 Thank you. We're going to get started with our lunch presentation. Okay. Again, for those of you coming in, please make sure to grab a feedback form. You can submit to the RSVP desk up at the front by the elevators. My name is Solma Zabouale. I'm here at USIP. For those of you who have participated in our morning panels, I hope that you have enjoyed it as much as we have as we try to understand and explore this field a little bit more. I've been practicing traditional karate for about 13 years, which is a Japanese form of martial arts. I am a five-time national champion as well as an international competitor. I've competed at the world level, at Pan American levels, and most of my medals are gold, so that's nice. Also, through my athletic experiences, I've come to realize that sports is a factor, is a common factor among everyone. It's a universal thing. It'll always be here. It'll never go away. It's a common factor despite age, ability, gender, you name it. Contrary to how martial arts might be portrayed, it is rooted in prevention in terms of building and sustaining peace within oneself and through that being able to transfer it to your environment as well as those within your environment. This has led me to my experiences as well as this philosophy has led me to analyze and try to understand a little bit more how martial arts as well as sports can be used for building peace around the world. My hope is that the inclusive capability of sports will mobilize international efforts in order to create peace. This inclusive nature includes embracing those with disabilities, a common occurrence that war and conflict affected individuals and children face. Mr. Huebner is the chief of Paralympics and for the U.S. Olympic Committee. I have great enthusiasm for his presentation, as I'm sure everyone else here does too. And I guess without any further delay, Mr. Huebner. I'd like to just thank the U.S. Institute of Peace for having me today. I think I know a little bit about peace building. I'm from a family of six. So, you learn everything at home. And my comments today are going to be focused specifically on Paralympics and a lot of it with the domestic tactics and strategies that and maybe not even using the word peace, but I think when we look at outcomes and I deal with this every day, I think there's some tactics and strategies in there that can help us all work together more collaboratively to come to an outcome. First of all, just on the U.S. Olympic Committee, we're very unique. We're one of only four national Olympic committees in the world that also operate and manage the Paralympic Program. And it's my duty, as my communications people tell me all the time, to remind you that the Paralympic Program is for athletes with physical and or visual disabilities. Thank you, Eli. You can report back that I've done my duty today. So that makes us unique. We have a pretty significant brand and I've heard just in a couple of the other panels today. You know, our brand, and we do brand research quarterly, is arguably one of the most powerful brands in the world. It's influential. It's deemed very positive by not only people in the United States, but people around the world. And it gives us a pretty significant platform. We have a pretty significant infrastructure. More than 50 organizations are members of the U.S. Olympic Committee. From USA Swimming to USA Hockey to National Recreation and Parks Association to military organizations. Touching more than 50 million Americans and thousands of U.S. communities. The Olympic movement, and this is where we diverge a little bit in terms of strategies and different strategies. The Olympic movement, initial focus was peace. And a lot of folks that have been tied to the Olympic movement remember in 1936, two young men that reached out to each other. One German, one American, Jesse Owens and Lutz Long, who probably in just a simple gesture, promoted peace throughout the world in a way that most people couldn't. But it was the incredible platform of the Olympic Games that allowed for that to happen. What's unique about the Paralympic movement, and this is why I have multiple personalities, the Olympic movement was a result of a peace mission. Paralympic movement was an outcome of war. Initial focus on rehabilitation of injured service members after World War II. And that's where the movement started. What's unique within the U.S. Olympic Committee, and our role on the Olympic side is really to work with partner agencies, USA Swimming, USA Hockey and our National Governing Body family, to prepare teams to go to the Games. And on the Olympic side, a lot of those entities are involved in the grassroots initiatives, in the youth initiatives. On the Paralympic side, it's a little bit different. We are the National Governing Body for track cycling and swimming in the United States. We run the programs. I have coaches on my staff. We also partner with National Governing Bodies to implement 21 other Paralympic programs. But we also, and a lot of people don't realize this, a lot of times when you talk about the Olympic or Paralympic movement, you think about elite sport, competitive sport. We in the United States are also focused on the other end of that. Getting kids with physical or visual disabilities involved in daily physical activity. Getting them involved in programs. Not competitive. Learning to have fun. Introducing engineered military personnel, sport. How to run with your five-year-old son in your backyard. Not how to go to the Paralympic Games. So on the Paralympic side, within the US Olympic Committee, we're involved in both. We're involved in the grassroots identification and inclusion of persons with physical or visual disabilities and physical activity. We're also involved in developing the team that goes to the Games and represents the United States at the elite level. Just some programs. And again, most of these are coming from a Paralympic perspective. I just want to emphasize that. And I think as we get to outcomes, you'll hopefully see where some connections to what the subject matter today is. One of the key initiatives for us is the US Olympic Committee using that incredible platform and brand that we have, is to engage leaders to shape policy. Very important on the Paralympic side. Fact that there's a lack of programming in the United States for kids with physical and or visual disabilities. Not, again, to go to the Paralympic Games. To just simply play with their friends in their backyards and communities all over the United States. To be physically