I direct common grace ministries, which is a faith-based nonprofit in northern Indiana. And TechSoup has been a foundation for us for many years. All of our windows, we have several things that we've used over time, QuickBooks, when we reinvented our accounting system, we're actually invented it several years ago. TechSoup was there for us. And I don't know that we would have been able to do that without TechSoup. So we are a huge fan, and thank you very much. Thank you, and thank you for sharing. And when you use QuickBooks, are you using it to manage grants or just manage donations? Pretty much everything accounting, everything that's tied in. We do have a grant calendar that we set up kind of as a reminder for ourselves. But we have been able to, before we put TechSoup in place and before we were able to do that and get QuickBooks into place, we had everything on spreadsheets and no real connection with our accountants. And so it really helped us to overhaul. And we've had a 300% increase in our bottom line. And I fully believe that doing a better job of managing that and managing, communications with our two offices through our Windows programs, that has all played into our successes that we're experiencing now. I agree. And you said the keyword managing. So it's some work that you have to put in. Thank you for saying that. All right, did we get the gentleman, Steven? Is he able to come and join us?  So we're in the process of putting in place a new strategic plan and we started rolling out to the company. But what's really underlying it for us is a focus on getting out of this, the nonprofit starvation cycle, right? We spent 50 years underfunding, under supporting, making do. So it's interesting. I have to admit that in an earlier life, I was a consultant. So one of the things I did is I reached out to some consultants and really in some work that the bridge band group did and just looked at it, read it and said, yeah, this is the problem with the starvation cycle model that they talk about with large nonprofits they work with. So really what we did is we kind of tore apart the organization, made a big investment in technology and now we're ready to reap the benefits. So we figured out we have to grow our revenue by about at least 30% which given the fact that so many other agencies are scaling back really isn't that hard because we have a lot of unserved people in the state of Oregon. So if we get to that number with the investments that we made then we know we can get a sufficient return to be able to fund our operations from our services and our grant making then really becomes focused on projects. So we wanna, the state no longer funds some artistic work. We are now going after a grant to bring that program back because it's so popular with our clients and that really is a big change. So getting the revenue up is number one. Number two is a really a focus on better developing our people which we couldn't do before until we did this. And then finally, the third part of the plan this is really just a simple plan is to complete the investments that we've made in technology and processes. And TechSoup was a huge part of this for us, right? But we put together, it's been a two-year process to change our technology. $300,000 budget cost us just under 300 all 100% grant funded. We actually spend less for software state of the art software thanks to TechSoup then we used to pay for software that ran on XP computers and was unsupported. That alone was mind numbing to us. And the result of that is that we've got a plan that enables us now to pay a living wage with the only agency out of 60, 70 in the state that pays a living wage. So, you know, it's been a success story here and I think we're really thankful that we ran into this concept of the starvation cycle that kind of gave us a path out. So even though we didn't pay the money petty thank you to the consultants at BridgeBand for giving us a model and a path forward. That's beautiful. There was a lot of questions in chat room.  So we serve, we say people with diverse abilities that is a diagnosis of intellectual developmental disability and we focus on day services and employment and we do this across. We used to just serve the Portland, Oregon area we now serve most of the state of Oregon. That's an expansion that is gonna take us about a year to grow this part of our organization about 30%. Again, because other agencies are pulling back they don't have the funds and we're being asked to step in and we're fortunate now to be able to do that because of this change. I heard you say a couple of things and Robert asked that your hand raised you talked about getting your revenue up you talked about so his strategy we're sharing strategies, getting the revenue up to focus on better relationship in people. People, that's who we need to build our nonprofits volunteers, donors and then complete your investment that you made in technology. So that's awesome. Steven, they once know about the starvation cycle. I'd never heard of that the nonprofit foundation cycle. I've never heard of that. So it's a concept that was put into writing by a group called Bridge Band and they typically work with huge foundations international nonprofits and things like that that if you know the consulting world they grew out of one of the largest consulting firms in the world and in Bain and company. And the concept is really simple. I'm just pulling up a sheet here but the funders want us to have minimal administrative costs. So that puts pressures on nonprofit to underfund administration which then leads to us in addition misreporting because we're underfunded. We don't have the data. We're not reporting it correctly. So now the funders are going, well, I can't trust the data and you get into this loop. And that is called the starvation cycle by the Bridge Band group. And it is, I think it's a really accurate description. And it's, I didn't even realize when I first started nonprofits that we were living it. It gave me a vehicle to think and talk about why we are where we are and why we can't pay a living wage and why we can't better support our clients. This is great. This is why I love EDechat for moments like this. You cannot get this anywhere. And thank you Stephen for sharing that. Robert, we're so glad you're here. Go ahead and unmute yourself and feel free to share. I'm coming from about 45 years of experience and fundraising, which is not for you to go well. Most of that is from a pastoral experience. Now, when you've got a congregation to go to, it's a little bit different than when you're going to from a nonprofit sector. And so the nonprofit sector