 Really, I'm so glad that you're all here. It's good to see you. I read a quote this week by a 1977 Nobel laureate. This is interesting. Noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility. I don't even know what that means, right? But here's the quote. When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to lift the system to a higher order. Now, I know that he was talking as a physical chemist about something else, but I think directly applies to what we're trying to do here in our city through the initiative and through other efforts. I think San Antonio is just amazing in what we're doing, reforming those small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos, lifting the system to a higher order. So we've invited Ben. Ben was here for a Pathways to Hope Conference last August on mental health, and I got to meeting him. I didn't even know he existed. Shorthand, I just refer to you, Ben, as the faith liaison out of DC, but that's not his title because it's really long. He's the program specialist at the Center for Faith and Opportunity Initiatives at the US Department and Health and Human Services. Did you even know that we had a faith and opportunities initiative at the Department of Health and Human Services? And it's not new, right, Ben? And you're going to tell us about those things. But he's really known for facilitating partnerships between faith-based, philanthropic, community organizations, the government, exactly what the initiative is doing, right? He's known for that. And he also helps to strengthen those local faith-based and community leaders, just like he's come to do with us today. He's been doing this for 15 years at the Center, and he's served in many roles, including the designated federal officer to the President's Advisory Council of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, a 25-member Council of Faith and Community Leaders making recommendations to the President and the White House. So if you can get his ear, it might be helpful. You never know. He received his master's in organizational development and knowledge management in 2007 from the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. He resides just outside of DC with his wife, Kristen, and practices his own personal fatherhood initiatives with his two girls. So, Ben, it's all yours. OK. Ben, yay! Thank you, Ann. Let me see, make sure this is on. Well, I just want to thank Ann and her whole team for bringing me here today, because I don't know if you've heard, but there's this polar vortex freezing the rest of the country. And your guys are cold, but you're not as cold as they are. Actually, my phone is just all these DC is saying, go home early. Get out of the ice. It's as good I left. I ran far away as I could. But it is a pleasure to be with you all here today. For the past 15 years, I've had a privilege of working with faith and community leaders at the national level from other countries, and then also some work in the international space, but mostly focused here domestically. And throughout that time, since President Bush through the previous administration to President Trump, we've had a faith-based office, not just in health and human services, not just at the White House, but also spread throughout federal agencies, doing this work to connect and coordinate with these organizations and individuals. And so when I got a chance to meet with Ann and hear about the work you guys are doing here, I can tell you it's some exciting work. There is more structure here at the local level with what you guys are doing than what I see in a lot of other places. And so I was excited to come and support the work you all are doing here and encourage that and to share what I can as far as examples of some models that we're seeing from around the country that might support the work you're doing, might connect to some ideas and projects, and to have a back and forth. So my goal here as much today is for you to hear me as much as I can also hear from you. So I wanna encourage you to be thinking about what can I share, how can I contribute into this conversation and dialogue, and I will try and facilitate as much back and forth as I can as well. Let me also make sure you see that you have cards here and I believe it's on every seat. I want you to be thinking about your big idea. I want you to be thinking about the thing that could be something that you could implement. It might be something you're already doing. It could be something that you grow and expand and build on top of. I want you to keep that, and you might think of that idea while you're sitting here. You might kind of hear something and just think, we're gonna use those ideas later, but I want you to know that as you're sitting here and you're like, aha, moment. My friend, David Jenkins, he says that aha moments are duh moments in disguise. So you may be sitting there and you may be like, oh duh, why don't I think of this before? Write your duh moment, your aha moment on your card. We'll use them later. So in this work, we really wanna think about how all these different organizations, all these different partners work together to affect change. And I know we have faith leaders here and we have community leaders here. We have community leaders who work with faith leaders here today. But I think one of the things I always start off with saying is that I always think and encourage us to think about our faith leaders. I think sometimes we don't often include them in the systems that we think about. And I think we can encourage the faith leaders to think about themselves as a part of the system. But it's so critical to think about where they fit. Faith counts as a survey that's been done nationally. They found that 1.2 trillion is how much the faith sector contributes to our economy. So not to just distribute, we can actually put a monetary value on what faith leaders do. This is the mentoring they do. This is the support and care that they provide. This is services to elderly. This is partnerships and connections and beating meals and all these different activities. When you have a chance to aggregate as much as we humanly can through this research that they've done, it's 1.2 trillion dollars that they've contributed to the economy. There's so much that our faith communities can do and be a part of and connect to. And we need to think about where they fit, how we