> Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for a webinar today, Reaching the Disability Employment Community, Best Practices from our Partners. I'm going to hand it over to Nakia to do housekeeping and then we will begin.
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Nakia? I'm not sure if we lost her. Well, the audio for today's webinar is being broadcast through your computer. Please make sure your speakers are turned on or your headphones are plugged in. You can control the audio broadcast via the audio broadcast panel, and if you accidentally close the panel, you can reopen it from the top menu item, communicate, join audio broadcast.
>Nakia Matthews: I'm back. Had a little technical difficulty.
>Jamie Robinson: No problem.
>Nakia Matthews: If you do not have sound capabilities on your computer or if you prefer to listen by phone, you can dial the number you see here, (855)2448681 and enter the meeting code, 661395082, and you do not need to enter an attendee ID.
Realtime captioning is provided during this webinar for those who are deaf, hardofhearing, or for whom English is a second language. The captions can be found in the media viewer panel, which appears in the lower righthand corner of the webinar platform. If you want the make the media viewer panel larger, you can minimize other panels like chat, Q&A, and/or participants, and conversely if you want to minimize it altogether, you can go ahead and close it.
There will be a Q&A section at the end of the webinar. Please use the chat box to send any questions you have to Katie Metz or myself, Nakia Matthews, and we will direct the questions accordingly during the Q&A portion. If you're logged in by phone, you may also ask questions by emailing Katie directly at . This is being recorded and the materials will be placed on the National Disability Institute website at www.realeconomicimpact.org. If you experience any technical difficulties during the webinar, please use the chat box to send a message to me, Nakia Matthews, or you may also email me at . Jamie?
>Jamie Robinson: Thanks, Nakia. Okay. Thank you all for joining us today, again, reaching the disability community, best practices from our partners. My name is Jamie Robinson. I'm part of NDI's training and TA team. Today we'll hear from four of our partners across the country sharing effective strategies within their region and organization in terms of their reaching out, serving and collaborating with their local disability community and we'd like to especially thank each of the partners today for agreeing to highlight and share their work nationally with our diverse audience today who represents NDI's Real Economic Impact Network, workforce development, and many other partners who are involved in tax and asset development work.
We'd like to say a special thanks to all of NDI's partners, Bank of America, Acorda, IRS, and especially WalMart for sponsoring today's webinar.
For those who are on the line who are new to NDI we are a national research and development organization with the mission to promote income preservation and asset development for persons with disabilities and to build a better economic future for Americans with disabilities.
Our REI impact network is an alliance of organizations and individuals dedicated to advancing the economic empowerment of people with disabilities. We consist of more than 900 partners in more than 100 cities across the United States and we represent and include nonprofits, community tax coalitions, asset development organizations, financial education initiatives, corporations and privatesector businesses, federal, state, local governments and agencies, and of course individuals and families with disabilities. And all of the partners join forces to embrace, promote, and pursue access to and inclusion of people with disabilities in the economic mainstream.
So with that, I would like to hand this over to our first presenter, Rich Sanders, who I have had the pleasure of working with and collaborating with on various projects, all aiming towards expanding economic opportunities for individuals with disabilities. So with that, Rich, I'll hand it to you.
>Rich Sanders: Okay. Can you hear me, Jamie?
>Jamie Robinson: I can.
>Rich Sanders: Great, great, thank you, and thanks to NDI, everyone there, for the opportunity to share some of our ideas today. I work for the Disability Employment Initiative in Alaska and we participate in several different assetbuilding activities in our initiative, one of those being the marketing of tax services, another being building a coalition of financial institutions, the United Way, other partners, in developing what's called our Anchorage Financial Partnership Network, and it's really I guess, you know, when you look at marketing, one of the biggest things that I have learned over the years is that you need to develop a strong network to get those effective outreach opportunities, and I don't know, do we have these slides on this to move to or am I just going off a line here?
>Jamie Robinson: Yes, do you have the slides open in front of you, Rich. So you also have the ball, so you can control them right in the center in the top of the page, there's an arrow.
>Rich Sanders: Got you. Thanks. Cool. All right. Okay. So I clicked on it. That's a pointer. I got it. Now I got it. Okay. Thank you. I'm supposed to be an assistive technology specialist but not doing very well. What I was talking about is the strong networks, and I know that when I first started doing outreach and I didn't have a lot of these together, it was kind of a random approach and I didn't get a lot of buyin or feedback from a lot of folks when I was trying to just get them to come to an event or participate in a summit regarding assetbuilding or that sort of thing. So I going to talk more about that and what those strong networks mean in just a minute.
Obviously there's lots of outreach methods that I think many of us are familiar with. For me, there's the direct outreach. That's where you're meeting a person oneonone if they it's crosscommunication, it's a personal contact, and those seem to work very well.
There's also your electronic methods that are out there, general public outreach, and, you know, just getting back to the partnerships, building a reputation through involvement. When I say involvement, it's not just saying I know who you are, talking with them on occasional basis. What I try to do is when they hold events, maybe an open house, maybe it's a board meeting, maybe they're seeking public input on something, I try to attend those as much as possible because then you get your face in the mix, people recognize you more, and the more you do that, the bigger, I don't know, circle of contacts you build, and lastly there I put "form a coalition," and we'll talk about that in just a minute.