is totally different. And so what we're doing this year is going and building relationships. The corporations are great, the grants are great, but we're realizing it's the individual that's going to carry us through. And we know what that starvation cycle is. I think it was during the Bush administration that somebody said, you don't let a good disaster go to waste because during the disasters, when our funds come in, that's when people give, they don't give to you whenever there's not a disaster because they don't think about it. And when it comes to raising funds, I came to a point this year at the end of last year that I had to say this, hi, my name is Robert and I'm a dummy because in raising funds, I was looking at it all the wrong way. I noticed all these organizations that was out there. In fact, I had signed up with TechSoup a long time ago, never have utilized it. I don't even know how to use it. They asked, I went and looked at it the other day and they were asking me for a number. I have no earthly idea what that number is. And so I've got an email to them to find out what it is. I didn't even know I could get stuff through TechSoup. And so here I am under utilizing some stuff that we could have been utilizing that we could have used for a long time. And so I'm just now getting into the game saying, you know what, there's stuff out there we can use and I'm just trying to learn from other people, things that we need to learn from other people and realizing that it is about the individual, not about doing it all alone by yourself. Yeah, yeah, this is great. I'm so glad that you came on and we have a group with the faith-based leaders. So we have a webinar coming up in a couple of weeks called Faith-Based Tech Connections. But what you just said is what I'm seeing a lot of faith-based organizations, especially pastors, having to pivot from being, you know, inside the church, giving tithes and offerings to now being more out in the community, serving the community, which means you have to learn fundraising, which I mean, you have to go to those people and build relationships. So I would love if you would attend that. Essentially we're gonna put the link in there to the Faith-Based Tech Connections webinar in a couple of weeks and we'd love if you all would register for that. Tanya, hi, how are you? Tanya or Tanya? No, it's Tanya, it's Tanya. Tanya, okay. Okay, hold on one moment. Okay, so I'm excited first and foremost because I actually learned about TechSoup back in, I think 2016 when I was looking to open up our relationship coaching organization. And when we opened that up, we have a for-profit entity called Marry to the Ring. But during the pandemic, we went through 13, 15 month planning to extend a part of our services to justice involved, a specific component. So when we started our planning, I went back and said, let me take a look at TechSoup. So I'm gonna share with you where we are and I'm so excited because I'm not an ED, I am only the board chair, but we were about to hire our staff and I heard some of the pain points already. So we do have coming from a corporate background, we made sure that our staffing or operations had benefits and it was a competitive salary. And we were able to put up front and be able to justify the need and also look at opportunities with the state because the state, because we're looking at justice involved in the turnover, we're looking at staff that have come out the system and our state does offer us federal bonding for the first year if we employ those individuals. But what's interesting is I got from TechSoup systems, I'm about automation coming from corporate that manual paper environment is just not me. So we did automate our board and governance process with some of the tools that we had. And we also understanding I come from a construction background as well, Salesforce is very expensive for us on the for profit side. So I was happy to learn about the Salesforce discount. In addition to that, we also did something Aretha that I fell in love with, we partner with, we pledge to embed all of our fundraising and securing payments through e-commerce. And also there's another organization, I'll have the name at my fingertip that you all included because Bitcoin is gonna be the new currency for nonprofits. So we have already implemented all of the transactions to be able to receive in various e-commerce forums. So we're now about to move in. We have, I'm only, we got our 501c32 Erika during the pandemic, which was April of last year. And we were picked up by the largest foundation in this region called Longwood Foundation. And they undergirded us through a grant fellow program where they're doing a pilot. So we actually submit our first grant to them actually this quarter because they've taken the burden, the financial burden of us having to retain additional consultants to build out the rest of our organization. They're undergirding the costs for that so that we can implement our staff accordingly. And so TechSoup, I'm all about it. I mean, we are ready for do more 24 and we haven't even officially opened, because that's a big thing here in Delaware, big fundraising initiative with all the marketing toolkits, but we got a lot of the information from TechSoup prior to so that we knew how to build out all of our campaigns. So I probably said too much, but I just wanted to let you know that before we deploy, we understood the importance of diversifying our portfolio to look at various revenue streams because we saw the handicap and that's one of the reasons why we parsed out from our parent for profit instead of justice involved in order for us to get through this. If we go through the other neighboring nonprofit organizations, there's a lot of red tape and systems and things that need to be changed and policies, whereas we're already positioned to go ahead and hit the ground running. Awesome, thank you so much for sharing. So I heard you say a couple of things, automation, yes, automation. Automation is so key, I need to do more of myself. The board tools of fundraising and someone mentioned, they want to know about accepting Bitcoin, it's every.org, it's every.org. And so Tanya, you may wanna go through the chat room and see some people were asking some questions, go ahead and answer those questions in there. They wanna know the name of your nonprofit who you're working with. I see Jeff, I see your hand raised and I would like to acknowledge you. Thank you so much, Tanya. Thank you. Hi, Jeff, you can thank you for coming in. Sorry, I was on mute, yeah, hey Tanya. Just also wanted to share, I'm excited to be joining. I'm the leader of