing would be just ensuring that we have appropriate ventilation within the OR to help ensure that we are getting all those toxic gases and potentially airborne pathogens outside of the OR environment. And then lastly, I think another thing would be ensuring that your staff is wearing lead when we are using X-ray machinery and checking that lead. I think it's yearly. Excellent. Any other last thoughts for what organizations can do to improve safety in the operating room? I think the number one thing is just ensuring that you have a culture of safety and promoting awareness in that your staff knows where to find those incidents reports. They know what your policies are and if they have questions knowing who to ask those questions to. Great. Well, Caitlin, thank you so much for joining us today. We're so glad to hear from you and I'm so glad to have you in the movement. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure speaking with you. Great. Have a wonderful day. You too. Thank you.


I'm Joshua Cooper and welcome to Aloha Sustainability in Hawaii in peace in our Pacific, the UN SDG movement in Moana, New York. Today, we're looking at the exciting work around Sustainable Development Goals 17, positive proactive partnerships in our planet to make sure the Pacific is great. The UN Sustainable Development Goals provide and accomplish and actualize the 2030 agenda around the world. And UN SDG strengthens the means of implementation revitalization around the global partnership for sustainable development. Global Goals 17 calls for knowledge sharing and cooperation for access to science, technology, innovation, and how we can really cooperate at the grassroots and the global level. Today, we're meeting with an exciting group who's doing just that here in Hawaii. Chris, can you share with me a bit how and why the climate coalition was born and created? Sure. Thanks, Josh. Well, you know, first of all, I fully agree with SDG 17 and its importance because solving these problems that we have to solve really is going to require partnership and collaboration like we've never seen it before. And so it was in that spirit that I got involved with the Hawaii Executive Collaborative that Dwayne Kurisu sort of re-envisioned and reshaped probably five or six years ago to bring in a diverse group of Hawaii's business, government, nonprofit, and educational leaders to convene and talk about how we can solve Hawaii's problems. And at the 2021 conference, actually it was really 2022 conference, there was a panel on climate and it was included a number of very impressive climate experts. And it inspired me to talk to Dwayne and see if I could help out with the climate coalition with forming a climate coalition under HEC and he said, yes. And so I reached out to Chip Fletcher at the University of Hawaii to be my co-chair and we formed it. And the reason that we did it under the auspices of HEC is because already with HEC we had a built-in group of diverse leaders, including all four mayors, the governor, heads of most of the biggest businesses in town, heads of the largest educational institutions, key nonprofit leaders. And so we already had an audience and a group of people to get together and work on these climate issues. And I think that consistent with SDG 17, we are going to have to have unconventional partnerships and collaboration if we're going to solve some of these big problems. And so I was thrilled that Dwayne was willing to have us form the coalition under HEC. I've been thrilled with the engagement of many members of HEC and people outside HEC in including yourself in your work with Maui County in getting engaged in this work and trying to help us figure out how to address some of these big climate challenges. It's true. Global Goal 17 calls for knowledge sharing and cooperation in our communities. And the Hawaii Executive Collaborative Climate Coalition does unite holistic movement combining public-private partnerships for positive change and climate justice. Jeff, can you share with us a bit why you decided to participate in this role as director of the coalition? We know you've been very active in many ways leading Hawaii with the 100% renewable and other important landmarks. Can you share with us what inspired you to get involved with this important HEC climate coalition? Thanks, Josh. And thanks for having us on the show today. First, let me just build off a little bit what you just shared about the partnerships and SDG 17 and how important is that sharing of information. Chris is going to talk a bit in a second I think about kind of our approach. But a big part of our approach is really kind of fostering that sharing among organizations. We have a diversity of organizations involved. We're challenging all of them to decarbonize their operations. And that's something that it's easier to do it together than to go it alone. And we hope to develop some case studies and a lot of lessons to help others sort of accelerate their decarbonization process in a unique Hawaii way. But to your question, I spent about 25 years doing non-profit work in the sustainability space in Hawaii. And I think we made some good progress. You mentioned 100% law. We've set some great goals in Hawaii. But we have a long way to go to be that model that we hope to be for the globe. So when the opportunity to work with Chris and Chip came up in the Hawaii executive collaborative, I was really excited because it's really a fresh approach. And that's exactly what we need if we hope to get our arms around this challenge. Having credible, respected leaders like Chris, experts in the field like Chip, and then that network of organizational leaders who are really wanting to take climate seriously. We need to work together to get there. The approach that I'm accustomed to is we go hard, we adopt policy, we kind of call out the folks that are laggards. This is really calling them in and saying, we're all in this canoe together. How can we really work together to go at the speed and scale we need to solve our climate crisis? That has been one of the most refreshing aspects of being involved is really HEC recognizes severity of the climate change and its impact on our island home. But HEC also understands that climate change is a time bound challenge. And as you said, the faster we act, the greater opportunity to create a resilient and thriving future. Chris, could you go a little bit more in depth about this unique approach and what's been able to be accomplished so far? Yeah, Josh. So we have a construct that we call climate in and climate out. And climate in is getting our member organizations to focus internally on the things that they can do within their organizations to have a better impact on our climate response, whether it's lowering their carbon emissions, lowering their use of single-use plastics, looking at ways to generate power through their facilities, overall just improving their climate impact and lowering the carbon footprint. And we have a staff member, an intern through the KUPU INA program, through KUPU that is helping our member organizations with their carbon inventories. And we're trying to find other ways to support our, and we're also connecting our members to other resources to help them with their climate in work. But the other half is climate out. And that is encouraging and really expecting our members to engage externally to help identify ways that we can work together to advance climate initiatives and promote favorable climate policy. Back to what Jeff was saying about this historic pattern of how there have been certain people working on climate and then a lot of laggards that get called out for not working on climate. One of the very first meetings that Chip and I had with a number of climate and environmental leaders back in the spring of 2022 when we were first getting started, even before Jeff got involved, revealed to us just how fatigued those people were by this lather rinse repeat that they go through every year with drafting legislation that is favorable to the climate and then having it killed in the legislative session because there wasn't that pre-session engagement to identify what could work. And so one of our biggest goals with climate out is to bring these organizations together. And Jeff is great at facilitating these discussions because of his extensive experience in policy work over the years, engaging these folks and talking about the policy that we need to advance in some cases, identifying relatively non-controversial policy that we can push forward. But increasingly, we're looking at how we can tackle some of the gnarlier, stickier issues around policy, getting people in the room before the legislative session, before the council meetings to agree on what is acceptable to all parties, maybe not loved by all parties. In fact, almost guaranteed it's not going to be loved by all parties. But with that recognition that we have to make progress, we have to work together identifying policy that we can advocate, that we can get through the legislative process. And so that's something that we've been working on. We've had some