Good morning. Aloha, Pa. And thank you for the beautiful music this morning. It was so uplifting and inspiring. Before I begin my remarks this morning, I want to take a moment to thank the souls who put this conference together, who have been working so hard to see these days finally be here. I also want to appreciate the people who cleaned this room last night, who cleaned it this morning, and who prepared it for us to enjoy today. And I want to acknowledge the ancestors who owned this land before we did, particularly the Juanño people. Like many of you, I am agitated. I'm agitated because of blatant injustice, overt racism, really clear sexism, and general meanness towards each other. But I've been agitated about those things for a long time. What has changed is that that same agitation is now pretty widespread. What's changed is there is increasing recognition, awakening, and learning. And as people come to understand just how bad we have been for so long, people are becoming more and more agitated. The questions, the conversations are painful, and they are real, and they are exciting. We have a golden moment now, unlike at least in my lifetime we have had before, to engage in really tough stuff, tough conversations, tough learning, and to ask really important, sometimes dumb, sometimes new, sometimes insightful, and sometimes wise questions. But it's the journey that we're all in, which is incredibly exciting. We are waking up. You know, waking up is not a pretty process. And I'm talking, so Baha'u'llah, the prophet founder of the Baha'i Faith, has told us since the mid-1800s that humanity has been a sleep on a bed of heedlessness. We have been asleep. For Baha'is, these are quotations that we read a lot, and we kind of think, yeah, we're asleep, and we know that, and we know about the bed of heedlessness it's talked about often. But think about what that looks like to be slowly waking up from it, because this is not a normal eight-hour sleep. This is like hundreds, thousands of years' sleep.  It's a different kind of awakening, isn't it? Your head might hurt. You might feel dizzy when you first get up. You may be a little confused, like, where am I? What time is it? What happened? And your breath will stink, and your hair will be really weird, and it's just not pretty. And when some people wake up, they wake up very confused and in a slow state, asking people where they are and who they are. Other people jump up and get in your face and say, good morning. I'm here. And they seem to forgot that they didn't brush their teeth yet, and they haven't fixed their hair, and it blows over everybody who's been awake. And that's what's happening. We are awakening from the bed of heedlessness that Bahá'u'lláh tells us we have been laying on for an extremely, extremely long time, and it is not pretty. In fact, it's traumatic. Some of you who are in psychological fields may know that in recent times, there is a new psychological term, in fact, being coined. It referred to people who are awakening right now. And I won't use the term because it refers to a politician, but there is a certain thing that's happening that is actually being clinically diagnosed in psychological terms. Many people are traumatized and confused, and we have been warned that this is the case. In a specific message to America, Shoghi Effendi spoke about the onrushing calamities, the cataclysmic forces that are to convulse human society. Being convulsed is an intense and not particularly pretty process. He says that humanity, heedless and impenant, is admittedly hovering on the edge of an awful abyss, ready to precipitate itself into that titanic struggle, that crucible, whose chastening fires alone can and will yield its antagonistic elements of race, class, religion, and nation into one coherent system, one commonwealth. The hour is approaching. When the most great convulsion will have appeared, I swear by God the promise day is come, the day when tormenting trials have surged above your heads and beneath your feet saying, taste ye what you have wrought. This is not comfortable. This is not easy. It's not peaceful.  And it can't be because fundamentally we know that the whole thing has to blow up. The whole system has to change, from its foundation to its structures, to its ornaments, and everything in between. This process of disintegration must happen as painful as it is. In the same message, Shoghi Effendi says that confusion and breakdown of human institutions and the ensuing epoch during which the shattered basis, it will be upon the shattered basis of a dismembered society that is grotesque. A dismembered society is to be recast, its forces reshaped, redirected, and unified. That is how it's going to all come together, only after completely falling apart. And the thing is, there is nothing we can do about it. There is nothing we can do about it. This larger transformation, the shifts that are happening and the fundamental structures of the world, the disintegration process is a part of the larger plan of God. And it is not something that in our small daily efforts we're able to stop. But there is a lot that we can do. And there is a lot that we must do. And this is what I'll spend the majority of my time talking about in this presentation. Bahá'u'lláh has a very unique role to play. We're told, again by Shoghi Effendi, though powerless to avert the impending contest, the followers of Bahá'u'lláh by can, by the spirit they events and the efforts they exert to help circumscribe its range, shorten its duration, allay its hardships, proclaim its salutary consequences, and demonstrate its necessary and vital role in shaping human destiny. There, Bahá'u'llh, is the duty to hold aloft and undimmed the torch of divine guidance as the shades of night descend upon and ultimately envelop the human race. So we cannot stop the disintegration. We cannot stop the shadow, the darkness that will envelop the human race. But we can shorten its duration, allay its hardships, proclaim its salutary consequences, and demonstrate the necessary and vital role that this disintegration process is having in helping reshape human destiny. So we have a tremendous responsibility to do much in order to bring mercy to humanity during this very, very difficult time. The Bahá'u'lláhs believe that we have the blueprints for the New World Order. And this is rooted in the fundamental theology of the Bahá'í faith. As many here know, Bahá'u'llhs fundamentally believe that God, periodically throughout history, sends divine messengers, prophets, Christ, Krishna, Buddha, Muhammad, Moses, periodically to send God's word for humanity for that day. And when these prophets come, they are relevant. They are relevant to the time and the culture and the place in which they appear. And they update and apply in new ways the same basic teachings of the religions of the past. And Bahá'u'lláh has done this for humanity to today. Bahá'i's fundamentally believe that Bahá'u'lláh confirms and reiterates all of the spiritual truths of the past, but applies them to today's time in a unique way with really specific guidance that humanity needs now. And so all religions, for example, talk about love thy neighbor, love each other. But Bahá'u'lláh gets real specific about specific people who've had a particularly hard historic time loving each other and gives us guidance on how to do that. And this is the blueprint that Bahá'is are trying, failing, making efforts in order to try to apply to the world today. And this is our challenge. So to be clear, the spirit of the age has permeated globally. These concepts, Bahá'is do not have a monopoly on. They're not unique to the Bahá'i faith. But the prescription in its application is unique in the Bahá'i writings, just to give you a few examples. Race unity, for example. The world now, at least in the majority, has finally come to a place where it gets, for the most part, the general idea that melanin should not determine your inherent superiority or inferiority. If you believe that, and there's some people who do, you're on the fringes. But for the most part, humanity has come to this basic understanding. Without the Bahá'i faith, there has been this general understanding. But what has happened is that we don't know what that looks like. And we don't know how to achieve it. And the Bahá'i writings are really specific. They speak specifically to white people. Around the historic unconscious, often inherited subconscious sense of superiority that must be addressed in order for racism to end. It is specific with regard to what African Americans can do. It is specific with regard to what Bahá'i communities need to do. It is specific. And so while the general idea is now commonly recognized, people are hungry for specifics. Gender equality, again, the world has largely accepted the idea that it's kind of not nice to be violent towards women. We haven't, not 100%, but for the most part. It is now in the majority more normal than it was 100 years ago to accept that fact. And women are now agreed to have souls. It's generally accepted that we should aspire to some form of equality, but it is still very vague about what that looks like and how we should exactly implement it. But high writings are incredibly specific on this. For example, the teaching that a family, if in the very unfortunate circumstance that it must for financial reasons choose to educate their girl or boy must choose the girl. This is in the Bahá'i writings. It's specific. And we have many, many other guidance like that. Immigration, another issue. There used to be a time in our global history where people were dominating different races because that was the thing to do. It has now become generally accepted that we shouldn't dominate and annihilate an entire people. I said, generally accepted. Again, we're still learning. But on this issue of immigration, we do not, as a global community, have specifics to understand that. We do not, for example, understand what is in the Bahá'i writings around the earth, in fact, being one country and mankind, its citizens. And so we have this guidance and the question then is how do we work in our communities and in the world to try our best, not perfectly, but try our best to help bring these prescriptions to humanity and engage in social justice. Before I get into the specifics about that, I wanna make one thing clear. Affecting social justice is the primary purpose of the Bahá'i Faith, if we are confused.  