leverage the strengths and abilities that they bring. I think here too, we have to recognize that they have strengths that are different from the rest of the system. Many times faith communities care about people in need and they are driven by that need and they serve that need. And sometimes the systems think, well, I have a program and that program's gonna end. So they, but the faith community says, no, I have the people and I wanna serve the people and they're just back and forth, problem people, problem people, problem people and this, yes, all of the above. It's gotta be both of those things when we solve problems because people are not just problems and problems are not just people. It goes by and in hand. We need to think about how these things work together and strengths and abilities from each side work together. And so while we have this challenge on the nonprofit sector and the civic sector, it's also important to recognize that our nonprofit community and our service infrastructure is huge in our country. So recently came across a report by, always forget their name, the organization for economic cooperation and development, OECD. When they looked at the national level of social spending in our country, US ranks 22nd. They kind of say, oh man, when they include all social spending, we jump up to the second in the highest amount of social spending per capita, no, let me see, per percent of GDP when we compared with other countries. So from 22nd in the amount of spending to 2nd in the amount of spending, that's the contribution of the civic sector. That's the contribution of nonprofits. That's the contribution of individual donations that organizations and individuals, nonprofits, service organizations, rotary, all those different organizations. Let me add that up. We have significant amount of spending in our country and it's really surprising to some to recognize that a huge part of that work is smaller nonprofits, community-based organizations. You may not know, I looked up this stat in 2012, 66% of all nonprofits had a budget of 500,000 or less. So these are not the nonprofits that you know. These are your smaller organizations that are right down the street. We've passed the ministry on the way in. They're not the big names. They're just people serving in their community and caring. All those organizations contribute huge to the total amount of social spending in our country and I think we're unique in that element as well. Not only that, but we can monetarily estimate the value of nonprofits in our community. The National Council of Nonprofits, again in 2012, estimate that the nonprofit sector contributed $878 billion with a B into our economy. So I think I share these numbers. I often am struck by, I'll share a quick story. I worked with during the Bush administration on a report that said the value and how many grant dollars went to faith communities. I would tell you I poured blood, sweat, and tears and part of an arm into kind of trying to figure out this number. And during the Bush administration, the president shares the number and I'm ready to stand, I'm ready to clap. This is a huge number. You guys don't know what this means and nothing happened. No, no, this is mean fast. Later in the speech, individuals recognized a gentleman who had put his life together from experiencing incarceration was a thriving part of his society and he got a standing ovation. And I was like, well, where's my standing ovation for my really cool number? It's a really cool number that's important. And I started to say at that point that outside the Beltway, out in communities, people care about stories, people care about lives. Inside the Beltway, people care about numbers. I've changed that story a little bit recently from a leader that I've talked to, Matt Bird. I learned from him that leaders care about numbers. When we go out and talk about what you're doing as faith leaders, what you're doing as a community, you need to have numbers because numbers matter. Leaders listen to numbers. Leaders, oh, that's the value of the community that you have, that's the value of the work. I didn't realize how huge that contribution was. So I share those numbers with you to not only encourage you and let you know that you have significant contribution, but so you can share those with other leaders. So other leaders can say the community makes a huge difference. They know it, but when you can put a value on it, it makes a huge difference. So I use and encourage you, but I also wanna make sure that you have these tools and resources, these numbers, to share out in the community with leaders that you talk to to go alongside the amazing stories of import and success and transformation that you experience and promote. What's interesting as well in a lot of what's happening in DC is something I'm personally excited about is how people are starting to understand how relationships matter too. So numbers matter, the outcomes and the achievements that we see matter, but also relationships matter. A lot of this is being framed in terms of what we're calling social capital, understanding how we make connections in these relationships and that these connections and relationships make a difference in programs and outcomes. A lot of times we start with the framing of what's called bridging, bonding, bonding, bridging, and linking capital. So understanding these are kind of critical and it helps us think through some of the services that we need to provide in our community. Bonding is capital and relationships that are with like people. Other community and individuals who we know and are similar to us and so we bond and connect with them because they're similar to us that we share some experience. Oh, that happened to you too, it happened to me. And so now we have some bonding that's happening. We have some capital, some connection that's happening. But we also need systems and places in our community that form bridging capital, that bring people together from different sectors and different places so that we can see and honor and respect and connect around some of those activities. But the other one that's really important is linking capital. And linking capital is opportunities that connect us to systems, connect us to nonprofits, connect us to federal agency or federal agency, state agencies, local city agencies. And we need all these different pieces