Ignited, which is a long-standing nonprofit in California, 36 years now, I guess. And we, so we basically provide teachers and students experiences that help them get into a variety of different career paths. And this year what we've done, or last year what we've done differently and looking forward to this year, we formed really strategic partnerships and kind of a joint venture project with other nonprofits. And we're kind of expanding that to get students to go into advanced career paths. So things like data science, machine learning, advanced manufacturing, and it's mostly focused on Title I schools, so kids don't have access to these kind of careers. But what we're really focused on is developing the curriculum they need, the supports for teachers and doing that with a group of partners. So why TechSoup is important and part of the reason I'm here and hoping to engage more with the community is, we've actually been really successful last year. We, for a brand new program that's a little over a year old, we managed to secure about $3 million worth of funding through various grants. That wasn't a kind of a one-shot thing. I think we're now at all right grants or something, including a big federal with the Department of Navy for cybersecurity curriculum for these kids. So we're in this really great position and grants were not a revenue stream for us moving forward. So we are put to the accelerator with this stuff with other partners. The challenge for us is now that we're developing curriculum for these kids and we're really turning our boat pretty quickly, we have technology needs for things like, well, where are we gonna store this curriculum? Where are we gonna form these teacher communities online and what kind of software exists? And I don't wanna say we're the victim of our success that it's way too early to declare that, but it's causing all these downstream technology questions and integration questions across partners that we're meeting on a weekly basis to try to figure out what a joint venture model looks like in the nonprofit world, but it's gonna be a very interesting year moving forward. So I'm hoping to tap this community for advice and ideas and different ways we can make this a success because we're off to a super fast start or new partners as well, because we're open to that. But anyway, I just wanted to share that and I'm really glad to be here and I appreciate this discussion. So follow on. I'm glad you're here too. Jeff, put your information in the chat room because I know there's someone here that could probably connect with you because you said a lot, a lot of nonprofits, they start and sometimes things take off super, super fast. There's some who sit back and say, why aren't we getting grants? And nothing's happening, but you guys took off super, super fast. And so now you had managing that, learned to navigate that and make sure that you stay on that path. Please put your information in the chat room. I know someone who can probably relate and connect with you because we want Jeff to continue on this path, right? We want him to stay strong. See, there's already some people already connecting with you. Marilyn, please unmute yourself and welcome. You are still muted if you're speaking. Hello? Yes, we can hear you. Can you hear me now? We can hear you. We hear echo, but we can hear you. Is there an echo on your side? I think it's on your end because it's the first time I'm hearing it. Give me one second. Okay. Can you just call me next? Let me fix this. Sure thing. A T-bell, I'm hoping I... Did you have your hand raised? Did I say that right? I did, and you pronounced it great. So thanks. Okay, hi, welcome. Hi, so I am in a unique situation. I am the youngest president of a board here. And we hired a consultant during the pandemic. We got some COVID relief funds. Our local arts council has been really awesome and fighting for us and making sure that we had access. Our group was a nonprofit club celebrating blues culture and music by extension, you know, black culture. And so it's been really interesting trying to learn. I come from the corporate world as well learning the nonprofit landscape as a leader is much different. Trying to figure out how to motivate people that are volunteers. So we have a board of 16 that's all volunteers. It's supposed to be a working board, but we all know how that goes, right? And so we've come from the nonprofit club world where we were a membership club, you know, you joined our society and got some discounts on some concert tickets and stuff like that. But also they developed programs over the years. So when I took over three years ago, we had to figure out what to do and how to maintain. They also didn't save any money.  Well, I got empty bank accounts. So we've been working now to, you know, make a strategic plan and I'm learning that process in the nonprofit world. Learning how to develop partnerships and how to monetize partnerships, you know.  So we can't just walk up to somebody and say, hey, we've got 10,000 bucks to throw at this because we don't, you know. So I'm really interested in things, strategies people have in the TechSoup workshops. I signed up for often. We got a new office last year. We had a one room office that was gonna be used for festival storage, but it's in like a skyscraper in downtown. Our request is from the board that we get more space. So we're developing internship programs and volunteer programming that'll help us as well as, you know, redoing our committees and stuff like that so that we can actually execute programming. Now I've designed lots of great programming and continued programs that we had and kind of doctored them up. Now we just need funding. So we're in some grant cycles and trying to hear back from some grants that we've applied for at the end of last year. So. Well, thank you for sharing it. Put your information in the chat room. And I love that you said that you guys are working on a strategic plan. If you've never done a strategic plan, everybody here, I suggest that you do that, do a strategic plan, a three year or five year strategic plan. And Daphne, I see you said that you are not able to raise your hand. So I'll go ahead and let you unmute yourself. Go ahead and unmute yourself and then you can make your comment or ask your question. My name is Dale Finghawk and I have a, my ministry is life changing ministry foundation. And what we do, we help individuals that are getting out of prison and asked with youth and we teach them a skill. So I'm going, coming into this kind of fresh. I don't know who to partner with or how to partner with any other nonprofits. I've tried to, but