good success early on and we will be tackling, and we can talk more about this later, but we'll be tackling tougher and tougher issues. The other aspect of climate out is working together on not just policy issues. We don't want to be only a lobbying or policy guidance initiative. We also want to work together on projects that are going to directly impact our community. And that includes both mitigation projects and adaptation and resilience projects. And so we are looking at ways that we can coalesce businesses and other groups around supporting a wide range of initiatives, not just in the policy sphere. Hello, Chris. Really covering a lot there and so many directions we could head in. One of those aspects of the gnarly and the good around the legislature is absolutely crucial and let's maybe look at some of those bills, Jeff. But first, before we get into some of the most important legislation that we should encourage people to get behind and take action before the closing of this session, how many organizations have heeded this call to be part of this movement for the greater good? Can you share a little bit about some of those organizations and how they've been getting involved so far? Sure. Thanks, Josh. We have a really big tent and that's the goal. That's the idea is to engage as many organizations, large, small, nonprofit, for-profit, government, otherwise, as possible in the climate conversation. And we're doing that with what we're calling the climate pledge. And let me tell you, I'd be the first to say these pledges, these declarations, in my mind, are sometimes just worthless. And it's really not the goal at all. But we've tailored our pledge to be really clear that this is essentially you're telegraphing your support, that you're committed to taking action on a climate. And then we're actually asking you to do things, as Chris said, both internally in your organization. So measuring, taking a snapshot of where you are with your carbon emissions, setting goals to reduce that, and then putting together an action plan to achieve your goals and ideally the state's goals of 100%. And then asking you to engage constructively in the climate conversation. So it's not just a sort of feel the good kind of, we all, Malama Aina, this is, we're committed to do this as an organization. And we are going to take these steps internally and systemically to address the challenge. Today, we've had about 42 organizations sign the pledge. And these are names that folks would recognize. I mean, it's some of the, honestly, the largest contributors to climate change in Hawaii, as well as some grassroots organizations that are more community focused. So, you know, part of Hawaii, Hawaiian Airlines, Hawaiian Electric, Young Brothers, Alexander and Baldwin, and then, you know, folks like a Blue Planet Foundation, all four counties as the, as Chris shared and the governor. So really an eclectic mix, Kaiser, you know, some folks from the hospitality industry, Outrigger, some restaurants. And again, this is our goal to really get a good cross section of folks. Everyone, this is a, you know, all in sort of challenge. So, there are also folks who are participating in our conversations that have yet to sign the pledge. And that's perfectly fine. You know, when they're ready, we hope that they do, but their voices matter. And again, we want to engage as many people as possible. So, we've had some, you know, organizations that have signed testimony, participated in conversations, come to some of the brown bags that we do. All of this in the interest of just moving forward on climate. Hopefully, we'll have, you know, 100 of the largest organizations signing the pledge, but we're happy with the group that we have, and the door is open to anyone to join. It's absolutely crucial as we look at transforming at the speed and scales necessary is essential as we move forward. And it does require a fresh approach and a new kind of collaboration. And HEC Climate Coalition really does embody the spirit of SDG partnerships. Chris, can you share with us and characterize some of the keys of success in a coalition such as HEC Climate Coalition? Yeah, Josh, you know, I think I first have to acknowledge that we're still, we're still figuring that out. We're still finding our way through this process. But some things that I think are key that I think we've done a good job of so far, and hopefully we'll continue to do, is first of all, you have to start with a group of people that have a shared commitment to the goal of making Hawaii better. And again, I want to acknowledge the role that HEC has played in that because the folks that come to, that are involved in the Hawaii Executive Collaborative and come to the conference each year, are coming there for the specific purpose of trying to figure out how the role that they can play in making Hawaii better and addressing a wide range of issues that are facing Hawaii. So that was a tremendous foundation to start with, because everybody that walks in the door has that perspective. And then of course, the organizations that may not be involved in HEC but have jumped on our bandwagon are similarly motivated, including a lot of the NGOs that are already doing great work. The second thing is, speaking of that great work, is don't duplicate what others are doing. We're not trying to do things that are already being done by other organizations. We're trying to make connections. We're trying to help facilitate groups that may not have the resources, the attention, the policies that they need to do their work effectively. So we're trying to help leverage all the tremendous work that's being done in Hawaii on climate. And as an example, as you know, working with one of the counties, is that we're not coming to the counties and the mayor is saying, here, you need to do this. What we're doing is we're saying, we know you have plans. How can we help support you? How can the business community? How can HEC help support what you're doing? And so we're trying to make sure that we're not supplanting the work that anyone else is doing or duplicating the work that anyone else is doing, but supplementing and helping them be effective. I think another key is building trust. And this is still very much a work in progress. We've got many participants that not only have not worked together in the past, but some of them have been on opposite sides of critical issues. And I think it's important that we move at a pace that allows us to, we know eventually we need to move fast, but we cannot move too fast until we've built that trust. And so I'd say we're still in the trust-building mode. And some of the things that we've been doing on policy and some of the low-hanging fruit that we've been picking has been specifically for the purpose of building those relationships, building that trust so that we can accelerate the work as we go forward. And so, yeah, there are other things we've had tried to keep barriers to entry low so that there's not a $10,000 or $20,000 price of admission. Anybody who wants to come and be part of the coalition is welcome. There's no financial commitment. The only thing we're asking for is a commitment to act, as Jeff said earlier. And we think those are all part of making it work. And I can talk about this more later time permitting. I think that we acknowledge, as I said, that we are picking a little bit of the low-hanging fruit right now. We're going to have to move into some tougher issues because the long-term success of this coalition and of our climate response is going to depend on people making more sacrifices and taking on some of the tougher challenges. And we're really trying to set the lay the groundwork for that. And so, it's far too early to declare success, but we feel like it's moving in the right direction. Hello, Kristen. Jeff, can you get into some of those aspects of those low-hanging mangoes that we see at the legislature in ways that we can build the trust so that we can have more transformative change? Could you share some of those measures that even our listeners should get involved with and contact their officials? Because we know we're heading into the last month and how important it is to hear from people. What do we see as HEC and the climate coalition? What are some of those measures that we think should be adopted that are there at the legislative session? Sure. And just because we call them low-hanging fruit doesn't mean that they're not very impactful. Last year, the coalition put its shoulder behind a measure to appropriate funds for Hawaii's green bank. And most folks are kind of aware of the green bank, but it's a real success story in Hawaii where we're providing essentially low interest loans, largely for low-income families to do solar plus storage. They had received a bond 10 years ago. That funding was drying up, so this was a new appropriation to let them continue that good work. And let's set you past the $100 million appropriation last year that's going to be a revolving fund that's going to come back to the state. So really exciting, but it's one of those, you know, I call these things