coming together to bring about outcomes. And what we're seeing and what we're looking at is when programs think through these relationships and these connections, we're seeing stronger outcomes achieved. Not only are you seeing stronger outcomes, I think we're also seeing sustained outcomes. So I'll give you one more example of this. We're seeing and looking at programs that have alumni networks. So when somebody comes through the program and stays connected to that program, maybe even providing some support to people coming back through the program, that maintaining of that relationship with the organization and the individual served actually leads to sustained outcome. And again, this is capital. This is you managing that relationship and those dynamics so that you stay in touch with the program and as you stay in touch with the program, you sustain the impact that was achieved when you were a participant in the program. And we're noting and celebrating programs that have alumni networks and asking how their alumni networks actually contribute to the program outcomes they're achieving. There are other examples and programs that we're looking at and we'll talk about those more as we look through some of the different issues. But I just wanted to make sure that you see that both you matter, the community matters, the systems that we have matter, and then also that these relationships matter to the programs and outcomes we're trying to achieve. Okay, that's the first part. I think I'm even, I'm good. Okay, I forgot to set my timer. I want to hear from you all. What does that make you think? What are some of the things that you consider? What are some of the ways you see that expressed here in San Antonio? Help me, we were talking earlier, that you are experts in this room. I'm standing up here up front, but you are also experts. What are some of the things that you see? What are some of the examples that you've heard that connect to some of the things that I just shared? And let's hear. Well, maybe you read over the weekend about how the Community Bible Church raised $75,000, worth of $20 gift cards for federal employees who had been furloughed locally. Isn't that amazing? That's a, for me, it's even an example of linking critical thinking and how we work together. Because if you didn't share the need, number one predictor of whether or not people volunteer is whether or not they're asked. If no one says we need gift cards, one way you could support people in needing our community is gift cards. Nobody gets asked, nobody does it, because nobody asked and then it doesn't happen. So we've got to help find ways to connect needs and opportunities and that's that linking systems. I was talking to Bill earlier today too, he said, technology is sometimes communication is what we need, not technology. Technology can facilitate communication, but just talking is a form of technology. But ancient, ancient technology. But we've used it, why don't we use it a little bit more sometimes to get some of the things we need to do done? That's again, a form of capital. But it also kind of rides in your whole thing about how numbers do matter because even if we say that numbers don't matter to hear that $75,000 worth of $20 gift cards to help the furloughed federal employees or better than that, it makes a difference, right? We got one. Okay, I was thinking of that very same example too, but because many, many times I have been really upset with government that is supposed to be working to take care of the common good and does not. And who comes through? It's always the faith-based groups. And the experience of this recent shutdown really pulled that whole thing together, I think. I saw it all over the place. And what it said to me was, out of the awful stuff that happened to so many people, all of the pain that was there, the sense of solidarity that came through with every single group, even to the resource fair yesterday that was offered by the county with all the different organizations around, it just said immense things to me. But it said to me, people maybe who had never had that experience before of being at a loss with what was going on experienced what other people go through every single day. And they also experienced the compassion of people that they never expected it from. I just thought something good. I'm really stuck. It's so many pieces of this, so it's interesting. I think we often see big problems and we look to the biggest place for the solution, which many times it's federal agencies, and I get those calls. And I hear someone say, I have this huge problem in my community, how do I solve it? And so often my answer is not that we have the answer. And actually it's interesting here too, because the answer that they're looking to is the people who were furloughed. So there's all this mix of both value and challenge, and those individuals are providing significant service of their community, but not always are the solution in the community. They provide this kind of ongoing support and connection that we miss when we don't have it, but we don't often see, I'm reminded of sound men. We don't have a sound man up there right now. You don't know the sound man's not there There he is, he's up there. Oh, there he is. Look, they thank you, that's another person who we don't, until it's not there, right? And so when we don't see these systems, and so I have noticed, at least when I experienced the shutdown a few years ago, there is about a four month lag. Four months from now we'll see the impact of people having not worked for 30 days, because it takes that long for the system to come through. But often the solutions in our communities are not coming from DC, they're not coming from the government. They are often small. They're little, they're ass that go out that say, hey, can you help with this? And people step up, people get involved. And many times it's our faith community that are the ones who are equipped and able to step into these spaces and to facilitate a neat need when they're asked, if they know what the need is and can be resourced in that way. So, love how there's so many different these pieces. So, but one thing I would take away, many times big problems have small solutions. Many times big challenges that we face have things that look smaller pieces that can be addressed to meet that need in meaningful and important