active. Our brand and our platform gives us a great opportunity to have that discussion with leaders at all levels. At the local level, at the regional level, and at the national level. And that's something we utilize. Because we want to be a thought leader. We want to be at the table. And when I say we, key critical point, when I say we, I'm not just talking about the US Olympic Committee because we are partnering with agencies all over this country to help implement programs. So I just want to emphasize that point that the US Olympic Committee are organizations like Tacoma Parks and Rec, Blaze Sports, Disabled Sports USA. Big and small all over the country that we are using our platform and this is a learning and listening to earlier today, a learning, a takeaway. We got groups coming to us every single day. Every single day. And we just, we can't handle, you know, 100 people calling us daily as to how we work with the US Olympic Committee. So we, based on feedback from numerous organizations around the country, decided to take a leadership role in flipping that around and bringing people to the table to discuss how we can work together collaboratively to address an issue. And that's critical as we all fight for resources. Absolutely was critical for us as the US Olympic Committee. And we were asked to take that role by different community and national government leaders, program leaders. We were asked to use our platform to take that role. From a community perspective, I mentioned we send teams to the game, but from a community's perspective, in the last two years we've developed 126 Paralympic Sport programs and 126 communities in the United States. Our goal is to be in 250 communities by 2012 with an emphasis on not building Paralympic teams, but an emphasis on developing programs so kids could be physically active at the community level or the school level. Pretty significant military program. That's where we came from. The Department of Defense and Department of Veteran Affairs. And I remember about seven years ago sitting in a meeting and again, a little bit of the dialogue earlier, sitting in a meeting with about 20 different organizations, all with their elbows out, fighting for the same piece of the pie. And the US Olympic Committee was in that meeting. And I'm looking at generals and, you know, admirals and everybody else. And any time I go to the Pentagon, which they're often, I always laugh as to why is the US Olympic Committee person sitting in this meeting. But a role that we want to play and have been asked to play is to be that neutral partner that can hopefully get past the turf and talk about how do we collectively move forward. So today we have programs at 40 military installations around the United States providing technical assistance, expertise and support for injured service members coming home to be physically active as part of their rehab. And I'll take a jump domestically to internationally and I'll take a couple other jumps as I conclude as to where does this fit into the subject matter of today. Just last week at one of our programs, Israel, Great Britain, Canada, Australia participated, sending people over to get support and technical assistance from us on how to go back and train people back in their countries to support this newly injured population. Internationally, you can see this picture. We've delved into that space although our priorities have been to really develop our domestic programs and even though the Paralympic Movement has been around for more than 40 years, 50 years, the US until really our governance reform in 2004 when Paralympic became part of our mission statement, United States has not had one entity focused on building the Paralympic Movement until I would say 2005 when our governance reformed. So this is pretty much our infancy and we are developing domestic programs that hopefully we can take our learnings and explore internationally. And we have done that. Our Paralympic experience and in this photo, you'll see a Paralympic youth camp. No competition, I love what Nina said. No competition in terms of what we're doing with some of our youth programs. It's about experiential learning. Teaching young kids with a physical disability to dream. To go to Athens, Greece. To go to Beijing, China. And be at the Great Wall, 15 year old kid in a wheelchair at the Great Wall of China. And what we've done is with that program we've slowly began to expand our horizons based on our priorities and now we've invited other countries to participate in that program because one of the things that we feel is so important are those international relationships that we want to develop with young Americans that can go around the world and meet kids from Germany, kids from other countries. And our two programs are Paralympic Experience where we take Americans to the games, American kids that promote ability to the games. And we've connected with other national Paralympic committees to make sure we create experiential learning at the games. No competition. But also last year we partnered with Turkey and eight other countries to create a Paralympic Youth Program. Again, focused on international relations and building relationships and dreaming. So our outcomes. And this is kind of where we get back to peace and I love the evaluation discussion because we were in an executive team meeting last week talking about our 2011 performance screen and trying to evaluate international relations is trying to evaluate peace or trying to evaluate a lot of different things. It's a pretty hefty subject as to how do you really evaluate the importance of relationships. But this has been key and I think my purpose today was to be thought provoking. How do we engage leadership? My whole life seems like I've been on the prevention side of any business I've been in and as all of you that are in the prevention world know, you're always scrapping for resources. So how do you provoke leadership? How do you provoke thought leaders? How do you provoke policy decision makers? To say, yes, this is important. This is impactful. This is making a difference. And my boss yells at me all the time because our business is to win medals at the games and develop sport programming. So when I start talking about the impact of physical activity on health, on secondary medical conditions, on employment, on higher achievement levels in education, he gets ready to throw me out of the room. But it's very important in the space that I live in. And I see the outcomes every day. And we pulled together a research