inertiatives because they're really good ideas, but sometimes they just don't have momentum to get across the finish line. So that's where the climate coalition can come in, bring together again a really diverse, you know, array of organizations who might not otherwise be engaged in the climate conversation. So when a lawmaker sees testimony that has Alexander Baldwin, young brothers, zippies, a blue planet foundation all in the same, you know, letterhead, we think it kind of carries a bit of a different weight than the typical, you know, voices that you'd hear at the legislature. So our goal with these, what we call low hanging fruit or kind of motherhood and apple pie measures where there's not a lot of controversy, but there might not be the support to get over the finish line is to channel that support and make sure that these really good policies can pass and get enacted. This year at the legislature, we're continuing that support for the Green Bank. An innovative proposal called Solar Huey has been introduced. And the idea is, you know, folks who live in condos or multi-family who can't put solar on the roof, this would provide a vehicle for them to do that by enabling them to invest some funds in the Green Bank. And those funds would be deployed to put solar on, you know, low income homes. The folks who are getting that solar would benefit because their bill would go down immediately. And then the individuals in the condos would receive some return on that investment.  So we think it's, you know, one of these perfect programs that can be innovated here in Hawaii. And the legislature, I mean, folks are busy there. There's a lot of attention given to, you know, various matters. So we want to keep the focus on a measure like this to make sure it gets over that finish line. We're also jointly supporting another bill to streamline permitting. This has been discussed for a few years now, but again, we just want to get over the finish line. It'll help the counties and solar developers, you know, quickly get these things permitted using a online application process and cuts in that red tape that's holding back our transition. So those are the sorts of things, you know, we hope to just kind of channel support and importantly start that engagement and trust building with some of these organizations who don't necessarily do climate day in and day out, but they can start to see themselves as, oh, you know, this is important beyond just my business. This is important to the state. And it's worthwhile for me to put my name and my company's logo on this testimony to support it. But as Chris said, you know, our real value is going to be tackling those difficult issues, getting people in the room together, kind of creating that brave space where people can be vulnerable and agree to, you know, moving forward with a shared understanding of what it's going to take to really decarbonize our economy and build resilience in Hawaii. Definitely understand it and see that as well. And that's that aspect that the legislature, it's always the same people who are always there and people already know who's for what. So shaking it up a bit, getting people to collaborate together for the greater good to make sure climate justice is a priority for Hawaii, as well as Moana New York and the Pacific and the world is absolutely crucial. And HEC's multi-sector climate coalition does support the creation of a favorable environment for climate progress. And what I do appreciate too is addressing the systemic barriers that have impeded progress so far. And by leveraging the influence and these collective capabilities, there's really a strong foundation now on which these climate initiatives can succeed. Chris, would you like to share a bit about some of the success that you've experienced so far and how you decide the next steps of what could be positive going forward? Yeah, I think that, thanks, Josh. I think that I'm most encouraged by the level of engagement and that includes the engagement, as Jeff said, in the testimony, the support that we've been able to provide for critical initiatives. And as Jeff said, just because we were able to reach broad agreement on these issues doesn't make them any less important. They've been very important and very impactful and the support for the Green Bank last year in particular and some other things that we've taken on. That said, I think that we have to get into some of the stickier issues, as Jeff has indicated. And there are a handful of them that we've identified and we are soliciting interest from our participants to get involved in these discussions and that's where we're moving next. In fact, we're going to be convening in the next week or two some discussions around some of these more challenging issues. And we certainly need to do that. But we also need to find ways to draw more businesses in. I'm proud of the numbers of businesses. And as Jeff said, we've got some of the largest businesses, some of the businesses that are most significant in the decarbonization movement involved. But we really need to get everybody involved over time. And so we're looking at ways that we can do that. We're looking at the possibility of forming some industry specific groups where folks in the same industry can get together and talk in a safe space about how they can tackle some climate issues in their industry without interference from outside, but sort of comparing notes about what they can be doing, whether it's in the development space or the restaurants or hotels or other transportation businesses. And so that's something that we're going to be moving into soon. We have to continue to build trust and more and more in person engagement. Keep in mind, it was still pretty tough to convene when we first formed this coalition. We did have an all hands in person engagement or convening last year. But most of our meetings are virtual and we need to begin to spend more time in person and building that trust. The last thing that I'll say, and I'll actually hand it off to Jeff to elaborate on this, is that we need to celebrate the successes that we've had. And one of the things I think we need to realize is that we have achieved a great amount. And we've also got a lot of partners and participants that are doing some amazing things in the climate space. Some that clearly predate our involvement and some that I think we can maybe take a little bit of credit for inspiring and motivating to take these actions. And Jeff has some thoughts about how we can more proactively, not only recognize what we as a coalition have done, but try to recognize the great work that's being done by a lot of companies and other organizations in our community. Oh, and it reminds me of all the important work that Jeff had done with various NGOs here in Hawaii at the state legislature. But then also I think we're both at the UN Framework Commission on Climate Change, Conference of Parties in Glasgow, where I'm assisting Tuvalu government and you were doing some amazing articles as well, because that's always in our mind of what impacts us, but also our Pacific neighbors. And Tuvalu, of course, is just right down the Pacific Highway down there. And you could go there with Hokulea just straight down. And it's an important space with no high mountains, with very little aspect of being above sea level. And that's always weighing on our mind of what we do. How does that impact you as well as you think about the successes of what we're doing so far with HEC, Jeff? You know, I know we're short for time. So I'll just say that I mean, it's actually critical with what he does. We can be that vanguard and that model for our Pacific neighbors, but also for the globe. And I think just to build off what Chris shared, to me, I mean, climate is a it's a technical challenge, economic challenge, policy business challenge, but ultimately it's a social challenge. And we really hope to provide that sort of social framework for new norms around how we need to behave in this climate era that we're living in, how we can reduce our carbon emissions, build resilience, and essentially provide that social proof that we can go together to solve our climate challenge. Very true. And if we look at the HEC Climate Coalition, it does ensure an equitable transition to a climate-resilient economy, society, and environment for all of Hawaii's people. And what's so important is that really taking action on climate isn't just a commitment. We appreciate how HEC Climate Coalition understands it's our collective kuleana for what we can do and how we can go forward together. So thank you both for joining us. And more importantly, for all that you do daily to make sure that we can see Hawaii as a leader. I know, Chris, you've done amazing things with the Unitar Seafol that aspect of bringing together universities. And Jeff as well, the Residency Hub meetings and other aspects just show some of the beginning seeds that have been planted, but the roots are running deep about how we can make Hawaii a leader and make sure that we continue our collective kuleana for a better planet. Mahalo, Nui, and thank you both.