I've been burned. But what our organization is mainly is trying to get the guys that are coming out of prison and give them a skill in the automotive or give them a skill in drone, in the drone flight aviation and then working with at risk youth also and giving them a skill. But my problem is trying to find the resources that I need to help me move forward on this project. And I was just wondering if there was any, anyone out there, you could help me with some ideas of what I need to do. Okay, I know someone had put in there that they were a part of a prison ministry as well. Would you put your information in the chat room? They wanted to know what state are you in? I'm in Texas. In Texas, okay. So yeah, somebody else put that they were a part of a non-pop. And when you say you were looking for resource and Marilyn, I do see that you say you're ready to speak. When you say you were looking for resources or excuse me, looking for partners or resources, what kind of partners or do you know that's the question? You don't know what kind of partners you need. No, I don't. I'm sorry, Degas. No, it's okay, it's okay. It's okay.  You have that. Yes, I have that all together. I'm in the process of putting that together so that I can get the school, go through the Texas workforce and get the school approved so that we can offer the courses. But... Tonya, Tonya put that they're... We're just as involved because that's the new term that they use now. It's just as involved, yeah. So both of you put your information in the chat room so that you can connect with each other. And Daphine, I imagine it's the funding portion. So now you have a connection that you guys can both connect with each other. This is great. This is why we're a community. Thank you so much for saying that to me. You're welcome. Marilyn, we are ready for you. Is this better? It's much better. Thank you. Hi, everyone. I'm Marilyn Harris. I'm also out of Texas. I'm in Houston and to the young lady that was just speaking, I'd like to talk to you to see if we can be of service. My organization is the Women Veterans Business Center. We were the country's first women veterans business center. We started in 2010. Women veterans is a common term now, but when I was in the Army in the 80s and after I got out for 20 plus years, nobody was talking about women veterans. And then in 2008, nine and 10, no one was helping women veterans with entrepreneurship or just starting girl business. That's where we started. Now we're rebranding, re-innovating because of COVID, it showed us so much. Women did not fare well in America. All women, the unemployment rate was from 6% to 11% for disabled women like myself in terms of unemployment. So we said, what can we do about the here and now? What can we do to help this stop? And we started a women veterans tech career startup business initiative with our partners, Microsoft. And so we're an educational charity. I actually am a nurse. I was an Army nurse, I'm a nurse for 35 years and I pivoted it to cybersecurity. So I've been the poster child for showing women at whatever age, whatever you look like, whatever you don't know, as long as you're breathing and your brain is working, you can study and learn and you can be in due just about anything. And so I just want to say publicly, the most important thing I want to say is thank you TechSoup for everything. We most recently bought the Wix website, we're in boost and over the years we've used you in so many other ways to help us go forward. We are looking for partnerships to the pastor that had the cybersecurity program. I'm a cybersecurity consultant. I'm a believer. You can reach out to me and to us. We're in Houston, but hey, because of Microsoft, we're virtual. We have 10,000 team seats where we can talk and collaborate and just do good together. So I just want to thank TechSoup again and thank you Ms. Simmons for this opportunity. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you for sharing. And thank you for your service. I'm a Navy veteran, 21 years myself. So thank you so much. Alicia, so someone put in the chat, well, actually I want to share this with everybody. Alicia sent me this note. Some of you may not be familiar with Zoom. You're getting private messages in your chat room that's only going to you. So it's not going to everybody else. So check your private chat rooms. And if you don't know how to do that, put a one in the chat room and I'll share my screen to show you how because don't feel bad. We're in technology world, so it's okay. Okay. All right, good. So everybody knows how to do it. Okay. And somebody said the LinkedIn nonprofit group isn't that active, better have our own TechSoup one for this. Okay, so I get it. So somebody wanted to do a Facebook group for us and LinkedIn or something like that. I'll work on it and we'll figure this out. Thank you for putting your information in there. Guys, you were sharing. This is what community is all about. Sharing, putting your information in there. Anybody else want to share some of your strategies? This has been amazing. I've never heard this much. I'm going to go back to Gallard, you heard this much that's going on as I'm going to say your name wrong. So go ahead and unmute yourself, A-Z Jar Gal and tell us how to pronounce your name. Hi, can you hear me? Yes. Can you hear me now? We can hear you. Introduce yourself. Yeah, hello. I'm Azal, you just call me Azal. And I'm from Mongolia, but I'm in Silicon Valley with the nonprofit that fights air pollution in Mongolia. It's quite deadly over there.  We're quite new organization. Our challenge has been our volunteer. Everyone is a volunteer. Nobody's paid full-time or part-time. So our goal is to raise enough funds to at least be able to afford to pay people part-time or full-time with Mongolian salary. And I think it's like $1,000 a month, which is okay. And I wanted to get your feedback on the way we want to come up with our strategy. So we have like few projects in the pipeline and we're thinking of like prioritizing, you know, which ones we want to focus on this year, next year. And then each project has a budget. And then we can come up with different ways to fundraise for them. You know, pitch the different projects and whoever wants to donate to that specific project can contribute. And my question is we were thinking of like having 30, $40, $50 paying monthly donors every month. But I think it's too small and people can stop at any time, right? So if you are familiar with any sources for fundraising for climate change and air pollution, please let me know. I would greatly appreciate it. And I think it's getting fund, you know, 