So the House of Justice recently wrote, the issue of social justice is, as you know, central to the Bahá'i Revelation. Shoghi Effendi in 1941 said, movements for social progress and social justice as long as they are disassociated from both political and religious partisanship should be supported by Bahá'is. And because we have needed a lot of clarity on this in a letter in 2001, the House of Justice said to an individual believer, yet another concern you mentioned to avoid involvement in any form of partisan political action. This principle should not, however, be misunderstood. The program of the Bahá'i cause itself operates in the political realm to the extent that it is concerned with inducing change in public policy and behavior at local, national, and international levels. And in 2008, we were told by the House of Justice, and this is particularly pertinent to the Tahirih Justice Center's work, involvement in social discourse and action will at times require that Bahá'is become associated with the development of public policy. In this regard, the term policy, like the term politics, has a broad meaning. While refraining from discussions of policies pertaining to political relations between nations or partisan political affairs within a country, the Bahá'is will no doubt contribute to the formulation and implementation of policies that address certain social concerns. Examples of such concerns are safe guiding the rights of women, extending to effective education of children, curbing the spread of infectious disease, protecting the environment, eliminating the extremes of wealth and poverty, et cetera. And because we are still confused, just a few months ago, in a letter written on April 27th, 2017, the House of Justice clarified that the principles of non-involvement in politics and obedience to government far from bringing obstacles to social change. Our aspects of an approach set forth in the Bahá'i Writings to implement effective remedies for and address the root causes of the ills-afflicting society. This approach includes active involvement in the life of society, as well as the possibilities of influencing and contributing to the social policies of governments by all lawful means. Indeed, service to others and to society is the hallmark of a Bahá'i life, that we can be and should be involved in social change, social justice, and in the development of policies. But the reality is the part of the reason, I think, and we don't have clergy in the Bahá'i faith. And so what I offer is my interpretation that others may very well have different takes on. But my reading of the Bahá'i Writings is that one of the reasons that we are not to engage in partisan politics is because it is not radical enough. We are not simply about tweaking or changing a little bit or just having like a different party or having a new bill or a new law in place in order to heal humanity. Partisan politics is not radical enough. Bahá'is are interested in the foundational transformation of the whole understanding of who we are as spiritual beings. And that's what we're trying to change. And so to work in a realm of partisan politics kind of isn't really exciting enough. It's not radical enough because we're working on something far more fundamental. Justice, for example. The Tahiré Justice Center works on two fronts. We work to alleviate the suffering because by the way, you know, disintegration when something is crumbling, there will be people caught in the rubble, there will be people inhaling toxic fumes from what's happening in the decay, and there will be shards of glass spraying and there will be people who are hurting and people who need help. And we're told again and again in the Bahá'i Writings that we need to be a source of mercy and what the Tahiré Justice Center does is it protects and heals and helps women and girls who are fleeing human rights abuses. But we are also trying to do this other stuff around helping to influence law and policy. And our system is fundamentally flawed, our justice system. It's flawed because it's adversarial. And it's flawed because you need money in order to get justice. And that should not be. Justice is a divine right. Justice is the best beloved in the sight of God and it shouldn't be accessible only if you can afford a lawyer. And I should excite my lawyer. I don't hate lawyers. But I think there's a problem with some of them and the system in general. But we have to work on two fronts and so the system is this way, we need lawyers and we need to provide them to people who can't afford them in order to have justice. But then I am also working in legal aid, think tank, justice circles, legal services corporation and others in order to blow up the system. We are having conversations about why do we need lawyers anyway. In order to access justice, we should not be gatekeepers to justice. And there's a fundamental inequity that should no longer continue. That will take a long time I think, but it is a fight that we need to fight. So, we know that we have a lot, we know we can engage, we know we have to engage, we know what will not be pretty, we know what will be painful. And so how do we then engage? And this is where I'm gonna get really, really specific. My understanding of the Baha'i writings on partisan politics and what I have gleaned from it is that we have about six rules. I'm sure there are more. But I think in kind of linear ways, which is not always good, but in this instance I found six that I will talk about. And the bar is high, kind of painfully high, particularly right now for the period of time that we're living in. So, the first one is that we actually have to obey people and authority. And it doesn't matter what we think about them, or their sanity, or their personality, or their actions. We must obey our government and our leaders. Bahá'u'lláh said, what mankind needeth in this day is obedience unto them who are in authority. Bahá'u'lláh said this even as Bahá'u'lláh was prescribing a takedown in the whole system. What mankind needeth in this day is obedience to them who are in authority and a faithful adherence to the cord of wisdom. The instruments which are essential to the immediate protection, the security and assurance of the human race have been entrusted to the hands and lie within the grasp of the governors of human society. So, it's even more. We must not only obey, and this is number two. We must not only obey, but we must wish our government well, publicly, openly, without hesitation or sarcasm. We must wish our government well. The only exception is in the instance where we are pressured to deny our own faith. Abdu'l-Bahá says, we must obey and be the well-wishers of the government of the land. Regard disloyalty unto a just king as disloyalty to God himself and wishing evil to the government as a transgression of the cause of God. Abdu'l-Bahá lived at a time when despots were rampant. Dictatorship was the norm, and this is what he said. The third point of guidance is that we must not even discuss political affairs. Abdu'l-Bahá said the irrefutable command is that the blessed perfection hath given in tablets that the believers must obey the kings with utmost sincerity and fidelity, and he hath forbidden them to interfere with all political problems. He hath even prohibited the believers from discussing political affairs. Now, we don't have confession in the Baha'i Faith, but I'm gonna confess right now that that's hard. Number four, we should not judge as just or unjust. How our government, we should not just, sorry, not judge, just or unjust, our government, and we are warned that if we do it, we'll cause disunity. We're told, we are not the ones, as individual Baha'is, to judge our government as just or unjust. For each believer, would sure behold a different viewpoint, and within our own Baha'i fold, a hotbed of dissension would spring up and destroy our unity. We must build up our Baha'i system and leave the faulty systems to the world to go their own way. We cannot change them through becoming involved in them. On the contrary, they will destroy us. Okay, number five, we cannot judge how they came to power. So in a letter on behalf of Shogye Effendi, he said, we cannot start judging how a particular government came into power. And therefore, whether we should obey it or not, this would immediately plunge us into politics. We must obey in all cases except where a spiritual principle is involved, such as denying our faith. For these spiritual principles, we must be willing to die. Okay, number six, rule of engagement, is we cannot ridicule those in power. We cannot debase or belittle them. It is not for Baha'is, the Universal House of Justice says, in offering social commentary to vilify specific individuals, organizations, or governments, or make attacks on them. Indeed, the guardians specifically cautioned the friends against referring to political figures in their public remarks, at all, whether in criticism or in support. So we must do this not only to avoid political arguments, but also for the maybe more important reason, which is that to ridicule any soul at all is to demean the human race because we are all one family. Oneness means all of us. Specifically, Abdu'l-Baha said, even though we find a defective branch or leaf upon this tree of humanity, or an imperfect blossom, it nevertheless belongs to this tree and not another. Therefore, it is our duty to protect and cultivate this tree until it reaches perfection. If we examine its fruit and find it imperfect, we must strive to make it perfect.  