consortium that we don't want to lead. We don't want to get involved in another evaluation or research study. There's enough of it out there. We've tried to just pull a group together of people doing that and utilize the specifics that they're focused on and also talk about, hey, there's a really need to really look at the health impact of physical activity of people with physical disabilities. Can you take that on? So the research is there. It shows it. I see it every day. With 17, 18-year-old kids at our Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs who I would argue have too much self-esteem. I guess if you're number one in the world, you should. But they're talking about college, they're talking about jobs, they're talking about making a difference. And this young lady from the University of Illinois just returned from Ghana on her own and did an international relations project there teaching kids, teaching kids to participate in sport. That's an outcome that we might not be steering and similar to what Jesse Owens and Lutz Long did in 1936. But we have a platform to assist with the collaboration and assist with developing a plan. And that's a role that we are playing in the Paralympic space. I would argue that program availability, healthier population, educated and employed population and some international outreach would help the peace throughout the world. Seeing in 1990 Iraq and Iran march in together at the World Championships. Paralympic World Championships was pretty phenomenal. And seeing yesterday the timing of this session was perfect because last night on CNN there was just a great story about Iraqi rowers on the Charles with USA rowing one of our member organizations with our Paralympic Sport Club in Boston with members of our military program all together on the River Charles rowing. And that's an outcome that hopefully we can assist and play a role in in terms of really trying to identify how you measure that. And good luck. But also be a player in sitting down with leaders. And I leave with that note and I'll open it up for any questions. Our role in trying to facilitate leadership and I'm seeing this every day domestically and I'll give you a story about Chicago. We went into Chicago which was a pilot project for us and there were 20 some odd organizations same thing all fighting for the same resources and by getting the leaders together in that community and in Beijing China over a two and a half to three week period talking about the need talking about the problem and strategizing a plan came back and announced a program in December of 2008 that today has more than 23 organizations working together to grow the resource pie and what I mean by that a lot of people go to finances but what I mean by that is to identify kids to collaborate on programming and to increase resources we were able to triple the amount of resources available for all those programs by collaborating and a billion dollar trust fund in Chicago said by leveraging the national relationship and platform of the U.S. Olympic Committee with the 23 programs collaborating locally is powerful and we will write a check to support that so I leave you with that point because in listening this morning obviously that's a challenge for all of us and working with a lot of our military installations Colorado Springs alone we have a major army base where more than 100 organizations every day knock on their door how can we help somewhat overwhelming at times for an entity like that so the more we can talk about in sessions like this how can we collaborate leverage some key platforms to engage leadership and show some great outcomes I think will help in this space driving policy leaders to make change and with that I'll set the format open it up for any questions any softball questions this is a sport group right no okay great thanks I have a question I'll open it up so you mentioned collaboration you mentioned a lot of people come in asking for help so what is something what can those people who come say what can we do for help I mean how can we utilize that desire that initiative to come forward and ask that question unfortunately for whether in Chicago you're going to get a postcard from me sometime today hopefully one of the things that we did and it was based on sitting with a group of leaders in the space that we work in is we had an innovation summit in 2007 in Chicago brought 40 different leaders from all different entities together and out of that we had a plan we had a strategic plan in place but out of that took that input and put it against that plan one of the things that group asked us to do was use our platform to lead and we are doing that in the Paralympic space the first thing we did was created a national leadership conference to share best practices and talk about key initiatives by the way in 2011 the two primary initiatives based on feedback from our constituents all over the country are how to increase your revenue a simple subject for everybody right and identification but we created that because we wanted to get thought leaders together and the postcard that hopefully you'll have today and if not we can get an email out to all of you with our website it's just www.usparalympics.org is a national leadership conference to talk about subjects and I could envision this subject even though we have our priorities and developing our programs are our number one priorities I could envision convening a group of people and especially the space that we're in Rwanda right now is one of the leading teams in Paralympic sport Iraq and Iran leading teams in specific Paralympic sports I could envision helping to facilitate a conversation under the Paralympic umbrella in this space possibly as part of that leadership conference but we've also expanded now to eight regional conferences around the country where we're bringing thought leaders together about primary topics of what are important in the Paralympic movement and this subject matter fits into that space and again it might not be a direct direct as mentioned I don't think I used the word peace in my presentation but when you talk about availability of programming education employment those are things that I think lead to peace and a lot of what we do it's not direct my job isn't to get people with physical disabilities employed but it is an outcome from what we do using our incredibly powerful platform to do it so one opportunity is potentially our national conference and talking about maybe creating a specific subject matter as part of that it's a