20,000, 30,000 at a time would be much better than asking for 30 bucks a month from individuals. So that's my question. And also shout out to TechSoup. They've been lifesavers for all of our technical needs and working remotely from 10 different countries TechSoup made a huge difference for us. So yeah. Wow. Well, thank you for the shout out and thank you for what you do for climate change. Sometimes we take it for granted, but air we're breathing and just going out in the water or drinking. So if there's anyone in the chat room that's familiar with or this is a passion project of yours, you know about funding for climate change, please put it in the chat room and put your information in the chat room how we can reach out to you as well. Right now I can't think of anyone. Somebody put in green leaf. So there's a lot of things in here. And as we're going, I'm sure people will put in there. See Jeanine works with climate change. And so you can reach out to her. Someone asked does TechSoup maintain a list of strategic planning consultants? Right now there's not a list list. They're all people in your community. We do have a platform that's gonna be launched really soon. I can't remember the name of it. Please forgive me. I hope I don't get fired for this, but it's gonna have consultants on there. So we'll be able to put that up for you. If you are a consultant, go ahead and put your name right here in the chat room. I mean, I'm a consultant. I see my co-partner here.  You specialize in this. So share your information. This is what we're here for. It's nothing that, you know, wrong with this. This is how we grow. That's what we are here for to grow. See, Jennifer, great. Thank you. Everybody's putting their information here. Great. If you please share with everybody else because I got a direct message to me, put it into everybody. That's the one thing. You wanna make sure your chat room says everyone. Cause if it just comes to me, I'm kind of multitasking, unable to move around and navigate sometimes. Anyone else wanna share any strategies that you have? We have learned so much today, right? This has been amazing. Yeah, I see a lot of heads nodding. This has been amazing. This is what I love about ED Chat. Sabrina, put her information in there. Great. This has been great. Yes, it has been LaChica. Put your information in there as well. The go-to chick. I am telling you, you need her information. Anyone else would like to share? There was something that I forgot to mention before that I like to mention. Sure, absolutely. As we're resetting our organization, like I said, we're 36 years old. So it was starting in 1985. I was five years old. Yeah, I'm only 40, I'm gonna be 42 in a few days. So one thing that I noticed about boards in the nonprofit world is there tends to be a really big age gap. Boards tend to be from what I'm seeing like 40 and 50 and up. And in our local arts community and in the nonprofit sector here, I'm in Greensboro, North Carolina, a city of about 300,000 people with a really high percentage of nonprofits per capita. I think one of the last reports I said, so if you have something like 700 nonprofits registered like in my county. And so when we have these discussions as I'm learning, I'm also sharing with folks, we're building our strategy. One thing we're doing is looking at a strategy for the next 35 years. We're not just looking at, we're looking at how we can position our organization to be ready to respond in 35 years. And part of that is making sure that we are building what I call a 21st century blue society. Cause that's kind of the group of organizations that our thing comes out of. But I'd encourage everybody, look at your organization, not for what you're comfortable with now. Look towards the future. Like I tell our board all the time, we're building a 21st century blue society and we're 20 years late. And so we got to think about that. Think about engaging in different ways. Think about the fact that like the programming stuff that we're doing, we're not doing it for what we want. We're doing it for the community that exists now. And a lot of nonprofits talk about engaging youth, but then the strategies don't really line up. So we've been looking at that. One thing we've done with that is centered people first. We had to really make sure that we are looking at people. I told my board, our 36 year old festival is the longest continuous blues festival in the Southeast. I said, I don't care if we ever do this festival again if we're not really meeting our mission and teaching people. Otherwise we're just bringing people to a concert and that's not what we're here for. It's not what the mission said, it's not what we signed up for. So people want to really... Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate that. I appreciate your insight too as a young person. Angela, I see your hand is raised. Okay, thank you. You can go ahead and unmute yourself. Yeah, you know what? It's people was just saying it's really resonant and it's very aligned with what I was gonna say. I know there's a lot of questions about ending the nonprofit starvation cycle. I wanna bring DEIA into this conversation because I think that's a huge part of ending the nonprofit starvation cycle. And it's really grounded first in identifying your core values as an organization. So yeah, what's your mission? But then what are the values that are gonna get you there? And every action you take as an organization has to align with those core values. And those core values need to be carefully identified, publicly articulated and consistently articulated so that when you're taking an action like analyzing your pay equity within your organization, looking at different demographic reference points on your staff, you can then say, look, we have a core value of equity and inclusion across the organization. We're taking a hard look at who is getting compensated at different levels. What is their racial and gender background? And then how do we level that? So then once you look at that, you can then put it, you do the analysis, you put it in your budget, you utilize allocation tables so that when you're allocating staff salaries and things you can allocate them to appropriate programs and then you communicate it publicly, grounding it in core values. That's how you end the nonprofit starvation cycle is because you're aligning your actions, your strategic actions, your financial actions, your analyses to what you say you believe in. So I think that's really the starting point for ending the nonprofit starvation cycle, getting a strategic communication process so that you're articulating that