We must make them knowing. Some growing upon the tree are weak and ailing. We must assist them towards health and recovery. If they are infants in development, we should minister to them until they attain maturity. We would never detest and shun them as objectionable and unworthy. We must treat them with honor, respect, and kindness for God has created them, not a Satan. They are not manifestations of the wrath of God, but evidences of his divine favor. God, the creator, has endowed them with physical, mental, and spiritual qualities that they may seek to know and do his will. Therefore, they are not objects of his wrath and condemnation. In brief, all humanity must be looked upon with love, kindness, and respect. For what we behold in them are none other than the signs and traces of God himself. All are evidences of God. Therefore, how should we be justified in debasing and belittling them? Uttering anathema and preventing them from drawing nearer unto his mercy. This is ignorance and injustice, displeasing to God. For in all his sight, all are his servants. And we need to mean this. I wanna just share very briefly a story personally. I and my work at the Tahiri Justice Center have been regularly humbled by meeting people who because of the news and newspapers, I should not like. And then I go into meetings and had one a few weeks ago, located near Pennsylvania Avenue. And I was shocked by the humanity of this person and the deep interest in learning. We were explaining to this person things that, I wish someone in his position understood, but he didn't. So we were explaining what undocumented means, what illegal means, what the immigration process in fact is people's constitutional right and legal right to apply for protection in the United States. And at one point, we were going on and on, he was listening intently, he was nodding, he was asking probing questions. And then we had a little bit of a break in the conversation and he said, stop. I'm shaking and you're blowing my mind right now. And I'm feeling really overwhelmed by this truth and I'm realizing I have been wrong. And he said I need a Diet Coke. And it was weird because it was a little bit mid-sentence of our mid-sentence. And we stopped and he got a Diet Coke. He came back, talked about how much he loved his grandchildren and then said, okay, tell me again what's happening to children at the border. He was awakening. He will not be a saint overnight. I don't know if policies will change right away, but what I know is that we are all human. And that we all are on a process of search and learning. Now, there are different people who have patience and the ability to teach at different times. But everyone is worthy of being talked to and learning. Okay, so how do we practically speaking navigate this line? Which right now is harder than it has ever been before. At the Tahirah Justice Center for over 20 years, we've been with relative ease able to both in optics and in substance remain a nonpartisan organization, have the respect of both parties. At one point, we received a call from a Republican committee saying they were gonna give us an award for helping quote unquote male order brides, women who are suffering abuse from men that they met through international marriage brokers. And then two weeks later, we got another call from a Democratic committee saying they wanted to give us an award. We called and explained to them that we were neither Democratic nor Republican and we refused both awards because the optics wouldn't have been what we wanted, but we were grateful they were both equally confused. And it was a line that we've been able to go down. But I would say that has become harder in recent times. It has. And so we have to be more careful and we have to be more deliberate and we have to be more conscious and we have to be more strategic. And there are a few things that we are doing. So public messaging, we're having to be careful in ways that we are not. We are having to have people who serve on our board. And I should explain, you might be wondering why do we care so much? The Tahirah Justice Center is a Baha'i-inspired organization. We are transparently and overtly Baha'i-inspired. We are applying Baha'i principles and we are clear about that. But we are not directly governed by or funded by the Baha'i institutions. We are independent. We have a separate board of directors. Most of our board are not Baha'is. Of our 72 staff, less than five are Baha'is. Most are not. All of our clients are not Baha'is and our work is done without regard to religion. Our work is done in a spirit of service. And so, but because we are Baha'i-inspired and we're trying to apply these principles, we have this obligation. The week after the election, just this past year, and it was coincidence, it wasn't on purpose, we gathered all of our managers who came from all four of our offices, Houston, San Francisco, Washington, and Baltimore. They came to Washington for a management team retreat. And the first day was hard. There was a lot of emotion. And one of the management team members who was not a Baha'i said, in moments like this, and particularly as a Baha'i-inspired organization, I want to ask that we go back to our scripture because we need centering. And she was right. And I was like, why didn't I think of that? And so I spent that night, stayed up late, pulling together all the Baha'i computations that I could on the issues that we needed to deal with. And we sat there in like a Ruhi book, study circle style for two hours the next morning, reading these quotations and just talking about them. And then we said, okay, now it's time to get back to our strategy and what are we gonna do on our programs and on our policy advocacy. And one of the management team members who was particularly in pain and particularly emotional and feeling rage, an incredible emotion after this moment of reflection and deepening started the conversation and said, I did not understand how we could remain nonpartisan and do this work, but now I do. Now it is clear to me. All that matters is the oneness of humanity and that is the job of the Tahirih Justice Center for the next four years. And so we know that we can be centered in seeing the bigger picture rising above the petty partisanship that exists, the frustrating laws and policies that maybe we see and we can focus on what's important. We can focus on oneness. We can focus on unity. We can focus on collaboration, consultation, on listening and collaboration building. But the bar is high. We have to be very careful. Our public messaging needs to be extremely careful. We are no longer signing on to letters that a lot of our colleagues are leading because of the emotion in the letter that we need to be disconnected from. We're deliberate about coalitions that we join in other organizations that optically we may be looking like. We are cautious about money we accept. I got a check, a large check from somebody who I did not know and it came in an envelope on the front of which had a picture of the Statue of Liberty in a Chador. Full kind of a Afghan looking Taliban-ish covering. On the inside, it said thank you for stopping the shariafication of America and here's $10,000. And she was speaking specifically about a child enforced marriage initiative that we have where we are protecting victims of child marriage. But in fact, most of our clients are not Muslim. They are Orthodox Jews. They are Christian. They come from a wide range but she had a stereotype in her mind about what that work was entailing. I called her and I tried to explain to her that we love Muslims and we respect Islam. And we are not in the business of quote unquote stopping the shariafication of America which isn't happening anyway and I tried to explain that to her. And she said I understand but her tone made me think that if I had seen her in person she was winking at me and wasn't completely understanding. And so I told her that we were grateful for her support but she was not supporting us for what she thought she was supporting and we would not accept her money. And there are other instances where we have done that but we need to be clear in our optics and in our substance that we are working for the oneness of humanity and we are not against or for any particular subgroup. Consultative methods and promoting them within coalitions helping to check the air of superiority that can come from people of certain educational backgrounds certain racial backgrounds and certain social justice backgrounds. There is a righteousness and a superiority that Tahir has become known for helping to moderate. And we will talk to anyone who will remain friendly to us even while some other organizations are refusing to talk. Shoghi Effendi clearly says that we can boldly and fearlessly stand up to oppression while remaining friendly. We can. This may seem strange or odd to those of us who have been raised according to traditions long established by the norms of the old world order. This was in 1941. We paused to question common approaches assumed by most social justice activists and we are deliberately mindful about internal healing. So in order to be externally nonpartisan we have to be internally nonpartisan. And there are things that we do in order to moderate that we try to create safe spaces for people to emote for people to vent. We have once a day a stretch and breathe half hour because we just need to breathe sometimes. We have paid for therapy every single staff person at Tahirah can go see a therapist for free because some of us need that in this work. And when something catalytic happens we voluntarily offer a moment of prayer people gather together whether it's black men who are suffering in Baltimore that particular day we all gathered for two hours just to pray. There are moments when we need to pause and feel the pain of what's happening around us and if we don't do that work internally it will seep out and agitate it in frustrating ways. We integrate into our training of staff how to be nonpartisanship. We have a five point guidance for our public communications that need to be adhered to in order to be nonpartisan. We teach consultation versus debate which is really hard for lawyers to learn. We deepen on guidance around racism and the respective roles that we all have to play. We have an internal staff led committee on race power and privilege to continue on a monthly basis the work that we all have to do including those of us involved in social justice work. So we know that we need to be engaged in social justice. We know that we have lots of guidelines around how to do that while remaining nonpartisan. And then I've shared a little bit about some of the experimentation on that that's happened at the Tahirih Justice Center. Imperfect, we have made mistakes, we have learned from them and we're in a process of growth like all of us. But let us be clear that the true solution is not about the political sphere or the policy sphere. The true solution is this recognition of the oneness of humanity. Shoghi Effendi says, let there be no mistake that the principle of the oneness of mankind, the pivot around all the teachings of Bahá'u'lláh revolve is no mere outburst of ignorant emotionalism or an expression of vague and pious hope. It calls for no less than the reconstruction of the whole civilized world. This is what we are about and what would it look like if we truly understood the oneness of humanity? And by the way, the writings when you dive into this, it's not even about recognizing oneness and the fact that I am better off if you're better off and this interconnectedness that the writings talk about, it's even more than that. We're told as Bahá'u'llh to prefer others to ourselves. It's more than seeing our interests as mutual. It's preferring others to ourselves and what would that look like? If we got that as a civilization, what would our structures look like? What would our laws look like? I get really excited when I think about it because it would be amazing what that would look like if we understood that. Might we, for example, be willing to pay 14 cents more dollar more on a hamburger so that