ways that we can help identify and that many times faith and community leaders can contribute into. Other thoughts? Hi, good afternoon. Over here. Yes, yes. I would like to mention my experience working on social service film. I'm glad to be here in San Antonio because the persons in general provide a great service. For example, many agencies, I can say 100% but many agencies has bilingual service programs for the families because San Antonio has a high percent for Spanish families. And the same times many organizations provide another language services too. So, this is great because all population feel more comfortable when they receive the service and the language that they use it. Another, I would like to share is how we like citizens, like persons, like residents, we support activities in the city, for example. And my personal experience, I participate on the countless homeless last week. So, it was a great experience because we was many, many organizations working together to count how many homeless we had in community. I was mentioned before, like, after these populations, we had having for help and we had many other resources. I'm working for HESTA programs. I feel glad when the families approach me and they express some needs. I'm glad because I found in the community resources for this family. It's when you say, I'm here. So, we connect, all the organizations connect and we provide the service. It's true when you say, it's in a high population service or small places like the churches in the community, community centers. But in San Antonio, I trust really, we provide a great service for the families and we try to work together. It doesn't matter religion, doesn't matter income, doesn't matter other stuff. It's only the compassion one to another person over here. Thank you, sir. No, I see that too. And I think that's why we're excited. I'm excited to be here with you all. Let me just respond to a few of those points. A faith leader once told me, and I love this, he was talking about Spanish language translation. He was saying that many of his communities speak both English and Spanish. But if he doesn't translate it into Spanish, the community doesn't use it because the community is bilingual. And his comment to me was someone always pays the cost of complexity. And the question, one of the small pieces we can ask is how, and maybe one of the ways we can have the greatest impact without the greatest negative impact is by saying how can we answer the cost of complexity? How can we translate things that otherwise wouldn't get translated? How can we kind of help put pieces together that other people won't put together because we are willing to take the time and the ability and build those relationships and connections that allow us to bring everybody together in meaningful and important ways to address all the different challenges that we're facing. So it's gotta be somebody always has to pay that cost as a part of the solution that you're building. Can you be the answer? Can you provide and address that complexity? Because often I think, here's the other thing, for vulnerable populations, we expect them to manage complexity. We expect them to figure out all the different services they need. We expect them to figure out the programs and activities. And if we can have, this is a lot of interesting programs creating navigators, creating individual who manages the complexity of someone and says, I'm gonna walk this through with you. And again, we're back at relationships because if you don't have a helpful relationship with that person, that navigator can't really help that person walk through those challenges because you need the trust of somebody to be able to manage, just because you can't, you don't turn over your complex problems to just anybody, right? You turn them over to somebody you trust, you turn them over to somebody. And again, here too, community leaders, smaller nonprofits, faith that are in proximity, that are close to individuals, many times can be some of those individuals who manage that complexity, who vulnerable populations will let manage that complexity. So it's a critical step. One more comment before we move on. How does, how does our $1.2 trillion match up to the last several years or 20 years ago or 30 years ago? That's a great question. The $1.2 trillion from Faith Council was a time point in time study and the organization Faith Council is actually looking at other ways to kind of parse that information and count some of those different. They don't have numbers from previous years. I think one of the things we're seeing though is that there are opportunities for us to look and value that in different ways in different places. Some communities are doing audits of their, all the different contributions of the faith community and then doing a regular update of that so you can show the growth that's happened. Now, one thing I do know historically, and kind of we know this intuitively, but not, but it's important. Historically, many faith communities contributed significantly to social spending. And so historically, there has been a lot of investment in this space. We don't have good numbers, but here's another thing too that I would say, we need better numbers. We need to do a better job measuring what we do and the impact that we have because leaders are asking those types of questions that you're asking and we need to have better information. Now, at the same time, we need to have the strong relationships. We can't forget the relationship component that makes what so many programs do effective, but we've also got to have better numbers so that we can show the value in more places to more leaders about what is impacted and how it has an impact. So it's got to be both and not either or. Sometimes we can look at numbers and get so number focused that we forget that it's about people being served and lives being changed, but we also need the numbers. And so it goes hand in hand. And so, but I would say historically, we've done pretty good on the stories and the relationship side. We've not done as well as we need to do as organizations of acceptor on the numbers to show what the actual impact is on an ongoing basis. So we have like little ideas, but not big picture stories. And we need more big picture stories. I just want to add here. So make sure if you want to get the annual report from the Faith-Based Initiative that you've left your email address because we're going to send it out to all of you. But we've got some amazing numbers. 