publicly, clearly on your website and all your communications, that's what gets the support of the public who's gonna fund you. Wow, can I give you some snacks? Because we don't get too much into diversity, equity, inclusion in our nonprofit. We're focused on so many other things, but it's so important, so important. And we're seeing that right now. We're seeing that. So thank you for bringing that up. Yeah, we actually did a webinar on that topic. So thank you for bringing it up. So someone who wants to know what is HPNC, Angela? Sure, we're a standalone hyper-local youth center on the south side of Chicago. Awesome. About a $1.2 million budget. But I used to run an organization that was $60,000 and another one that was $300,000 and this one is $1.2 million. It's all the same principle no matter your organization size. Okay, so HPNC stands for what? Hyde Park Neighborhood Club. There we go. So I think that's what she wants to know. Okay, a couple of people sent me a couple of direct messages how you get in touch with TechSoup about your account. It's customerserviceattechsoup.org. Customerserviceattechsoup.org. I'm sure we just came off holiday so there may be a backlog for someone reaching back out to you but that is how you get in touch with TechSoup.org. So put your contact information in the chat room, Angela because they still want to know what you do. So we probably take up the whole rest of the 10 minutes learning what you do. You did make some great points. Anyone else want to? Okay, James, hi, welcome. I just wanted to just kind of throw out there with TechSoup. I'm with a Christian ministry and really the big side of what we've used TechSoup for is Office 365, the collaboration pieces and also with their, the discounts for hardware and software have been big thanks. Like I said with the Office 365 and with everything that's going on now that's really been a blessing to be able to have those accounts even to set up accounts for our volunteers under our same umbrella and be able to video conference. We run the different applications that come along with that, running Microsoft Planner and so the whole collaboration piece and being able to work together and also with Zoom. We utilize Zoom now to bring together and do ministry events that we could do in person. So for anybody, especially church ministries that haven't seen what TechSoup offers I would encourage them to take a look. Just like I said with Office 365 just on the savings for the subscriptions for email accounts and everything. We've saved tremendously with like I said then also discounts on operating systems, hardware, software. So there's a lot of things out there that we kind of just grab them when we need them but not realizing that we can go there and get those discounts. And like I said, been able to utilize that to bring a number of different volunteers into our planning process without them having to go pay for their own Office 365 accounts or set up all those things. So that's something that I would encourage to look at. Thank you and thank you for saying that. And I wanna say that we do listen to you all. James on one of the webinars you recommended that we do more how-to webinars because a lot of people get technology and then they're like, okay, now I got it, now what? They don't know how to use it. So we're definitely gonna be implementing some more how-to webinars because it's important once you get the technology you got to make the best use of it. So we have about five more minutes. I want to ask Erica Scott Woods if she would come back on because there was something going on with the recording earlier. I want you to close this out and tell us, yes, what you did as a new nonprofit, a new nonprofit have what you were able to accomplish. Before you do that though, is there anyone else who would like to say anything? Okay, cause some people say they came on late. They say, I came on late, what are some of the strategies? So you have to watch the replay. Do you wanna remind you now we're recording this? This will be sent to you via email on replay. So Erica, go ahead, tell us what happened. Okay, oh. So I was sharing the wins we had as we come in 2022. So as a new nonprofit, we got our 501C3 in March, 2021. And thanks to TechSoup, I learned about that around the summertime. And I leveraged all the webinars, all the access to free and reduced partners to really help stand up the organization. So that way when I go to present who we are, we have the technology behind us. And we have a nice link website and thanks to QuickBooks partnership, I got that free. So I was able to give them reports for my operating budget and all those things. And so from that, the grants we applied for, three grants we applied for, we actually won. I got an application of that on December 30th. It opens the new year for us with a budget of $20,000 for capacity building of our organization. So it's for funding program staff and to really support other supports to build up our board and all of that. So those are our big wins. Thank you so much. I'm gonna thank everybody for coming here today and sharing all of the great things that you're doing in 2022, your wins, some of the things, even some of your struggles, some of the things you say, hey, I need help with it. And you've expressed that. You've said we need help. And then the whole community in here jumped in here and started sharing your website, sharing your content information so that you can help each other. This is what executive directors chat is all about, learning how we use technology to advance our mission. Continue to share your information in there. Somebody said, oh, they want to know where you got your capacity grant. So you sent that directly to me. We've got to do a Zoom, how you use Zoom. Somebody sent a message to me that was really for Erica. They want to know. Great, thank you guys. A lot of people saying this is their first meeting, where you got your capacity grant from. So you can type that in the chat room. Great, community foundation. Lots of grant webinars next month. We're gonna be kicking off our information with GrantStation. I have a comment on how I think boards can better support DEI goals. Yes, please, Becky, come on, I'll meet you so. Thanks, Sarita, I appreciate that. So I was an executive director for 16 years and I'm also a former board chair. And currently I'm a trainer and consultant. And last summer I had the pleasure of working with the Syrian refugee organization in southeastern Turkey. And one of the things they have is this concept of a general assembly in addition to their board of directors. And I was very intrigued by that. And of course