the person making it could feed their family? Maybe we would. Would we consider the fact that a minimum federal wage of $7.25 which translates into an annual salary of just a little over $15,000 is unfair to mothers who love their children and don't wanna have to work two jobs and never see them? Maybe then we would change that. If we recognized the oneness of humanity, maybe we would walk by the locked glass case in the grocery store of baby formula and stop and think. About the fact that baby formula is the number one most stolen item in grocery stores. More than alcohol, more than cigarettes, more than anything else. And in most grocery stores, it is held behind a glass case in lock and key, the big versions of it. You can get the smaller versions in the aisles. Stop and think about that. If you are working multiple jobs, you cannot nurse your baby. You don't see them enough. You do not have a pumping station nor can you afford a $300 pumping machine in order to keep your breast milk up. And so what you do is you feed your baby formula. They are in childcare. That even you know isn't the best for them. You are not seeing them as much as you would like to. But it is your only choice. And then a tub of baby formula costs $42. And babies eat a lot and there is no choice because babies can eat nothing else. What would you do? You may steal it. And it is the number one most stolen item in grocery stores. If we understood the oneness of humanity, if we cared about others more than ourselves, we would find that intolerable. If we understood the oneness of humanity, maybe we would use less water so others could, less energy so future generations have it. Maybe we would allow our property taxes to go to other counties, to other places where homes are not so expensive and the money is not flowing as much so that children in those jurisdictions can receive an education just as good as the children in jurisdictions with big houses. There is a lot that might change if we understood the oneness of humanity and if we preferred others to ourselves. So in closing, I want to remind us that it is fundamentally the oneness of humanity that will solve all of this. And partisan politics isn't even interesting enough. It's not radical enough. There is this fundamental change in how we view ourselves that is even more exciting and more important. And for Baha'is, it also means teaching the faith. Because we're told in the writings that unless we are actively teaching the cause of God, we are sharing this message and helping people understand spiritual solutions to the ills of humanity. Divine assistance is entirely cut off and that is an exact quote. Divine assistance is entirely cut off as the phrase unless we are teaching the faith. And so if we wonder why things are hard in our lives or in our communities, if we wonder why we're not getting as much divine assistance as we would hope, we may need to be teaching more. In a letter written to an American believer in 1996, the House of Justice talks about the faith spreading throughout America and says, however, as the House of Justice has been trying to get the friends of America to understand for some time, the necessary precondition to translation of our community's social vision into reality is a massive expansion in the cause. That's a precondition. Those who fail to comprehend the urgency assigned to the objective of achieving a large expansion have obviously failed to appreciate the moral imperative behind this aim. This was a letter written to an individual believer specifically on the subject of the plight of African-American men in the United States. So we have a lot to do, but it's gonna be okay. It'll be okay. It won't be safe. It won't be pretty. It won't be comfortable. But we've gotta get used to being uncomfortable. We've been really, really comfortable for a really, really long time. And like any muscle that has maybe a hatch your feet or is just really, really weak, the first time we use it, the first time we do all of this stuff that we've talked about, it will hurt and we will be weak because we don't have the muscles for it. We don't have the tools for it. We don't have the tools for being uncomfortable. We don't have the tools for having hard conversations. We don't have the tools for social discourse and action. We don't have tools for teaching the faith. We don't have tools for the oneness of humanity. There is so much we don't know.  And then that night, you won't be able to sleep because you'll be so in pain because of your new experiment. Your muscles will be throbbing and they'll be very sore and you might need drugs to get over it. And the next morning you'll wake up and if we're doing what we should do, we walk right back into the gym and we try again to use that muscle. And it's even more sore because we kind of heard it the day before. We're even maybe more sensitive, but it's okay. It's still growing. And we do that more and we do that more and we do that more and then we get muscle memory and we remember, oh yeah, I've been there before. We've had this conversation. Now I've learned, now I know better. Now I can do better. And we're growing and we're learning and we get strong and we get stronger but it will hurt particularly at first and it will hurt always so long as we are truly engaging and we're truly exercising. We will make mistakes and we'll have lots of opportunities to grow but that's part of the deal. And so I look forward to seeing you all in the gym. Thank you very much.


Okay, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event. Yes, you can call us a webinar, we don't mind, that we hold every Wednesday morning live at 10 a.m. Central Time. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, interviews, mini-training sessions, basically anything that is related to libraries, we'll put it on the show. We do record all of our shows as well, so if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's perfectly fine. You can always go to our website, you can find the recordings of all of our previous shows there. We do have speakers from the Library Commission, our own Nebraska Library Commission come on the show, and we do have guest speakers sometimes, from both in Nebraska and outside. And today we have a mixture of that. This morning we have some people on the line with us and some people next to me here. Our topic for today is library planning, a customized program for success, and some group of people here at the Library Commission and with some of our regional library systems have been putting together this plan to help our libraries get themselves up to speed and planning what they need to do, and they'll explain all about that. But I'll just do some basic introductions here next to me. I have Laura Johnson, who is our Continuing Education Coordinator at the Library Commission. Hi, everybody. And Richard Miller, across the table here, is the Director of Library Development, sorry. Good morning. And on the line with us right now, we have two of our System Administrators of Regional Systems here in Nebraska, Denise Harders, and Sarah Warnock here on the line as well. We may have another one on. We'll see if he makes it. Eric Green is our third that was going to possibly be here today. So I'm going to just go ahead and hand over to you guys to take over and do your presentation and tell us all about what we should be planning for. Who's up first? Hi. I'm sorry. My voice is not at its best today. I have a cold, but we'll get through this. We have put together a plan for planning for Nebraska Public Libraries because we have some new accreditation guidelines. As you may know, Nebraska has had an accreditation program for public libraries for, oh, what, 20 years. And so they were getting, the guidelines were getting a little old. And we had a committee that worked on them very hard for quite some time and came up with some new Nebraska guidelines for public library accreditation. You may have seen them, but these were officially adopted by the commissioners of the Nebraska Library Commission last Friday. So they are now official. We will be using them for the accreditation process. This year, you can take a look at them if you like here. And this is, I think it's linked to on our front page. Yes. It's linked to on our front page of our website. So what is the deal with the new accreditation guidelines? Well, they were developed by a committee of Nebraska librarians. We met for, well, over a year. Right, three years. To work out, you know, how. A year or three. What did accreditation really mean? And what did we, what was really important? It was felt that it was really important that the accreditation guidelines be more flexible. Because sometimes one library might not have something in one area, but they're doing really well in another area. So, and they're community based, which means that they speak to the idea that you're fulfilling your community's needs. And so that was felt to be really important. And this is what we've come up with to try to have that kind of standard for libraries. The committee were these people. And let's give them a big thank you. Big round of applause here for these folks. Because they worked very hard. This was not an easy thing to do, to try to work out what really makes a library a good library. And that's what they were trying to do. These are more flexible. In the former guidelines, you had to meet every guideline. In the new guidelines, you just, for each guideline, there are points that you can earn. And it's how many total points you get at the end. So, if you didn't quite make one guideline, you can make another and make it up. In the former guidelines, when we asked a library to have a particular standard, we had them in size categories, which are more, they were kind of arbitrary. But we didn't want to compare very small libraries with fairly good size libraries. So there were several size categories. Now, with these new guidelines, everyone is going to have essentially a customized category because they will be put in a category with the libraries that are about the same size as they are. And we think that this is going to be fairer. Then the former guidelines had the three E's, essential, enhanced, and excellent, which no one ever remembered, including us. So now we're going to call them gold, silver, and bronze. And we think, thank you to the Olympic Committee for that. And we think that that will be easier for people to remember. So what about these guidelines? Well, they are going to be in effect this year. This will be the first year for them, so we'll see. But the schedule is going to be similar to the accreditation schedules that have we always had in the past, which is about July 1st. Notices