Hi, I'm George Cao and in this short video I want to give you a simple ongoing launch or enrollment plan to get enough clients in your business. Let's say that and then hopefully as I'm talking here you'll enjoy the background. I'm in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. This is Stow Lake, beautiful right? The bridge as well. So let's say you launched once your services and you still need to get more clients. What do you do as an ongoing enrollment activity? So let me give you a three month cycle. Here's a three month cycle that you can keep using just cycle through these three months. And let me know how it goes. Let me know if you have any questions. So the first month, first month is you contact your warm contacts about the fact that you have openings in your client base and you're looking for the serving them etc. Your warm contacts include your previous clients if you have any people you've already worked with in the past. Chances are they need more work with you and so you contact them about and I just did a video prior to this one was about how to contact your previous client. So watch that one for more information and read the notes there.  And chances are you have some of those people. Maybe they emailed you or they contacted you through your website or through social media or something like that. So follow up with them. But part of your warm contacts is also your email list. So maybe you have an email subscriber list. Time to let them know that you have openings in your client base that this is the kind of things you do with your clients. You listen to bullet points. You give maybe two or three testimonials and you offer a free complimentary call to experience what it's like to work with you. And also part of your warm contacts still part of the first month. Now you could use this as a two month cycle, two month duration if you want. But depending on how quickly you work, your warm contacts also include your social media. So wherever you're active on social media, you post to your Facebook or your LinkedIn, Google Plus, Twitter, Instagram, etc. So that's the first cycle, the first month or two. The second cycle or the second month or two is you contact leaders of online groups and offer yourself up as a resource on your topic. You're not trying to sell them anything, but you go to certain online groups like Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups where you've noticed that there are people asking the type of questions that you love helping clients with. And so you basically offer, contact the leaders of those groups, the manager, even the active people and say, hey, just want to say thank you for facilitating this awesome group. And what I want to offer myself is as a resource, if you happen to have anyone contacting you or posting questions about this area, please let me know. I'd love to answer as many questions as I can and just help people however I can. And of course, if it's really right for them to continue working with me as a client, I'm also open to that possibility. And you might even mention that commissions is available if it's appropriate for them. Otherwise you just want to help as many people as you can. I have a specific video and more details on that that I'll link to about the strategy. And then the third cycle, the third month or two is to use LinkedIn because LinkedIn is a business network to contact people who might be referral partners for you. So people who are other experts, other businesses that probably have an audience that are similar to your ideal clients, but that business themselves don't serve the clients in the way that you do. So contact them about say, hey, if you have anyone who needs this kind of service I offer, keep me in mind. I'd love to help them out as much as I can. If they're right, I'll serve them as a client and then you can broach that commission conversation if it's useful. So here's the key to all this. And then let me end the video in this way. Don't, especially for all three of these cycles. Don't stop at say, well, George, I contacted 10 people and nobody signed up. No, you've got to contact 50 people in any one of these cycles before you make a judgment on whether that strategy worked. So hear me out. 50 people. And I would say also every 10 people that you contact, you need to change your message just a little bit to test out. It's called split testing. Test out whether a different message would be even more effective and helpful. So 50 in each of these three cycles before you make a judgment on whether this is a good strategy for you. So let me know if you have any questions open to your updates as well. And until the next video, I wish you well.


All right, welcome. This is Siobhan Murphy and Sherri Johnston from ERLC. We're educational consultants and today we're going to share a short video clip on planning with the literacy and numeracy progressions. To accompany this video, there is a learning guide that has some key understandings, questions for consideration and discussion, as well as additional resources. So let's get started. So let's talk about why we want to use the progressions. Three great reasons why they are helpful to our work as teachers. One, it's a really wonderful tool to support what we're already doing in our classroom. So shouldn't feel like an add-on, should just feel like a resource that we can consult. Second great reason why we'd want you to be familiar with them is because a lot of teachers would tell us, you know, I'm not really a literacy or numeracy teacher. I'm not a math person. I'm not a language arts teacher. I'm an art teacher, a phys ed teacher. And the great thing here is that they're going to help all of us really zoom in on the kind of skills we need to develop in our students across the curriculum. And finally, it provides a common vocabulary amongst all of us K to 12. All right, so let's look at a scenario. So this is a learner outcome from art from level one, so grades one and two. And we're asking the students to mix primary colors and lighten and darken colors. So some of the literacy skills or understandings that they're going to have to have is thinking about the background knowledge that they bring. So do they understand, you know, primary colors and how you mix them together to lighten and darken, which also leads into vocabulary as well. Do students understand those terms, lighten, darken? Do they understand what we mean by primary colors? So they're going to have to have that knowledge and understanding in literacy in order to help them achieve this outcome. We also think about them having to communicate meaning and their understanding and how that plays into the literacy skills they need, as well as numeracy skills they need when they talk about and think about the quantity of the colors of paint that they're using and the different measures that they're using as well. So let's look at another scenario. This one here is grade five health. And so here we're asking the students to identify and implement an effective time management plan. And so some of the things that we can think about to support students in their understanding of this is really making sure that they have those numeracy skills of time and time management and the importance of how that's going to play into them meeting this outcome. So some of the things we can do as teachers is posting the schedule for the day and having students refer to it to develop their numeracy skills regarding time. And also it can be helpful to explore information shared in many different forms lists pie charts so incorporating again some of those literacy and numeracy skills and looking at how we spend our days in our school and the activities and how long they take. So really tying in key literacy and numeracy skills to develop the students in their understanding of this health and life skills outcome. So let's move up to a grade seven science class. And sometimes the progressions can be helpful when we look at where we know students have difficulties and challenges. And one topic in that program is all around forms of energy. And we're asking students in the skill outcomes to conduct investigations into the relationships between and among observations gather and record qualitative and quantitative data and then of course analyze it. So what I've often found working with these students is that they really struggle to make good sense of data and charts. They're not great at extrapolating and understanding the big ideas there. So this sends me into the progressions because this can guide me on some some modeling and some lessons that I can build to make sure they're going to be successful. So if I look at the literacy side of things I can start with helping kids acquire that info piece and going to get some more information about alternative forms of energy. We can talk about how to organize their texts and we can help even with some of those comprehension strategies making sure they can read the information they're finding and make sense of some of the online materials. The numeracy side can help students with the data set and showing them different ways that data is shown looking at how data can be skewed just helping them interpret and represent that quantitative info. So hopefully in the end they're able to to go in there do their inquiry show what they know. I might need to help them with some background vocabulary. I might need to help them evaluate websites or even just looking at how to read a legend on a table. Speaking of which if you ever find that a math glossary might be helpful learn Alberta created one and it goes K to 12 and you'll find lots of definitions there that could be helpful to your students. So lots of tools to access. If we look at grade 10 social studies here's another example and here they look at issues and this one's all around to what extent should globalization shape identity and 1.9 is quite interesting because it talks about evaluating the efforts to promote languages and cultures. So you're thinking okay how can I help students to zoom in on this outcome and if I pull my progressions I can really look at even the very first one around what does the word evaluate mean? How can students show me they understand this? What do they need to do to evaluate? And if I look at inquiry questions I'm going to want to seek examples of how cultures are promoted and what impact is resulting. So I need them to get in get familiar with a whole wide variety of texts and sources. Hopefully I can find materials at different reading levels to make sure all my students are successful in their inquiry learning. I definitely want them to learn how to evaluate perspectives who wrote the texts and the knowledge any sources that we've used. I probably going to really want to zoom in on background knowledge builds a vocabulary like what does linguistic revitalization mean and lastly I really want to help them organize what they've been learning and craft that persuasive essay so they can evaluate promotion efforts. Now not to leave a numeracy out you know I quite possibly want them to dig into background knowledge and how do we read the data and how do we read these efforts to promote the language and culture. So really being able to understand what they're reading. I might need them to have some kind of a multi-tiered classification system so we might need to find examples of that. I want them to know the best way to display what the data is that they've come up with and make informed decisions and hopefully be good to get it critically assessing claims or arguments and lastly we might need to revisit how to visualize analyze and represent these relationships between two or more of these things. So lots of literacy and numeracy skills that I can develop as we're working on this outcome. So let's talk about progressions in subjects that we often don't think about in terms of literacy and numeracy. So we've pulled some great eight examples and looking at the outcomes we would invite teachers if you're working with a group to take some time and talk through these and figure out how could the literacy and numeracy progressions help even in outcomes where initially the sense would be I'm not sure where they fit here and yet I think you'll see as you have some rich conversations there's lots of sub skills that we can go after to make sure students are successful with these outcomes. From previous group discussions teachers have talked about health aid and they've zoomed in and said you know it can be really helpful to help students understand the difference between describe and explain and making sure they know it conformity and descent means. So lots of conversation around that task in those terms. In drama eight teachers have commented on this idea of interaction and what interactive interacting effectively and constructively looks like and helping the students co-construct those concepts and in phys ed we can talk about this personal effects of exercise on the body. So how are students going to analyze that? What kind of data are they capturing? How are they going to show their analysis? So lots of ways we can take these progressions and shape some of the modeling and the many lessons that will likely need to put in place to support the students. All right one of the things that we wanted to share with you today is that currently in development is the curriculum development application so the CDMA and this is where the new curriculums are going to be presented as they are released. One of the nice things in here is that this application will allow teachers to link learning outcomes across various subjects as well as see how the competencies work in and the progressions. So just knowing that the progressions will be embedded in the new curriculum and then as I said you'll be able to see how they link from subject to subject. We would like to thank you for your time today and just remind you that that learning guide is available to support this video. Again to highlight some of the key understandings and questions to consider as well as any additional resources. Thank you for your time.