So when I talk about direct involvement, really need to learn about them, and obviously if they're not somebody who is consistent with your agency and your mission, that might be difficult, but if you see a place in the activity you're doing that they would be a critical component, it really it does behoove you to align with them, learn about them, do outreach for them, and I do that first by trying to contact a program director, say it's an independent living center, it might be a Voc Rehab agency, it might be, I don't know, a recreational facility for people with disabilities, but I contact them directly, and as many of you know, oftentimes you'll run into, you know, I don't have time but here's my communications person or here's my Assistant Director, that sort of thing, and that's fine.
So what I try to do at that point is organize just a short meeting. I don't want to take up a lot of people's time because I know I mean, this is the information age. We're all maxed out and we're very busy. So what I try to do is organize everything that I want to say and, you know, go directly to that impact of those that they serve. So that when you sit down with them, they can see direct benefit right away, or a possible direct benefit, and then when you close that meeting, talk about reiterate some of those positive benefits that the service that you're marketing will give to them.
I try to always follow up with a thank you, especially if I don't know that person because it's an initial contact, there may or may not feel that it's important when you leave but when you follow up with a thank you and ask any questions, generally you'll get a response there.
One big thing is to offer assistance to get them started because, again, we're all very busy. We're limited resources, and if you can offer a portion of your time or resources, then it makes it a more valuable partnership. Lastly, again, I like to attend events they hold and bring ideas and resources to share. The whole concept being this is a give and take world, and if you're just a taker, there's probably not a lot of room for them to be giving and I want to say that's one of the most important things in our outreach.
Here's a sample. We did a, what we call a Super Saturday tax event where we have lots of service providers with booths and tables explaining services and VITA volunteers there providing tax services. When we did outreach, we did standard marketing. United Way has a media person who develops mailers, cards, posters, and we put those around to different places. But in one day I visited all of these different people in person and was able to schedule to meet with them oneonone, spend about 20 minutes with them, talk about the importance of it and how I can help them maybe get the word out to their people, the people that they serve as well.
So we have the Division of Voc Rehab, public assistance I visited, the Center for Blind and Visually Impaired, Deaf and HardofHearing, Deaf/Blind Council, independent living center, community mental health center, National Alliance for Mental Illness. Really, a couple of things. I got the word out about the event. Again, I made contact with that alliance and that circle of people that I try to stay in contact with on a regular basis.
So when we talk about electronic methods, we have a listserv here at the council, of key partners. When I say keep it clean, listservs tend to get old. They tend to have people who have moved on to other jobs, don't want to get your information anymore. We are very fortunate here at the council to have an intern on staff who can check that listserv, who can update our website, you know, check our Facebook and Twitter accounts to post events and see what kind of feedback we're getting. Those are all very good ways, and we found more and more and I think all of us know that the Facebook and Twitter are becoming pretty effective in getting out information. Whether we talk about fliers and events in public areas, I like to look at places people go to all the time, grocery stores, transit centers, public assistance offices, things like that, and we also have a calendar on our website that posts our different events.
General public, again, we have media folks both within our agency and also within our partnerships, so if I look at our Anchorage financial partnership, United Way is using their media contract to do it. But if I'm looking at state partnerships, we have an onstaff media person within health and social services, so we write PSAs, contact the media with media releases, send out mailers, when possible contacting the television and radio stations directly, particular public radio because they like to give interviews about these types of things. Oh, one other that I forgot to mention was DMV sites. These are places most people have to go to at one point or another.
Different disability boards, councils, that sort of thing, I like to apply to these things. Generally don't take up a lot of time. Most of these places or boards and commissions meet once every quarter or maybe two or three times a year, and you know, it's a good place to get other information from other board members as well. Right now, I'm serving on the Center for Psychosocial Development. I'm looking to join our Challenge Alaska Recreational board, AT consortium, state rehab committee. These are places you keep contacts up and keep it going. I know it sounds like a lot of meetings. If you kind of choose and pick which ones will fit your schedule best, it's a good way to go. Also attending public meetings they set up is important. That shows you're active and interested in participating.
One of the last things I want to talk about is forming a coalition. It was very difficult to form a financial partnership here in Anchorage when I first started in this job. Because we were seeking to go statewide and Alaska is like five different states in one. I don't know, many of you haven't been here. We have southeast, we have the coastal south, we have interior, south central, and they're all different climates, geographies and even communities, the way people think, the culture, so to speak.
So when we realized that wasn't going to happen, we looked at key partners here in Anchorage that could do the coalition. First thing we looked at, what are some of the common goals and outcomes measured. If we can share the outcome measures, it behooves all of us. We have to have a commitment to meet at least three to four times a year. In the case of the Anchorage coalition we meet every month. We have to have resources that can be braided, blended, aren't so restricted that it limits us in the activities we do. Within that coalition, you got to have that leader. I was doing that for quite a while when doing the state leadership, when it made sense to switch to the United Way, it made sense in the world. We have a strong communicator there. She's good at keeping the pace going, getting those meetings done, and then we want to show those measurable achievements once a year.