will be sent to libraries who are up for re-accreditation because, remember, accreditation is a three-year period. And so about 1 third of our public libraries will be up for accreditation this year. And then to the unaccredited libraries would like to try to be accredited. So you will get a notice around the 1st of July. Then around the 1st of October, we would like to have this all completed. People have wondered about, oh, how does this point thing work? Well, you'll see. All together, if you had everything that these guidelines requested of you, you would earn 275 total points. If you earn at least 250 points, you'll have gold. You'll be at the gold level, 200 at the silver level, 175 at the bronze level. And these levels will work as the levels did before in terms of there's slightly more state aid involved if you get gold level rather than bronze level or silver level. So there is a encouragement to do as well as you can. And to improve as you go along, which we thought was good. Now, when we talk about those peer comparisons, this is actually more confusing to talk about than it is to do. It's simply you rank all the libraries by size and you put the library you're talking about, target library, we'll call it, in the middle. And then you have some libraries bigger and some smaller. So the category is always really, the library is very closest to the library in terms of who you're being compared to. And these are the places in the guidelines where the comparisons happen. When we ask about your local income, we ask about your hours, your staff expenditures, your full-time equivalence of staff, how much you're spending on materials, what your circulation is, what your collection turnover is, what your collection size is, and your attendance per capita. Don't let the numbering system throw you. There are like five categories in the accreditation guidelines and things are numbered one. And then it's 1.01. So we try to keep them very, the numbers try to keep things straight, and they try to make sure that the, what am I trying to say? There's a logic. Yeah, there's a logic to it, but the order, the progression? Hierarchy? Hierarchy. That's the word, hierarchy. We need a resource. The hierarchy of, this keeps them in a hierarchy so you can see how things are related to one another. It wasn't meant to look, well, officially used. It's just, it was meant to keep things in order. We've already had a couple of questions. People saying, well, how am I going to know if I can make my peer comparison? What's going to happen here? Well, actually, the numbers that we will be using, oh, and that's an important part of this, too. We hope to have your application for accreditation pre-filled out with the numbers that you have submitted in the Public Library Statistical Survey. So then, of course, the Public Library Statistical Survey takes on even more significance. And it's awfully important that you do that. And that numbers get reported in very consistent ways. But you can look at those public library surveys. They're here on our website for you to download the numbers if you want so you can figure out where you fit in this. You can also use the IMLS, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, has a little thing, Compare Public Libraries, where you literally, it will compare your library to other libraries. So it will put you in categories. You tell it what libraries you want to compare your library to. So here are ways that you can always find out where you are in your peer comparisons and that will be a mystery. OK, the other thing was about these is they were very much community-based. The idea was that, yes, there probably are some important things about libraries that every library should have. In fact, there's a whole. There is a set of requirements that a library must have before they can even apply for accreditation. Things like, you have to be legally established while everybody's legally established. But how do you best serve your community? Some communities need some kinds of things. Some communities need other things. So we really wanted these things to be community-based if the library's fulfilling your community's needs and wants. So how do we figure that out? Well, that's why the guidelines require a plan. The guidelines are going to ask you to have a strategic plan and tell us what the objectives of your plan were in certain areas. So knowing that we were going to ask for a plan, we also knew that many libraries have worked very hard on strategic planning. And they have plans. Some libraries, for many different reasons, haven't quite. And they maybe are going to need a plan. And so we wanted to find a way for them to get a plan fairly quickly. And so what we did is we put together a set of worksheets or templates. And if you plot these worksheets, then you'll have a plan. Now, this is still not a complete walk in the park. But we think we've made it about as easy as we could. I'm going to show you these worksheets. Here's the first one, which is you plan to plan. Hang on. There we go. OK. Can everybody see it? OK. This sounds almost redundant. Let's plan to plan. But if you put together a schedule, kind of when you're going to do certain things, you know who's going to be involved. You're going to have dates when you really need to have it done. It is going to make your planning more successful. So you do need to take a deep breath and kind of figure out what you're going to do before you start planning. And you will. So this is the first worksheet. Goodness. Then the second worksheet is a community profile. Now, you may have many of these numbers. Your mayor's office may have them. Your planning department. Can you see this? Let's try that. OK. See if I work. Yeah. I'm sorry. OK. Can you see this OK? Yes. OK. So what we've done is we've just picked out the demographic items that seem to be important. And literally, you just fill this out. And we have said, here, for instance, education, we've asked from the AFF, that's American Fact Finder. That's the Census Bureau. The table that includes these things. So you just go to the American Fact Finder. You find your table. And they've simplified the American Fact Finder. There's new software now. And it's really very easy to use. And just fill out this form. It may look, I think it looks too formidable. But we thought this was better than having to decide what went and where you're going to get the stuff. Just fill out the form. Then we have Worksheet 3. And this is perhaps the most time-consuming part of the planning processes. Can you see that OK? Yeah. Because this is where you need to find out about the community needs. And there are, of course, a number of ways to do this, one of them just being observation of people. But you could have a community meeting and ask people. You could have focus groups or key informant interviews, which is you would choose some people who were either very typical of a particular group of people or people who were leaders in a particular group, say the principal of the school or the minister at a church, would be key informants. They could kind of tell you about the group of people that they represent what their needs and wants are. You can do a survey. But surveys can get kind of involved. But there are several ways to do this. And then what you do is you just record everything people say to you. And eventually, you're going to see that here are the same things over and over again. So you kind of take note of how often people talk about that particular thing. Then you put all the things in order by the frequency I've mentioned. And you write down the top 15. So there's 15 things the community needs or wants on the worksheet. Then we go to the library. And you already have a lot of information about your library again from your public library survey. You've already reported your circulation and your hours open and all those things about the library. So you can look at those. But then you also want to look at your strengths, weaknesses, and your opportunities and threats. Now, this is your SWAT chart. But what we've done is we've kind of categorized things. So if you have a strength in human resources, say you have a great group of volunteers, that's really a strength in your library. The weakness, well, maybe you really could use another staff person. And that's a weakness in human resources. So you kind of put that down. And you may not have strengths and weaknesses in all these categories. But you just sort of categorize your strengths and weaknesses. Then you look at your opportunities and threats. And these are things that are really external opportunities for your economy. Oh, an opportunity might be that there's a new plant opening in town. Well, that's definitely an economic opportunity more people coming to town. A threat, a plant's closing. Or I don't know, there's been a real difficult schism in one of the churches or something. So those would be external threats. And those would be things that might affect the library. So you just write those down. And this will kind of give you an idea of where the library is. Then, worksheet five, you look at the community needs. You look at what you think the library has. And you choose those needs that you think the library is uniquely suited to fulfill. And you try to figure out how you're going to fulfill that. And you have a goal and an objective in mind. And probably you're not going to have more than five goals. That may even be ambitious. But for the period of your strategic plan, and we think a strategic plan will probably last from one to three years, you will have goals and say what you would like to accomplish. Then, on worksheet six, you talk about how you're going to evaluate how well you did in achieving your goals. And this is really very important because, well, how do you know if you were successful unless you know how you were going to measure? And you do want to be able to measure things. So you need to know what kind of information you need to be collecting along the way. So at the end, when you get to what your measurements, you have the numbers you need.  