Hopefully everybody is now seeing my slides. As Stephanie mentioned, I'm going to report on RDA, Digital Humanities Outreach efforts. Here's the Twitter tags for Research Data Alliance myself if you want to tweet during that talk. I assume that most of the people on the call at least have an inkling of what RDA is, but I will just give a very brief overview focusing on the things that are most relevant for the outreach efforts I'm going to talk about. So the Research Data Alliance is a global initiative with over 3,000 members from over 100 countries. It's aiming to build the social and technical bridges to enhance open sharing of data, and the RDA vision is research and innovators openly sharing data across technologies, disciplines, countries to address the grand challenges of society. So those are the official marketing speak of what RDA is, and what I think more importantly is what is RDA hoping to do and hoping to produce, right? And I think there's two main points here. One is social infrastructure, and to that end, RDA is providing a global forum for communication and collaboration, and a wide interdisciplinary community of experts working together to identify problems and build solutions. And I think the interdisciplinary point here is really important because particularly for the humanities, it's an opportunity to reach outside of our discipline and get access to experts from other communities. There's also technical infrastructure, right? And so RDA is investigating, documenting, and leveraging existing infrastructure solutions, but also building new solutions for public apps. And I'm going to share a couple of slides from Fran Berman, the head of the RDA US organization, because I think they really present a picture of what infrastructure is in other areas than data, right? And so if we look at what infrastructure is made up of, there are maybe six key areas, right? There are adopted policies that state what you can do and what we agree to adhere to. There are solutions for systems of interoperability. The classic case here is that we can all plug our laptops in, no matter what country we're in, because we have these handy little gadgets that allow our adapters to work with the plug sizes each country has. So it doesn't really matter that every country doesn't adhere to the same standard here, but we have the brokers and tools that allow those things to interoperate. And similarly, there's common types, standards, and metadata that are common sizes for pieces of wood and for buildings, that sort of thing for wires and cables. All of these things are infrastructure in the physical world, and there are analogs in the data world as well. Then another key point is it has to be sustainable, right? There has to be some sort of economics that enable us to keep the solutions that we're building going. The community has to adopt the solutions. A traffic light only works if everybody agrees to go on green and stop on red, otherwise chaos ensues. And then we also need to train and educate the people or the users of the solutions. So although these are not specifically data solutions we're talking about here, I think there's definitely analogs in the data world, but this is a good overview of where REA is focusing its efforts. But prioritizing this work and infrastructure can be challenging, right? Because there are barriers to data sharing and collaboration all over the place. It can be difficult, particularly when professional cultures aren't supportive, and in the humanities this is maybe a key point. Funding is often limited, and this is not specific to the humanities. It's limited everywhere, right? But humanities maybe is often at least in the U.S. I know it's more challenged than some of the heart sciences. And with limited funding you often find yourself competing with people that you would really like to collaborate with. There are lack of incentives, lack of enabling environments, lack of infrastructure. All of those things can make work on infrastructure difficult. And I really love this quote that Fran has here from the Syracuse Mayor that talks about infrastructure being overlooked because politicians don't really want to spend money on academic development because you don't cut rooms for water mains, right? So it's not exciting to talk about infrastructure where you can't have a big party when you have a water main, but that's what really matters. And that's the case for data infrastructure. It's hard to make the case to do something innovative when it comes to infrastructure. But I really believe that working on collaboration is an innovative activity. So there is lots more to say about RDA. We can talk about the way the organization is structured into working groups and interest groups. But most of it, and talk about specific outcomes that we have so far, but that information is all available on the RDA website and is not the main point of the talk today. So I wanted to give you a brief overview of what we're doing with RDA and then really go into the motivations and objectives for doing some outreach from RDA to the digital humanities community and vice versa. So for me this is really a personal crusade. I guess you might call I got involved in RDA because I really felt that the digital humanities were underrepresented. And I wanted to make sure that I could make use of whatever solutions were being built. So one key motivating factor here is really to raise awareness within the currently mostly scientific RDA community of the relevance of humanities use cases. And then going the other way to raise awareness within the DH community of the activities of RDA and how they might be relevant to human estate and needs because after all we do have data even if maybe not all humanists think about what they're doing as being producing or using data. It is data. And you know to the outcome of this to raising of awareness really ought to be then to involve, to result in work, right, engaging, increasing the engagement by humanists in designing, developing and adopting the interdisciplinary solutions for data sharing. So that's really at its heart why I'm involved in these outreach efforts and why my colleagues that I've been working with are as well. So what are the incentives for people to participate in RDA and participate in a global community such as RDA? And I think that some of the most important incentives are the ability to reach wider audiences. So having your work sustained beyond the life of a single project. And this is particularly where I think the multidisciplinary aspect comes in because we work with solutions that support not only the humanities but the geosciences, astronomy, we have a much wider community that's working to sustain those solutions and a wider range of projects that would be depending on them, ensuring their life beyond any one project. And you know resulting in progressively better use of the dollars or euros or whatever the money we're talking about is and less of it would go to redevelopment infrastructure and more to the actual scholarly research that's the point of all of the data production. So how do we realize the potential of RDA? And this is one of the things too that I think is unique is being a bottom-up organization it's really up to the people participating to make what they will of it. Either we do the work together and we produce solutions or we don't. So it really depends upon engagement and if and how we leverage the community. Each of us as individuals and the organizations that we work for, I think that within RDA the working group structure and its focus on producing adoptable outputs is really essential to driving to real solutions and not just talk. So I think that by participating in a working group I can be assured that the work that I'm doing is important not only to me but to the other people who have committed to adopting it and it results in much more real solutions I think. And it offers an opportunity to look outside the usual list of suspects for collaborators to build sustainable solutions and this gets back to the point I was talking about before. So I think that we can collaborate with somebody in astrophysics or astronomy or sciences and it not only results in more sustainable solutions but more scalable and more robust solutions as well. So that's the background of RDA and the motivation for the outreach activities and now I want to talk a little bit about those activities in more detail. We started really this effort with a humanities panel at the plenary in San Diego in March. This was an outreach from Humanities to RDA and followed that up with a workshop at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in May and then most recently we had a meet-up at the DH 2015 conference in Sydney in July. So the humanities panel at Plenary 5, we asked the panelist to answer two sets of questions. First, what is different about digital humanities infrastructure and more specifically can those differences be described