Welcome to Train the Briefer

Welcome! Please sign in and make sure you got one of each of the papers as you came in. Introduce self and start with a round of introductions -- name and institution

Mental Health, Homelessness, Health Care, Barriers to Learning In January 2015, Sound Alliance institutions listened to their members to discover what issues were most urgently and deeply affecting members in our area. We heard that people’s priorities were mental health, homelessness, health care, and education. Briefer tells story about how this affects them

What can we do? As Sound Alliance, we take action on the problems in our community by making them into concrete, specific, and winnable issues. That is, instead of getting overwhelmed by huge problems, we break them apart into ways that we can take action. These are hard problems to solve, with lots of potential solutions. However, many of those solutions are things that we can’t solve right now. We found something that we can do RIGHT NOW

Best Starts for Kids -- Strategy BSK is a property tax levy (will cost a $400,000 home about $56/year) that focuses on investing in prevention for kids ages 0-5, rather than spending more money on preventable chronic illness and the criminal justice system later

Practice Activity

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Are VERY Common The more ACES a person has, the more likely they are to experience chronic disease and incarceration To explain, we will do an activity

Turn to a neighbor to discuss (~2 minutes each) Does the link between adverse childhood experiences and bad outcomes make sense to you? What about the resiliency factors that help people overcome ACEs? Have you witnessed or experienced this?

Why should WE work on Best Starts for Kids? Briefer describes how this strategy fits into the values of their institution--tailored for each briefing (1-2 sentences is fine)

Reactions? How does working together on Best Starts for Kids reflect the values and mission of your institution?

Will you join us? Each person should have a response card...there are assemblies coming up to ask local candidates for public office to endorse Best Starts for Kids. This is a chance to learn more about Best Starts for Kids and to have your voice heard in front of the people you elect.

Thanks for coming!

Briefing as Action Presentation vs Briefing Action People are passive recipients Action designed to get specific of information reactions -surface new leaders -agitate participants through reflecting about experience Not Organizing Is Organizing

Mediating Institutions as Interpreters -Help people develop a collective understanding of why things are the way the are -Civil sector interpretation can challenge market/Gov’t explanation -Civil sector explanation often raises questions of Justice

Workshop: Institutional Values How does working together on Best Starts for Kids reflect the values and mission of your institution? 7 minutes

Workshop: Personal Story Think back to the beginning section when you explored how these problems related to your own story… We will take some time now to craft your story for this section.

Time to practice!