Anyway, and then there is the final sheet, which is the strategic plan for your library. And that's simply a summary of the other worksheets that you put together. So it's not going to happen in one afternoon. It's not something the director can just fill out by himself or herself. But we do think that this will, with a little work from your board and from some concerned community members, you should be able to get this done fairly quickly within several weeks or a couple months. Laura, could this sheet be viewed as kind of a table of contents that they would use for the library? It could sort of be a table of contents that were sort of a summary of what the others are. Yes. But I thought we had the six sheets, but maybe it was important to put it all together in one sheet. So you had it. So you will really have a strategic plan that's one piece of paper. I'd like to emphasize a couple of things that Laura said. And we even want to have Denise and Sarah pipe in as well. One of the things that Laura said that is so important is that you choose goals that the public library is uniquely suited to fulfill or to meet. But one of the things when you're putting together the needs of the community, when you come up with the top 15, those aren't needs that necessarily relate to the library. But you do those first. Because if the library is meeting the needs of the community, it may be something that the library has never done before or is not doing well. So what you're doing is, and the reason she said you look at those and pick out the ones that occur with the most frequency is that then once you identify those, then you say, well, what could the library do? And the example that I always give, and those of you who've heard me say this are probably tired of my saying it, but I remember years ago when I was working and living in Missouri that one of the things that the branches of the St. Louis Public Library were doing was distributing rat poison in the city. And that's a unique role. I don't think I've ever heard another library do that, but they had branches throughout the city that were open more hours and evening hours and weekend hours than the city offices were, and so those became distribution points for that particular purpose. Certainly isn't a traditional library service, but it is a need that the library was meeting by virtue of the fact that it was open, the number of hours it was open. So be creative and open your mind about what it can do. One of the things that you have heard people say is that if you ask people what they want the library to do, they really usually don't know. They usually say, oh, I like to check out books there. That's what typically people think of, first of all, but if you as the library director and your board and your planning group actually investigate the needs of the community, first of all, that's the starting point. So that for example, if you've had a plant close in town and you have people who are desperate to find work and they need to know how to write resumes or they need to know how to apply online or they need to find out about unemployment benefits or any of those things, if you as the library will actually respond to that need, you're in a very strong position in that community to meet an actual community need. So do we wanna have Denise and Sarah chime in here too? Sure. Anyone in particular, first of all, I need both of them. Um, I've got to do it. Okay. Denise and Sarah, you're both unmuted, so feel free to chime in and say whatever. We actually have quite a few public libraries that are going to be going through this process this year. Here at RVLS, there's six public libraries and I know Sarah has quite a few more than that. I simply have 19 if I remember correctly. So I know myself, I've been working on scheduling workshops to go through the DVD that we prepared with the commission. Now that this is ready to roll, we really are working to get it out to the libraries. We'll be going over the DVDs, looking at the handouts that are explanatory sheets and also looking at those worksheets where you'll end up with the plan. I think it's important for the library directors to look at all of this information before using that with your board or with the community planning team. How about you, Sarah? Are you working with individual libraries? That's one process I'm gonna get started this week. So I think it looks like the regional library systems are going to be available to go through this process with you and we're going to help the individual libraries. Of course, the ones that are up for accreditation this year are going to be our top priority, but the other libraries that may not have a plan, it will be great for them to get started so that they're not in this short timeframe. Now I say short timeframe, we'll have until October 1st and that is plenty enough time to get this done that we will need to get started right away for those libraries. So we'll be going, be available as system directors to go out to the libraries, discuss it with the board, maybe even be a facilitator for the beginning stages of the planning process with your community planning team. This is going to be a little bit different process than it's been in the past, but the guidelines were reworked to make it more accessible to our small libraries. So that makes me very excited about it. And so we're going to be working through this process as a team. That's the intention here in RVLS and I know Sarah's working on that too, as well as the other directors. If Sarah doesn't say anything we should talk about again where the videos are and what the guidelines are. Well, we've all worked pretty hard to put together. I'm sorry. This plan for you, but if you already have a strategic plan and I know that many libraries do, if it has these five elements in it, then it can have other stuff too, but if it has at least a community profile, a community needs assessment, a library profile or assessment, the goals and objectives and an evaluation plan, then this will fulfill the requirements of the accreditation guidelines and you do not have to go through this particular strategic planning process that we have developed. We've just developed it because we didn't want to leave people wondering what they needed to do or what was next. But if you've already done planning, then you're fine. Let me add one comment to that. One thing is that when you look at the accreditation guidelines you will notice that every one of the accreditation guidelines except the very first one which says you must have a strategic plan, every one of those says which section of your strategic plan that addresses this guideline. So you will want to view those accreditation guidelines to see if those areas are all covered in your strategic plan. If they're not you may want to look at some modification before you actually have to go through the accreditation process. Now, we also, and Denise and Sarah have been very good sports about this. We made a video on how to do strategic planning. Denise and Sarah and Eric Green and Sharon Osega, all our system administrators and I and Richard made a strategic planning video which is linked to on our front page. This is a screenshot, a snip from our front page of our website. And you can go there and look at it. It's about, it's not quite an hour long. And it's made in sections. So you can use one section or you can look at the whole thing. And it kind of explains how to use these worksheets. It's being, it's processing right now. It's done. It is done. Okay. It's done. So it is available on our website right now. We also are gonna have some handout sheets on how to guide kind of things a little bit more about how to do certain things that will help you with the plan. So, and all of this will be up on our web, on our website because it's just gonna work better if it's on the website. I'm gonna try to put it up on the web but keep it as documents so that they'll really be filloutable. We'll see how that works. Look for a couple of blogs on both this planning process and on the guidelines themselves. One of the things that on that shot that Laura just had up there is that you'll see that the guidelines are also linked on our webpage. Those are guidelines that are not interactive because the way this is gonna happen is that Laura said earlier that we will pre-populate your statistics into the form that you will be using if you're applying for accreditation. Well, that means that each individual library that's applying for accreditation will have its own password because it has unique statistics on there. So the one that's on our website here that's listed that Laura's pointing to which says guidelines is basically a PDF of the guidelines but not the interactive form of the guidelines. The one other thing to mention about the guidelines are that there are some links that explain some of the terminology and the guidelines in cases and misunderstandings. So all of that should be very clear and we tried to build in as much as possible into the guidelines of explanatory material. I think you'll find that they're pretty straightforward. They are very different from the guidelines we've been using for the last six or seven years but as Laura said and as we've heard from our system administrators they should be applicable to your community. They do reflect the fact that you as the library are trying to meet the needs of your community. They are less prescriptive in terms of saying you shall have this and more directional in terms of what are your local needs and what do you have to reflect or respond to those needs. So it should be along with the whole idea of having a peer group that's closer that you're in the middle of it. We think they're more equitable in terms of the accreditation guidelines. At least that's our hope. But this first year is a test. If there are major things that don't work we'll have to do some modifications in them but we hope that you'll give them a try. We think you'll find them very useful for your community and the tie-in was planning will make them more useful we hope to your community and your library. I have a question. The sheets that you were showing here that these are just right on our desktop here we're showing they're gonna be on the website too for people to access them. Yes, cool. And we'll be getting them up, I hope, within the week. Yeah, they're not there at the moment. I know that. The video is there so you can start watching that. Yes, the video's there, it's ready to go. The guidelines are there but these worksheets are yet to go up. And we're gonna be interested to hear how people view this experience and if they think this works for them in terms of strategic planning but we really think that this is gonna hit them. It's gonna hit the high spots but we are gonna get, everybody's gonna get a plan and I'll plan they can work with them because we will need them in accreditation to know how you did with the strategic plan too. So this is gonna be something that you are gonna be working with for your neck through the accreditation period. We do have a question that just came in. Jessica Chamberlain from our Norfolk Public Library has a question. Since the accreditation forms will be pre-made for each library will I be able to see my particular library's guidelines and