in terms of use cases? Because getting back to the producing adoptable outputs, we need to have real use cases behind the things we talk about so that we make sure that what we're doing is solving a real solution. The other set of questions, are there specific RDA products or recommendations that our digital humanities projects can adopt now and if not, why? And particularly to look at the question of whether the requirements in data models are different and that whether that's contributing to a lack of adoption or lack of ability to adopt the work that's happening in RDA. The participants were Peter Wittenberg from the Max Planck Data Defeat Center, Nigel Ward from Nectar in Australia, Ted Hewitt from the Sharks in Canada, Ian Fortune from RPI, Centre Columns which were caused by the Ireland and myself. You can find out more about the panel on the RDA website as well. The key takeaways, I think, that all of the panelists represented this perspective in different ways. The question of what is the same across digital humanities and the other disciplines? I think the key point of agreement here was that core infrastructure really is the same, both in terms of the needs of the infrastructure, needs for persistent identifier solutions, data type registries, metadata standards, identity access and authentication solutions, et cetera. At its core, these core needs are not really different across disciplines, across the humanities and the other disciplines. But additionally, the challenges around core infrastructure are often the same as well. A lot of redundancy, similar solutions for the same problem, lack of long-term commitment to sustaining the solutions, lack of recognition of the work on supporting data sharing and interoperability, lack of incentives and support. So these things really look the same whether you're talking about the humanities or hard sciences. But there are some differences and the differences are really in the nuances of the data. Data formats may be very different and in the humanities in particular you may have many more types of non-born digital data that we have to accommodate. There's probably many more copyright and access complexities in the humanities, both data and metadata may be subject to copyright restrictions or maybe social, cultural issues around access that need to be considered. Semantics are different and at its heart an understanding of what data means may be different in the humanities and in the sciences. We're not only talking about spreadsheets and rows and columns of numbers but texts and annotations and various other types of data. There are cultural language complexities, data may be in a variety of different languages and a variety of different cultural assumptions behind its collection and use. The research methods may be different and in the humanities there are very often non-linear and recursive and not just about collecting data but about the work of doing curation and producing data as a result of curation and research in this sort of recursive, collaborative, long-term way without a clear beginning and end point. And in the humanities there are often very traditional reward models where digital and data production is not really at the forefront of people's minds. So some of the key takeaways from the panel were really that I think that from within RDA the case for involvement in humanities seems clear. There doesn't seem to be a question that it would be useful and valuable to have humanists participating in the discussion. So it did feel a bit like preaching to the choir and it was clear that we needed to do outreach to engage the humanists themselves in RDA activities. And further that we needed to find ways to enable and incentivize this work within the context of RDA because in order to enable people to participate they would be funded and incentivized to do so. So these last two points really fed into the next outreach effort which was an outreach from RDA to the humanists to the other direction. And that was our Baltimore workshop that was hosted at Johns Hopkins. The RDA perspective objective on this was to learn more about the disciplinary needs of digital humanists with regard to data infrastructure and data sharing. But sort of the underlying objective was really to have this discussion about how to engage the humanists and how to enable that engagement. So participants were invited to share these cases for infrastructure and the RDA-US leadership presented the RDA structure and went into some detail on the outcomes of RDA to date. We had a roundtable discussion following this and then asked for a reaction from the funders. So just to give you an overview of who participated, the workshop itself was hosted by Johns Hopkins University and RDA-US. The RDA-US leadership was present. We had U.S. funders of humanities there, the National Endowment for the Humanities Institute for Museum of Library Services and the Mellon Foundation all had representatives. And we had participants from a number of projects. In addition to doing the providing an overview of RDA activities, we also presented a sort of a deep dive look at the relevance of some of the RDA outcomes for the humanities. Because I think this question of how to make the value proposition clear is still one that we're struggling with a little bit. So I took one outcome, the data type registries, which is one of the first outcomes from RDA and provided a little example, mapping it to some of the use cases that the participants provided to explain where I saw the value being provided by this type of solution. And so some of the questions that I feel could be answered through the use of data type registries as well as other pieces of infrastructure or things such as answering questions about data that should be considered at the beginning of the project or as you work on a project, questions about visualizations and how to aggregate questions about copyright. And then also how to manage your data. Do I need to create a new data type or can I use one who else has data like this? These are all the types of questions that having solutions and infrastructure solutions like data type registries might help answer. So some of the key discussion points after the presentations. Collaboration was a topic and the fact is that collaboration is often difficult because humanities projects and funding are often invested in nationalistic or localized pursuits. So here we are talking specifically about global collaboration. And we spent some time identifying some grand challenges that might serve as unifying issues to spur collaboration. For example, interoperability of link data was a key point. Link data is a very actively pursued topic in the humanities right now and there's definitely a lot of work to be done there around ensuring our interoperability. And another grand challenge that could be considered would be ways to address the plurality of languages found in the data. Some of the other discussion points. We talked a bit about the RDA working group structures and how they should account for needs of the DH community where infrastructure may already exist but need to be generalized for wider use. And I think this is not a humanities specific topic. In any discipline, there are bits of infrastructure that exist and that could be generalized more fully to make it a wider, more scalable solution. So working groups might not need only to design new solutions but look at existing infrastructure and generalize it. The other point was really that RDA needs to make its value proposition to humanist more clear. Communication is really a challenge here. Talking about data is often not that easy to do, especially when dealing with traditional humanists. And we all agreed that training is really essential to engaging humanists in other suits. One of the most interesting parts of the discussion was really the feedback from the funders. The funders felt that RDA does really have the potential to prevent the reinvention of the wheel syndrome, which is something that's obviously a great interest to them when it comes to efficiency of spending with money. They felt that projects could perhaps look to take advantage of RDA's role as an entry with disciplinary global authority providing guidance and a stamp of approval. So for example, leveraging an RDA working group structure to ensure projects are producing and using sustainable solutions. We talked a bit about how it could be the type of thing that going forward in our funding applications, we talked about presenting solutions to a working group or leveraging a working group to put the stamp of approval and how that might spur funding activity. Other feedback from the funders was that RDA really does need to help tackle data publishing and copyright challenges in order to be relevant, particularly in the humanities. And there was some thought that preservation needs could perhaps serve as a unifying factor for DH projects. And here in particular, libraries