the laws governing nonprofits are so different in Turkey or non-governmental organizations are so different in Turkey. But I've really been thinking about that concept for US based nonprofits, because as Atiba said and as Angela said, so many of our boards are primarily older white middle class. And I certainly saw that in my years in Chicago and then my years in Minnesota. And what I think is it would be a really neat idea to have in addition to your board, a structure you create that of course would have to be part of your bylaws where you have a general assembly that's composed of your clients because a lot of boards are very reluctant to really open up enough seats for clients so that it is comfortable for clients to actually serve on the board. But we would have seats for clients as part of the general assembly. We would have seats for all of our partners and the organizations we collaborate with. And we could have seats for other university stakeholders. You might wanna make a couple of seats for funders. I don't know if that's appropriate or not. I'm just throwing it out as a thought or maybe your local university or the school systems. And the idea is that that general assembly might make the recommendations for board members to open up that process. So it's a wider group of people than just your small board of say nine to 11 people or some boards are tiny. Some boards are like three to five people but it's a wider group of people feeding in input and generating ideas for board members and they also could be part of the annual meeting. There should be an impact report as well as a financial report provided to that general assembly and there should be some training provided to those folks but I really think that if we're gonna open up our boards and our nonprofits to really support diversity, equity, inclusivity and justice goals, it's really important that we have a different structure than simply the board structure we currently use because our boards are too small and they just, they don't open up enough seats when we look at trying to bring in additional people who are more diverse and might share the backgrounds of our clients. Very good, thank you. I see Tanya.  We're gonna keep going. I have a meeting at 2.15 so I can stick around until then. But hey, let's roll. And I wanna just jump and say thanks Aretha because I have a meeting as well but I am a two time state award winner at the state level for diversity and inclusion for my consulting firm. We built, we hired, we actually not hired but we brought interns in from the university. So in our board application process, we have included the sexual orientation, queer their definition up front in the process. We also have added training to ensure that we have a board metrics responsibility that shows where we have to have up front we're doing a pre-selection criteria in each category so that we make sure that when we are doing our selection process that it meets the criteria so that the board is diverse upfront. And so it's more from a proactive standpoint and we've included training so that the board for those that may not be familiar with LGBT or et cetera that because it's something we have to embrace, right? That you make sure that that training is done to the board members. So we've incorporated a six a half hour training over a six month period for our board process every time that we're having a board director meeting so that they know how, especially since we're dealing with the justice involved population that are co-parenting over the period of time we wanna make sure that it's very diverse. So I have to drop off but if you wanna reach out to me, I drop my information but we spent three months building that so I can help save you some time around that if you would like, all right? Listen, everybody who has to drop off, email me. We need to do a DEI just for ED chat. So please email me if you would like to be on that webinar on Becky, everybody who deals with DEI or even if you have something to say about it. Anybody else having any comments? I'm going to have to rerecord my intro so you can stay on and watch me do that. Anybody else have any comments? Ron, I see your hand raised, go ahead. Yeah, I just wanna, well, I'm the founder of an organization, Island Scholars. We provide scholarships for students from the Caribbean Island of St. Vincent and virtual learning has really exposed some of the challenges of our educational system. And one of the things that I've been able to use is to be able to purchase laptops using my TechSoup discount because some students didn't even have laptops available to them. So thanks to TechSoup and then the Microsoft software that's been a huge benefit to us also. Very good, beautiful. Thank you for sharing that.  I appreciate it. Anyone else, thank you for your comments, feedback. Okay, thank you all for joining us today. As you are going out and taking care of the world, make sure you take time to take care of yourself. We see you next time, bye-bye.


So we're faced with a problem. Why is school reform difficult? Why is it frequently problematic? And its roots lie deep in our history. Education hasn't in a sense changed its assumptions of 100 years ago. Age-related classes, skills and knowledge developed for subject-specific disciplines, a custodial role, more funds allocated to the older pupils and the younger pupils, the increased marginalisation of home and community, and the overt training of teachers being more concerned with subject material than is in Finland, where they have to spend as much time on the development of social maturation skills of young people. We need to know a lot more. The basic model hasn't changed and it won't change just by tinkering around the sides. Twenty years ago, the Santa Fe Institute, people invented the atom bomb, came up with this interesting statement. The method people naturally employ to acquire knowledge is largely unsupported by traditional classroom classes. You all know that. What are we going to do about it? The human mind is better equipped to gather information about the world by operating within it by reading about it or studying abstract models. Nearly everybody would agree that experience is the best teacher, but what many fail to realise is that experience may be the only teacher. Education should not be drudgery and that was a theme that came through to me constantly in reading over school but undereducated. At every level, whether you're at strong start and digging around in the sand or you're building with blocks in kindergarten or whether you're in grade 12 and you're building a canoe, education should be fun, it should be