comparisons even though I'm not up for accreditation this year or will we only be showing that to everybody or here? I think what I'll say is we'll have to consider if we can do that or not. That's a very good question. So for right now you're just doing the ones that are up for, we may have to do that a little later. Yeah, because we wanna get these ones that are up right away. That's a good point because I think if we sent them not to everybody initially there would be some confusion about whether the library's up for accreditation or not. So that's a good point though. But you can of course go to the public library statistics or the library compare at IMLS to look at how your library compares because the numbers we're gonna be using are the ones that you've reported in your public library survey. One of the things Jessica that you know since you were assistant administrator before this is that you know that those statistics and the peer group statistics will change each year because they're based on last year statistics the final full year that we have from each of the public libraries. So that will change each year. But I did have a question from another library director saying, wait a minute, if I in the past I could look at the accreditation guidelines the way you've had them on your website and at least work toward that even if I was not up for accreditation this year. So we will take that into account. I think that's another issue we have to look at. Do we have any more questions? If anybody has any questions, comments or anything type them into the questions section of your GoToWebinar interface. As you can see from Jessica's I'm following that along here in the laptop so we can pass it on. Do you want to unmute Denise and Sarah? Is there anything else to... Denise and Sarah you guys are unmuted again if you have anything to add or share. Sarah did you have anything? No, I think we've gone about all that covered. I just think I have gotten questions as I've been out doing other workshops I've gotten questions and there seems to be some anxiety about these new guidelines because it is so different than what we've done in the past and also there's concerns about well I'm really small am I actually going to be able to get to the gold level and I think that was really making this a more equitable process and making those higher levels of accreditation accessible to the smaller libraries was part of the whole point. So I just want people to know as you go through this accreditation process is no, like Laura said it's not a walk in the park but it certainly is something that everyone can accomplish as far as getting a plan in place and then once the plan is in place then it's time to look at those accreditation guidelines and see where you fall. But it is going to be a real team process with the commission, with the system administrators and the library to get through this first time for sure and then we can work a little bit longer with everybody else. You make a good point Denise also and I think that the point that you made and Laura made earlier is that this planning is an important process whether or not you're up for re-accreditation or whether you're even applying for accreditation or not because you are trying to meet the needs of your community this should strengthen you and put you in a stronger position in your community when the funders come forward and say why should we fund you? Well, you can say we're meeting the needs of the community here they are, we have done this investigation we have done the SWOT analysis we have met with focus groups we have determined and heard from the community these are their needs and here's what we're doing those are what funders like to hear rather than give us money because we're the public library and we've always been here that doesn't hack it anymore so this is an important thing I want to go back to the accreditation guidelines for just a minute to thank the group that worked with us for over two years on those accreditation guidelines and Steve Batty who is the current chair of the commission did send thank you letters to all the members of the of the accreditation guidelines group because not only did they work very hard with us over the years with John and Laura and myself but they actually did that on their own dime or on the library's own dime because we didn't have money to pay for transportation or meals everybody sort of fed themselves it came on their own time, their own, their own dime so we really do appreciate what they have done it was quite daunting I think they came up with quite a useful document well we hope everybody will take a look at the at the video it was a very interesting experience for us and we're so photogenic you'll see you know we're trying to expand and use new media when it's appropriate and everything and Denise and Sarah and Sharon and Eric all came in it was a really good sport this is Denise there's a reason I am not an actor cameras are not good for me welcome to the club you look very nice on camera what did you think Sarah? I didn't bother eating that much I kind of fell back in some of my old high school future teens and I had to get up and do that oh so you had fun huh? I don't know if I could say fun well we hope it's going to be helpful to people we hope some of the handouts and the explanatory material will be helpful and filling out the worksheets we'll make this we'll kind of streamline this process and so let me use a metaphor that Laura used when we first started putting this planning process together and she said that we could go the route of doing the rather long and somewhat laborious task of a really intensive strategic planning process which if you look at some of the strategic planning process they'll say well maybe six months to do this or whatever the one before that said well it's going to take about a year Laura described the process that this group has come up with as the drive-in window approach as opposed to the full banquet approach we hope that this is useful that it will provide a structure for you if your library feels that it wants to do more or do this more extensively that's fine I think that's a good metaphor to use we hope it makes it simpler for you or at least digestible for you and that you can move ahead in your communities but please contact us contact your system administrators if we can help in any way as Denise has already issued the invitation we'd all be happy to come out and help you with the process we do have one comment from the audience it's very helpful thank you for doing it that's what I hope so but don't let this throw you up don't be afraid of it because it's not really scary when you get into it change is good it was cool to you on that maybe I haven't heard that before any last minute comments questions enter them in here questions if I stare and if not it doesn't look like anything urgent if you do have any questions as this process goes on ask you can contact your regional system offices you can call me you can call Richard there we go and we are interested to know what your experience is with this and what you think of it and if you just want to blow off steam about it because you're really ticked call me I'm cool with that but we really did do it because we thought it was going to be helpful and it was going to be a constructive way to approach the whole idea of accreditation so let us know it doesn't look like anything urgent came in well we were talking here so I think we will officially wrap up this session for today thank you very much Sarah and Lisa and Laura for coming and talking about this big changes for libraries in Nebraska but nothing to terrifying we hope lots of help available ask get what you need get your accreditation done thank you very much for attending this week's episode and it was recorded so it will be available afterwards if you want to listen to it again and see some of the things we're on here if you want to share it with any of your colleagues I hope you'll join us next week when it is our monthly tech talk with Michael Sowers once a month he comes on to our show and does he's the technology innovation librarian here at the library commission and once a month he comes on and shares any of the tech news of the past month and that will be next week and he has it will also have on the show with him Richard Byrne who writes the and maintains the free technology for teachers blog so if you work with teachers in your area if you are a library in a school this would be something really good for you sharing some of the things that would be good for teachers to use online so sign up for that for us next with us next week and also if you are interested in let's see Encompass Live is on Facebook we have a like button here for that so if you are a big Facebook user you can follow us on Facebook and we have announcements of when we have new shows coming up when recordings are available any links or anything that we find that may be related to any of the episodes we've had on looks like it's having trouble getting to Facebook at the moment but you can follow us there on Facebook so we definitely encourage that and look for blogs on both the accreditation guidelines and the planning yes on the commission's home page we have our blog here so they will be doing updates to that when they have all these things out there when those help sheets are put up the video is already available as we said it's right here linked and it should bring you right to YouTube where we host all of our library commission videos there is our Facebook page so as you can see here we announced when new shows are coming so definitely follow us on Facebook so other than that I think we are wrapped up for today thank you very much for attending and we will see you next time bye


My mom passed away in the mid 90s and my brother was in the early 2000s. At that point it was purely cytotoxic therapy and both of them had lung cancer, which you know in that time frame was terrible. 200,000 people diagnosed a year and very, very few survived a year and a half. And now due to innovations, it's gotten so much better with I think the anti-PD1s, the immunoculogy has changed it. So now 20-30% minimum of those patients have a long-term survival. They are in a long-term remission. EGFR inhibitors, precision meds, the same sort of thing. That standard of care has dramatically changed. Overall if you look in the United States, roughly 1.8 million people are diagnosed every year. And over the last 20 years there's been a steady 2% improvement survival every year. So now out of the 1.8 million people, yes 600,000 people die, which is tragic, but that means 1.2 million people are living. We're doing better.