were called out as having an important role to play, both on preservation as well as in providing training. So that's really the takeaways from the Baltimore workshop. There was no concrete actions determined from the outreach activity, but participants were encouraged to sign up and become members of RDA to explore participating and working in interest groups. And I think more importantly, it was really good to have this audience with the funders so they could begin thinking about how they could leverage the work of RDA to support funding of infrastructure. So the last outreach effort that I'll talk about here is the meetup we had at the DH 2015 conference in Sydney. I think Rick Mason helped me organize this, and we had an informal lunchtime gathering with about 10 to 15 attendees. It's always difficult when you're competing with lunch to get a good crowd. But it was interesting that most of the participants had not really heard of RDA before. They really had only a very big understanding of what RDA was doing and how it might be of interest to them. I think the people that came were mostly drawn by the topic of infrastructure and the opportunity to have a chance to talk a little bit about what they thought needs of infrastructure were. It was pretty clear that the researchers do not yet have a clear view of how their work benefits RDA and vice versa. So thinking about infrastructure in bits and pockets and not at the bigger picture is, I think, a challenge here. Everyone did, of course, agree on the importance of infrastructure and the need for humanist researchers to be engaged in defining the problems and solutions. We had some really interesting conversation on this point, particularly around topics of provenance and complexities of provenance when it comes to humanities data, as well as complexities around access and authentication and copyright solutions. In exploring those topics a little bit, it became clear that we really do have, from the humanities perspective, a point to provide here in helping ensure that the solutions in these areas are more robust because by considering the humanist needs, the solutions will have to take into account things that they might not have otherwise when looking at some of the more concrete sciences. So the end result of the meetup, participants were encouraged to sign up and join the working interest groups and we provided pointers to a few that were perhaps of interest. The other key takeaway is that the ADHD organization is going to begin to investigate ways to collaborate or participate with RDA. And I think that's a good thing and a good way to engage the humanist researchers a bit more. So what's next on the roadmap here? Going back to a point from early in the talk, I do really believe it's up to the community to engage at this point. Humanities researchers do need to begin to participate in the working interest groups of RDA if they want to have their voice be heard in the work that's being done there. Of course for funding, this is maybe a bit of a chicken and egg scenario, right? We want the activity that we're doing here to be funded but we really need to start doing it in order to prove its value. So I do think this remains a challenge but I also think it's something that we can work with and by starting the work and the momentum should pick up and we can begin to see whether or not it's something that's worth doing. So for those of you on the call who want more details on how to get involved, first sign up at the RDA website. It's free. You can start by exploring existing relevant RDA humanities activity. I've provided some links in the slides here. There's a more detailed report on the Baltimore workshop that you can access. Also from that same page you can access the use cases that were uploaded by the participants in the workshop and they're really interesting to take a look at I think. There is a digital practices and history and ethnography interest group that is the closest thing at the moment to a humanities domain specific group in RDA. And I think the approach they've been taking to this has been very interesting. They may have been doing some project share and reviews where they explore different solutions for digital humanities projects. And it's very interesting to me to see the approach the ethnographers take to exploring these projects. I will put a plug in here for the NASA PID collections working group of which I am a co-chair. This is a proposed working group not accepted yet, but I do think it has a large degree of relevance for the humanities. And this is about dealing with persistent identifiers for collections of objects, whether they're virtual collections or physical collections. There are a lot of different use cases that are of interest here. So I encourage you to take a look at our case statement and provide some feedback on the site about that if you're interested. Another interest group that I think is worth participating in from the humanities perspective of the data fabric interest group, which is looking at the big picture of taking the outcomes of RDA and putting them together to provide a full feature solution across the data fabric. And they've been calling for use cases from a number of different domains. And so that's an opportunity to present your use cases and to see what's happening across the other domains in this area. So I encourage you to add your use cases to start or join an interest or working group. And there's also a tab election coming up. So I encourage you to nominate yourself or a colleague for the technical advisory board if that's something that's of interest to you. I'm approaching the end of my term and I really do hope to see additional humanities colleagues participating at that level. I think that's now at the end of my slides and we can stop for questions.


Why health insurance, man? Because yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a good niche and we know riches are in the niches and all that, but how did that start out to where you're like, health insurance it is? Yeah, so the captive agency that I started with was it was health insurance exclusively. And so I made a transition from that to a more independent broker role where, and it was October, right, of 2017, right before open enrollment. I didn't, and in the middle of the annual election period for Medicare and I didn't have, I didn't have time to figure out Medicare and to go to sell in Medicare. I had a default to what I knew. And so I learned a few products very well and kind of stuck with that. And rather than trying to fit a bunch of square pegs and round holes, I found the product. I knew who that product was designed around, right? Like I knew that this particular carrier, this particular product was designed for healthy self-employed people that were paying way too much on the marketplace. And so I just took a kind of a hyper focus and it got me back to like a baseline income to where I could then start to transition into some of those niches or those other sectors of the industry, like Medicare, life insurance, group benefits, that kind of stuff. But I really believe that to get started in the insurance industry, you have to be, you have to be focused on one or two products, one sector of the industry. So if you're gonna sell Medicare, if you're gonna sell health insurance, learn health insurance and then kind of go from there because ultimately, whether it's health insurance or Medicare, you're gonna build a good little chunk of residual income that you'll have the time and availability to learn some other things. So for me, it might be engineering, it might be Medicare, right? It might be group benefits, most likely insurance. What's, say you have, we have someone watching and they're brand new. They barely know how to spell health insurance, okay? And if someone will, is coachable and they'll listen and they'll put in the work and do what you say, how likely are they are to actually make six figures that want health insurance? I think if they're all of those things, I mean, you started it off with could barely spell health insurance. So, you know, they do have to have- But they work hard, who cares? Well, hey, I mean, I was gonna say they'd have to have an above average IQ but I think I have an average IQ so I think they would just have to have an average IQ and ultimately that's the most important thing. You said be teachable, be coachable. I see people come from, you know, we see it a lot. We see agents bounce from agency to agency from different, you know, from Medicare to health to final expense, back to Medicare, back to, and they never actually focus but realistically, I would say that somebody that is focused and hardworking and coachable could make six figures in their second year and we're gonna see that this year with a lot of my agents that, you know, came on middle last year, still made $60,000, $70,000 last year and are well on pace for six figures this year. So, you