exciting and at every level, whether you're completing grade 4 or whether you're completing grade 12, at every step education should leave you hungry for more knowledge. That, I think, is the magic of what John has to say in his very important work. Are you in British Columbia ready for this challenge? I actually believe you are uniquely prepared and equipped by the fact that you are a relatively small province and, I now call you Minister rather than George, you still hold to the concept that having 60 semi-autonomist school districts is the key to the future because you can carry out innovation in small districts that you can't carry out on the scale of a massive country at the same time. You, George, and the 60 superintendents in this room are the unique resource that this province has got. You need to understand each other, you need to communicate and you need to empower the superintendents to create within each district something really wonderful. That, in logistical terms, is quite a problem, 1 to 60, but it's there. What we have in British Columbia, and obviously I'm remarkably pleased that John agrees with this proposition, I think what we have in British Columbia is the opportunity to create some magic. Having a Ministry of Education which can provide not only funding but direction, provide focus, provide support, but having school districts and school boards that bring some local and regional value added to the policy that is generated at the Ministry of Education. I think, again, it is through that local knowledge and that regional understanding that we get not only good policy from the centre, but local adaptation of it. We still think that as children get older, the class size should go down and we still work on this old assumption that little children, because they are more amenable, don't necessarily need the best teachers. And all of that is what is upside down. Now, if you look at the way the Scandinavians handle this, they actually work on a weaning principle and I think this is very interesting. They're actually saying, look, the job of the teacher is vital, the job of the child to learn as much from the teacher as they can and how they can do things for themselves when they have got past the school is vital. Now, I think when you start looking at like that, the job of the school is not to produce good pupils, it's to produce good citizens for the future who can drive their own learning. And if you look at the more exceptional countries such as Finland, they always have very, very small classes when children are young. They have their best teachers when children are young and they don't swamp children with too much stuff from outside that actually destroys the child's sense of confidence of mastering it. In fact, I've often used a rule of thumb which says that class size should never be more than twice chronological age. So 10 at the age of 5, 20 at the age of 10, 30 at the age of 15. Why? Does that mean 36 or 38 at the age of 18? Nonsense. If we get it right at the beginning, then in fact, as many of you are discovering, the older the child gets, the more they need to be able to have the freedom to learn that stuff for themselves in a variety of learning type situations rather than being stuck in a classroom. And the frustration that teachers have is being stuck in a model which is still based on tell, tell, tell. And the model you're developing in a world in which so many children now have open access to so much technology that actually they can go far further than you ever thought they could, you no longer control the key to the door of the classroom. So really the issue is actually a very big structural one. And the Scandinavian countries don't do what you do, they don't do what my country does. They don't split education into elementary and secondary. They actually have an all through school. An all through school from 7 to 16 where the teachers literally have the ability to be at any part of that sector. And sometimes the teacher who has brilliant understanding of children's learning actually is using that with some of the older children. It's a growing up situation. It's where everybody is pulling together in the same way. When we launched the BC Education Plan, we launched it with the group Student Voice because we thought that was absolutely the right place to begin a discussion about renewal of Education in British Columbia. Anybody over the age of 30 in this room, which is most of us, has suddenly begun to realise that actually Student Voice is not just a nice thing on the side, it is actually an essential bit. Because students do see things from a very particular perspective. And that does not mean to say they see them from a naive perspective. They do see them from the way in which the rubber hits the road. And this is what actually happens. And therefore I think the world we're moving into is much more about genuine intergenerational understanding. I'm hoping that in concert with the neighbourhood learning centres, with other initiatives that try to bring the community and the schools closer together, that we will see more and more parents feeling very, very comfortable in grade 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, coming to school, working as volunteers, helping not only their kids but other kids and really closing that gap between a school and community. Many of you heard me talking about balanced education, aiming like a three-legged stool. A three-legged stool can balance on any surface providing the legs are of the same length. Your four-legged chairs there are pretty useless and it's got a flat bottom to them. What are those three legs, the home, the school and the community? And over the years, and I've been as guilty of this as anybody, as homes have got a little weaker and communities have got a little weaker, the school is launched in and said we'll do this and we'll do that, to the point at which the task of the school becomes almost impossible. However hard schools try, you can't literally or metaphorically put your arms around the kid. But kids do need arms put around them. They do need what the home can provide. They do need the challenge that the community can provide and all those professional people in the community who've never been asked to help provide the most magnificent mentors at an apprenticeship level. If you can do in your small school districts here, create a really vital three-legged stool in which each part is working to support the other, then your children will grow far faster and you teachers won't be quite so tired because other people will be not sharing the load, they'll be sharing the fun as well.