If I'm wrong, but you were initially looking for $300,000 for 10% of your company, right? Yeah. So when they doubled that and then, you know, 25%, that would have been over double that. What was going through your mind? Was it ever a moment in your mind where you thought, maybe I shouldn't take this deal? Yeah. So, you know, being a shark tank nerd, I am, there's basically this girl who creates a, she has a shareable Google Excel sheet and she tracks every single deal on the show and bases asking price based on what the valuation is in the average deal, get your company gets cut in half on the valuation and an apparel companies, you know, on shark tank, it's not really open market rates at all. You're going to get a lot higher. You can raise a lot more, but going on the show, you're going to get about one to one and a half times your gross revenue. So I had this all pre-planned and valued my company knowing that I would go down to a 1.5 million valuation and statistically I would have to double that to be able to get to that. I kind of just kind of backed out a little bit to try to be like, hey, based on every other deal that happens on the show, I'm probably going to get, they're not, no one's going to come in there and be like, yeah, I'll give you 10% right away. I mean, maybe they could have, but I just don't, I didn't think like being like a niche golf apparel brand, they would like every single shark would be jumping at it. Like, I think it was going to be a very niche, like try to get maybe one or two offers on it. So I kind of backed out the deal knowing, going in that I would be comfortable going with 20% for the same amount. What is Robert like as an investor? How has he been helpful to you? How have you seen like the results come in? Yeah. So Robert is great. I'm actually seeing him, I think it's Thursday. He lives here in LA too. Yeah. He's provided, I mean, I think he's provided really high level thinking. We were talking about before we started, you know, moving the business to Arizona. I ran that by him and he was like, yeah, it's a great idea, you know, to save, to help, you know, save on taxes, on ops, really helps scaling the business.  And I was, I've been very like adamant of like, I don't want bad birdies sold anywhere online other than badbirdie.com. Just because we are, that's our main sales channel and we do have some customers that are selling online that were kind of phasing out and just kind of walking through that process, asking him feedback on that has been good. And then the biggest bigger picture, like I think we're talking on Thursday just about bigger picture, like, hey, our company is thriving during COVID, which is crazy and how we're going to continue to scale it. What are the next steps we can take to really develop a brand? I think for me, it's like I did this company for three years without paying myself anything. It's been scrappy. But now like Shark Tank's help just being where the company's at now, like this year was the year to kind of like prove the model. And it's now starting to work to kind of start scaling. And so now it's like, okay, we see traction. How do we actually start doing that? What are the practical steps? Like, where am I spending money? How much inventory should I be financing? Like how much in certain, I would say riskier marketing, like sponsoring a pro or doing a bigger media buy with the publisher? Like things like that. I think he'll be able to kind of help provide. And yeah, we're talking about it this week. So. Hey, everyone, thanks for checking out that clip. If you enjoyed it, be sure to hit the like button down below. And if you're interested in hearing the full episode, it's out right now on our YouTube channel. We've had a lot of great guests come on this show before, and we've got a lot of great guests coming up in the future. So hit subscribe so that you don't miss a single episode. One final note, we're always looking for new ideas and new companies feature on the show. So if you know of someone or know of a company, write us a comment down below letting us know who they are and what they do. We'd be happy to have them on the show. Till then, I'll just be here waiting for your comments. So, uh, see you later.


What's up everyone? It's your girl Kenzie here from Leighton Sports Cards and I am ripping two personal boxes here for Derek K We've got two 2022 Panini Chronicles draft picks football hobbies All right, Derek. Thanks for your order. Here we go. See we can get you He was at the fights last night and you showed him I saw those little sunglasses inside out of 149 chrysalovay Nice You've got spectra tj watt it's a honey badger That is to 99 Lawrence taylor A job. Oh, we have a karson strung on the optic and a jameson williams rickie college ticket john dottson Jason hill Got full coverage of david bell These plates and patches were the ones that I pulled the really sick one-of-one patches from Yeah, the higgins was So cool karson strong rookie like I had the whole sec patch on there. It was nasty erin rogers and isaias spiller optic The other one was a ridder one-of-one And it was the military bull patch people got a la ve rookie thibode We've got a matéo dorant auto Out of duke matéo dorant. I believe this is a stealer hit And I looked it up. I was like, oh Didn't know that jillan tolbert david bell and a hollow sam howl rookie out of optic contenders contenders They drafted some kids that they didn't want to need sounds like Sam howl got redemption John michi the third drake london out of 149 nice when they were on the red Falcons knew I'd receive it derek henry and david ajabo on the optic All right, let's see what we got here for you. Good luck. We have a anthony brown in-flight signatures red anthony brown Is the redemption there? We'll say a little bit more redemptions this year's chronicles than I think last year But overall it's it's 10 times better than it was last year for sure Out of 29 zone out of spectra kenneth walker the third Nice zone there kenneth walker the third problemar jackson johneamus nicobi dean and a red mac jones sick color match there That is out of 149. Is there any big big name for redemptions? I think was a drake london Um, we did pull a london. Well, we pulled one. I think auto I was a sticker and then there was a redemption as well drake london He's swift We've got a jone name on the red out of spectra. That's out of 25 drake london out of status johan dottson sam howl rookie out of phoenix and johan dottson optic Solid first box. They're free derek On the box number two. Here we go. Good luck there. Sam howl Up first we've got out of in case substantial swatches of damian pierce Damian pierce out of florida cmc johan dottson rookie and hollow dirrick stingley jr texans Third overall kenneth walker the third Lauren starbuck We've got from michigan to 149 david a job. Oh Hi, it's raven hit There you go out of 149 One of the steals of the drug Nice Nicoby dean david bell widermyre and hollow rookie widermyre on dottson Got a matt corral and a little bit print line straight through that you can see pretty clearly obj We've got out of nevada romeo uh doob stoves from nevada uh dk out of 149 charles woodson a lot of stealer uh Old schools dippado out of phoenix and a george pickens rated rookie Really excited to see what he does this year Stingley we've got nice. How about patch auto to 99 of johan dottson? Nice rpa there johan dottson Love that they put impeccable uh Kyle hamilton Williams we've got a kenny picket optic rated rookie and blue rated rookie optic kenny picket That's a beautiful color match on that blue. Wow Very nice that is 56 of 99 Very nice one there Look on ebay for someone else to be way overpriced, but usually how it goes berks hurts Got rookie of um zonovan knight Out of spectra to 99 zonovan knights Cup press long Jabbo and patrick mahomes and last five year freezer Pickens rookie kyle hamilton dak prescott to 99 Cowboys spectra rookie tray mcbride Cardinals there Traylon berks a jabbo a tyler goodson optic and a jaylon tulbert on the college ticket Alrighty derrick that'll do it for your two boxes. Congrats on your hints. Thanks again for hopping in We'll get these right out to you


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Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States. Thank you very much. Good morning and welcome to the White House. Please be seated. And my greetings to the distinguished members of Congress who've done so much to make this possible, this legislation that I'm about to sign. Dick Luger, Ed Madigan, Pat Leahy, and Kiki Delegarza. And special greetings to the Crone family, whose farm I visited not long ago in Decoyne, Illinois. That region of Illinois is among those hardest hit by the drought. But even in the midst of this trial, the Crones offered me their warm hospitality. And since you welcomed me to your home, I thought it'd be only fitting to invite you here to Nancy's and mine. Well, I know that there are a number of other farmers here today, including some who were visited by Secretary Ling and the Interagency Drought Policy Committee. And so welcome to all of you. The bill that I'm about to sign represents the largest disaster relief measure in history. According to this legislation, farmers who lost more than 35% of a crop will receive direct payments to help cover their losses. Livestock producers who've suffered losses in feed production due to the drought bill also receive relief. In all, hundreds of thousands of farmers and ranchers will benefit. The bill expresses a distinctly American tradition that of lending a helping hand when misfortune strikes. And there's another tradition that embodies one of our noblest political traditions, bipartisanship. Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle work together on this legislation in the understanding that the need to help our farmers rose far above any partisan politics. And I'm especially pleased that they were able to do so operating within our budget requirements. And I want to add my special thanks to my Secretary of Agriculture, Dick Ling. Dick, this is your bill. This legislation is helpful and generous, but at the same time it's not a budget buster since the drought will reduce the cost of our regular farm programs. To ensure the continued success of this important bill, we must stick to the principles I've outlined. Targeting assistance to the truly needy and emphasizing sound business decisions. That way we'll be able to keep costs down to the $3.9 billion currently estimated. You know, when I told the Croans about the trouble we so often have with special interest adding unnecessary costs to legislation, they said, let's save the Christmas trees for the 25th of December. Well, we've done just that. Congratulations to the congressional leadership on a job well done. Special congratulations to Secretary of Agriculture, Dick Ling, for his leadership throughout this legislative effort. But most of all, congratulations to America's farmers for the indomitable spirit with which they've been facing this crisis. This bill isn't as good as rain, but it'll tide you over until normal weather and your own skills permit you to return to your accustomed role of being the most productive farmers in the world. American agriculture is one of the great success stories of our time. As recently as 1949, a single American farmer could feed 19 people for a year. Today, a single American farmer feeds 120 people for a year. American products are shipped around the world. Through all these decades, despite drought and misfortune, American agriculture continues to succeed. So thank you. Thank you all. God bless you. And now, let me get to signing.