know, and none of these people came from an insurance background, you know, or even a business background for that matter. If I went and joined your team tomorrow. We'd have to get a bigger office. That's true. And I didn't bring anyone and I just focused on health insurance. How much money would I make in your office, your system, everything else over the next 12 months? So, my first year in health insurance, I made 110,000s. I believe that you could easily make 109,000 but definitely under a hundred. That was a setup, by the way, because you said earlier that, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. I'm remembering, yeah, I knew where you're going at but I think you could, I mean, you could easily make six figures your first year. It's not uncommon. Well, I did it, cold, doorknock, cold doorknock and selling life insurance. Exactly, exactly. And I think that there's a bigger market for health insurance, which is always why I've kind of wondered why it's a smaller niche or why it's an underserved niche. I mean, there's a lot more people out there in the under 65 space that are confused. Then they're on, then are 65 plus. Yeah, and they're confused. I mean, frankly, like the people that are self-employed or the worst situation you see is like they left a job or they had great benefits because they wanted to take this business venture on their own or get into real estate or whatever the case is and they're like, yeah, so I had $1,000 deductible on my group plan. I was paying 50 bucks a month, what can you do? And we're like, there's a learning curve there. We gotta walk them through. Hey, listen, the under 65 world is not perfect for the self-employed but I always say, if you have 10 options and all 10 options are just okay, we've gotta choose one of those 10 options still, otherwise we're going without coverage. And so we're gonna always choose the best option that sucks the least, right? Because at the end of the day, it's insurance. Even if you're talking, and I'm very much a positive person, I think you've picked up on that. Dude, no doubt. But when you're talking about insurance, I think you've gotta understand you're talking about insurance and nobody's super pumped about buying an insurance policy, whether it's like the best plan in the world or not. They hope to not have to use it. They hope to not have to pay too much for it and they hope that it covers everything every time they use it. And that's just not insurance. That's not homeowner's insurance. It's not your car insurance and that's certainly not health insurance. So I think coming from a realistic point of view is absolutely what helps me in this industry. So you made 110 grand your first year selling health insurance. I did. I made 110 grand my first year as a broker selling health insurance. I made about 80 grand my first year ever selling insurance with a captive agency. Dude, that's freaking baller though. How many people do you know that can say that? Not many, and frankly, it's something that I talk about often because I never, I always thought that I would just do construction, manual labor, like I didn't think that six figures was really in my wheelhouse and now we're talking about seven figures. Yeah, dude, come on. You're gonna make seven figures next few years. Yeah, next year, next year. Boom, 2021. We're speaking in to exist. 2021. I don't know how I'm gonna do it, but we're gonna do it, right? Six more months to figure it out and then we'll go for it. We'll figure it out. Where were you going with that? Why did you think six figures was never in the cards for you? Like, do you think that's an upbringing? Do you think that's a mindset? Do you think it's a scares, like I don't, you know what I mean? Cause... Yeah, and you know, it's definitely, it's an upbringing thing.  It's just kind of, and not to say they're not doing very well. I mean, some people in my family are doing really well doing manual labor. Absolutely, nothing wrong with that. It was, for me, just, I don't know, man. I guess I didn't know my worth.  And so, you know, it wasn't insurance that made me feel like I could make six figures. Honestly, it was just kind of overcoming some of that, some of that, those limiting beliefs we talk about. What were yours? Because we talked about that a lot lately and I've been picking up on that. What were your limiting beliefs? One of my limiting beliefs was that I felt like I was gonna do construction my whole life and, you know, $40,000, $60,000 a year was gonna be it for me. And I could be happy with that, you know? And certainly I could, but it was, I don't need to make more than that. Who cares? What's the point, right? I mean, I'm happy here, right? I don't need money, I don't need, and I still feel that way. How did you flip the script on that, though, because now you at least have the inner drive to make that a reality? Whether you really care if you make two million bucks or not, you still want it. It's gonna sound really bad, but it's not, it's not, like I'm not money motivated exclusively. Obviously, like most people, money is motivating, but I feel as though money is kind of like a scoreboard. Dude, I was, swear, I was thinking scoreboard over here. I swear. And so as soon as I turned it into a competition, you know, to go after more and more, and ultimately it's what we're talking about. It's breaking through that next limiting belief. I had a meeting with my team on Wednesday before we came up here. This is about more than breaking that six-figure mark. This is about more than, this is about breaking through that limiting belief so that we can see what's behind that curtain and what's the next limiting belief. Because I believe, I don't believe I've arrived. I mean, we're talking like I had limiting beliefs and I don't have limiting beliefs anymore, but I do, I mean, I deal with it every day. So explain what that is for those that don't know what a limiting belief is. So a limiting belief would be anything that, anything that is in your mind that is going against why you couldn't reach your goal, right? So like, you know, so I can make six figures this year, but I've got to do this, this and that or I've got to overcome this, this and that. And so, I mean, we had a conversation earlier with one of my agents and it was breaking down that goal and what you actually need to do to achieve it. And I think a lot of people, they're, they just don't, they just don't break it down. How many people struggle with that misconception we were talking about on the phone with your agent about how most agents feel like they need to know everything before they do anything? Yeah. And I call that like getting ready to get ready, right? Like it's like you're- About to get started. Yeah, like, well, I'm about to get started after I get this taken care of, but like, and it's, and that may be a limiting belief. Oh, dude it is. It's kind of like that first call fear. Like you don't know anything about insurance. I have found, and this is, I mean, this just came to fruition big time with one of my new agents in the office.  Like, I mean, he was killing it when he was passing the lead off, when he didn't know anything about the product, right? When he didn't know anything about insurance really. He was just, yeah, he was just finding, he was just fact finding and finding the right client. And then he was passing that to, you know, a closer we'll say, and we closed a lot of deals for him. And then as soon as he learned a little bit about the product, he started to divulge that and to come out with that right away. And it took us another month to get him back to selling again. And we kind of had to go back to some of the basics, but that ultimately, the more you know about the product, the more you're likely to get yourself in trouble by saying something silly.  So don't misunderstand me. I'm saying if you have somebody, and most agents do, right? If you have somebody that can help you close those sales, lean on them, lean on them. And if they're not willing to help you, then run. Somebody, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And if they're not willing to be there for you to help you close those first sales, run, run. This dude is a beast. Definitely follow him, stay plugged in, come to 8% and meet him, all right? I'm speaking into existence. He will be there. He's already got a ticket. He's ready, come meet him. I'm gonna keep finding amazing people like my buddy Brad to interview, to put on camera, and for you to learn from. If you've never subscribed, come on now. Take a second, do that. See you on the next one. Hey, if you love this interview, and I know you did, I got another one that I know you're gonna love too. It was how to write a billion dollars a billion in a month. It's right there. Click on that video. I'll see you over there. Because what we're starting to find is that there are plenty of ways that you can open the door with Medicare supplements, right? Oh yeah. You guys know this.