conference with national leaders and speakers not only from our government but from all over the world Coach K was our keynote this past year and who can talk about a lot of different subjects at a very high level speak up yes sir Eli your questions are always too tough for me take it easy on me today would you yeah I'll briefly answer that I thought somebody made a great comment earlier sport doesn't do everything in the world I understand that I mean not everybody is interested in sport but you know Invictus is on HBO right now it's just a great platform for how you can use an incredible platform and that's what we have we have an unbelievable platform I'm very aware of the great fortune I have and our team has on a daily basis to work for the US Olympic Committee we have an incredible platform for my world whether it's in a community in Denver where a 17 year old kid who was a wrestler was in a car accident lost his legs or another community where a 6 year old young man had a brain tumor and became totally blind or a 25 year old kid went to Afghanistan and came home as a double amputee we see it every single day it is the simple things that allow you to jump back into life and simple things for that 17 year old in Denver was he wanted to play sports he was a wrestler the simple thing for that 6 year old kid was he wanted to ride his bike not at an elite level he just wanted to play he wanted to ride his bike and that 25 year old although he made our Paralympic team his first thought when he became injured was his ability to run with his 5 year old son in his backyard so sport plays I would argue living this every day I think the support network is probably more impactful sport plays an incredible jumping point for somebody to realize in their support network to realize that everything is going to be OK you can still go skiing with your buddies you can get a job you can go to school and if you have the talent and want to make a commitment you can represent your country again our role in the military program we have programming at 40 different military installations we're developing community programming all over the country so when somebody comes home to Colorado Springs they have a program that they can go to in Colorado Springs and they don't have to drive 3 hours to the mountains and our program is focused on physical activity it's not focused on elite competition it's focused on getting physically active with your family and your friends knowing that 10% of the population will ever make an Olympic or Paralympic team so the primary focus of all of our programs and as we continue to take steps internationally same concept we're working with the International Paralympic Committee and we're strategically starting to do some things in that space but our highest priority and I'll be honest is domestically right now we're in our infancy and we need to develop our programs domestically because if we have a very strong Paralympic program in the United States we can help the IPC develop a very strong Paralympic program around the world and I believe very strongly we have a national event called the Warrior Games which we just hosted for the first time this past year it's an event that has created great support from leadership at all levels of our government because of the impact it's having for young men and women to return to their lives but a dream for me really talking about jumping into the space that we're talking about today some day at that event to see not only it being U.S. athletes but athletes from Afghanistan and Iraq and other places around the world at that event would be pretty powerful and I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility whatsoever yes sir yes I'm Dodge Fielding I manage a very close-court piece of the Institute for Multitract diplomacy President Obama recently maybe a year or so ago asked NASA to make a special outreach to the Muslim countries my question is is that something that the Olympic slash Paralympic Committee is also doing is you mentioned a lot of countries that are Arabic speaking is there a special focus on the Arab world? No, not really I mean we right now and again our primary focus has been domestic in the Paralympic space but we no doubt are having conversations with some key areas of the world our first priority are the Americas I mean there's in South America and Central America a great need programmatic need in those countries and it is how we're set up as the Olympic and Paralympic movement you start kind of in your own space but we have had outreach with the National Paralympic Committee of Afghanistan of Iraq and we're having discussions as to how we can support and then from the military perspective our allies have come to us and asking for support so there hasn't been any specific focus in those areas but we have ongoing dialogue and understanding where there's some great areas of need we want to be open to that discussion and if appropriate and if we have resources to focus on it be supportive in that space May I do a follow up? Yes sir Libya has a enormously proactive Paralympic program Omar Gaddafi has been committed to this for many many years and one of the really good things that he's done in the world is to serve the the systematic or disabled community in Libya perhaps they have something to teach us and we can speak offline but I know that Libya is one example of a country that has devoted huge resources to Paralympics Excellent point you make a great point my mother always told me first and foremost be open to learning we are in no way we're providing technical assistance and expertise but at the same time we're listening to other countries around the world and that is the role we've been asked to play and I'll close with that using this incredible platform as well all over the world with National Olympic Committees and National Paralympic Committees going to them in a way that is not overwhelming and talking about how you can partner to use their national platforms to reach an outcome and that would be my two bits of advice that is impactful and it's happening here in the United States and some countries are coming to us and asking for technical assistance to other countries and asking for the same but thinking about how you can approach that and if you can approach it collaboratively much easier for those entities to be able to possibly come back with a responsive we'd be willing to jump into this space thank you so much for allowing me to be here today we're going to take a quick break for about 10 minutes so see you then