19 tons of brand new blankets and winter wear labeled, sized, bundled, were delivered by the Latter Day Saints last year after an urgent action alert. Also after some mapping and looking where the needs were in District 3, which is Southeast San Antonio, four new food pantries opened and now approximately 700 more families are being fed than a year ago. We got tons in numbers. So that's in that annual report. And if you want a copy of it, make sure we have your email address. Thank you, Ben. There's another great point as well that with what you have within and the San Antonio Compassionate Initiative, government agencies sometimes are better at some of those number counting and processing and thinking through things. And communities are better at serving and faith communities are better at doing certain parts. And so how do we leverage all those different strengths? Unless we're in communication and talking with each other, we don't. So we've got to have that communication and collaboration which honors and recognizes our respective strengths and leverages all of them to achieve the things that we're looking to achieve. I want to spend some time talking about prevention because I think that's a really critical step. On so many of these challenges, many of the things we can address need, but if we don't get at prevention, we're not getting ahead of the problem. We're kind of staying behind the eight ball and we're getting stuck on some of these issues and we're not actually getting to preventing the challenges that we experienced. We've got to address need, but we really got to get ahead of challenges. Many times when we approach, there's increasing amount of conversation around understanding and recognizing trauma. When we talk, I'm using this frame and I think we talked about our vulnerable populations. Is there any population, any of the populations that need help and support are many times experiencing some level of vulnerability. When we think about and how to serve vulnerable population, many times these populations have experienced adverse childhood experiences or ACEs. A form of trauma, maybe beyond ACEs to other forms of trauma. And until we understand those levels of trauma and we ask instead of what's wrong with you to what happened to you, what are some of the experiences? I think through compassion. Compassion for me connects to empathy and empathy looks at the world through the eyes of someone else. Empathy asks, what did you experience and how can I better understand some of those experiences and challenges and how does that relate to the services? How does that relate to prevention? How does that relate to just me talking to you about the challenges you're facing? If you've experienced trauma, you may be struggling with that before I actually work through the problem that you're facing. Maybe the thing that's contributing to your vulnerability relates to some of those challenges you experienced. And if I'm not as a person here too, holding some of that complexity that you might experience, holding some of those challenges, being empathetic to some of those considerations, having compassion for you within that situation, the service that we deliver may not be as effective. And so approaching things from a trauma-informed perspective, better understanding trauma, better understanding ACEs can be a significant step that you can take no matter who and how you're serving. If you are approaching populations in need who are experiencing hunger and the family's experienced hunger, you may need to think about whether or not this family has experienced some level of trauma as it relates to. I mean, not having food and not knowing if you're going to have food and the malnourishment that it can be experienced can be a form of not thinking I'm ever gonna have anything. If you can't have food, then what else can you not have? If I approach that circumstance and that situation, that vulnerable population that I'm working with from that perspective, significant changes, different ways of approaching populations can happen which can really make a difference for how you serve and support that population. And let me say that too, this is a critical step, that prevention can not just be like a service delivery but just a connection and a communication and involvement of participation in a community that says you're welcome on the weekend service just as much as you're involved in the program Monday through Wednesday, Monday through Friday, depending on your service delivery. And so you gotta think through those different pieces and considerations as you think through how to serve in the community. But it's both that service and participation, that involvement and that connection. One thing, I love this quote from a faith leader named Ed Setzer. He says, faith communities without the broken are also broken. If our faith communities aren't places where it can welcome people who've experienced trauma and challenged trauma and are welcoming into that environment, then there's a brokenness that's there already that we need to wrestle with and experience. But then we also need to think about how we include those individuals who've experienced brokenness and trauma and think about how to connect to those services. So there are bodies of work, there are work activities, whole policy spaces that are getting ahead of this. We're talking about social capital. There's also the work in what's called Families First, which is a whole reframe of the child welfare system saying that instead of just responding to child welfare cases, we should actually make it so that there are fewer child welfare cases in the first place. Some work that was done, actually in some analytical work, they found that they could actually predict where child welfare cases occurred. And they were using data in the community. The exciting thing that happened here is that the researcher who's doing this work, she didn't take it to the county, she didn't take it to the other places. She took it to faith communities. And she said, if you could know where a child welfare case actually happened, would you do something in that community? Would you serve, would you support, would you build up connections and relationships in this block where a child may become separated from their family and faith leaders are like, of course, if I can actually help a family from being separated, that's something I wanna work toward. And it was this motivation that these faith communities needed to actually jump into that space and jump into those communities and really see significant change happen. But it's interesting, it's hard to measure. We're talking about measurement. It's hard to measure something that has not happened. It's hard to measure something that you by your work won't see happen as a result. But it can be, it's a question of how do we put these pieces together of programs and activities because that's what we want. Human flourishing in our communities is about not seeing families broken up. It's about not seeing kids who are experiencing hunger. It's about families who are at risk of being homeless, staying in their home and being supported. But we've gotta think about how we get ahead of these challenges and how all are, excuse me, different organizations and communities can participate in those systems. And lastly, let me say before we turn it over to some more conversation and dialogue. We talked in compassion about being compassionate to self. And I would be remiss if I didn't encourage us and challenge us to say that we have to take care of ourselves just as much or maybe even more than we take care of those in our community. We have to recognize that we need to do self-care and take care of ourselves so that we can care for others as well. I'm reminded of this when I went to a community affected by Hurricane Florence. And my word to them was as you are building other people's homes up, as you are building your home back up, ask the question, am I okay? Just as much as you're asking of all the people in the community that you're serving, are you okay as well? It's such a critical step that we need to make sure that as caregivers we do the work of ourselves to care for ourselves and to make sure that we have that reservoir built up within ourselves that we can serve others as well. I think so many times, and actually I may say this too, when we look through and think about how we can serve others in the community, we can get overwhelming sometimes. We can seem, again, big problems, complex problems. My experience is that when we do better with self-care, we have more of a reserve to serve and we have a little bit more measure of the ability to manage some of those big challenges that we see and we have a little bit more space to identify those small solutions because we're not overwhelmed by the hugeness of the problem because we're taking care of ourselves and we have a little bit more to contribute into these circumstances. So as a part of prevention, prevention is not just a big system thing, it's not just a national thing, it's not just a state-wide or city thing, it's a personal thing. We've got to be doing our own work to make sure that we get ahead of the challenges and take care of ourselves as much as we take care of others. So the reminder, I think the mental health reminder, it's a care reminder, it's a support reminder just to think about how those things connect to the work that you're doing as well. So I was telling somebody, I once started a workshop in a community with about 20 leaders and I didn't talk for the first 10 minutes. I was just like, hi. And my point was to emphasize that you all are the experts. You all know what's happening in the community. I see these big pictures, but you see what this means for individuals on the ground in your community. So I want to hear that expertise that you guys have, that richness, that understanding that's expressed and connects. What does this mean for you? How do you see what this works? Maybe you're doing some work and this makes sense. And you're connecting to some of these conversations saying, wow, I wonder how this works with my community. I wonder how trauma is something I need to think about more. So the floor is yours. Let's hear your ideas and perspectives about how some of this works. I'm with Mission Presbyterian. I'm the disaster recovery coordinator and work with and through Presbyterian disaster assistance. And prevention is one of the biggest things we're working on right now because I lived in Florida for 30 years where prevention is a huge thing when it comes to hurricanes. And as I've discovered, I have a 66-county area here in the state. And what I've discovered is preparations in the state of Texas are abysmal. You don't hear about needing to prepare for a hurricane except in a few locations. You don't hear about being prepared for the next flood. Now you hear about, you know, don't go into the water and drown, but how do you prepare to avert the next flood? What do you need to do to your property to be prepared? What do you need to do to be prepared for the next fire? What do you need to do to be prepared for the next tornado? What do you need to do for the next man-made disaster? And really, trying to get people to think in the term of preparedness is something that I think every community has to think about. And we need to be targeting that because if people are more prepared, there's less chance of casualties. When there's some research around resilience, is anybody familiar with the term resilience? It's the idea that when we have more connections, we are better prepared or more connected to actually communities that have higher levels of connectedness and resilience actually recover faster from disasters. And so through the connections and the resources and the conversations that we're building, we are not only having an impact now, we're having an impact when future challenges come down the road, we're having an impact. But let me say this, I think this is such a critical point. We also need to think about preparedness in our minority communities and our underserved communities. We've seen that time and time again and I think uniquely faith communities have a specific opportunity in these spaces to build some of these relationships and connections. And then again, contribute to and have a contribution to our ongoing health, because resilient communities are healthy communities as well. So opportunity connect to that. It also makes me think, so I'm just gonna keep like harvesting as well. I'm curious how many folks know about volunteers organize something disaster, VOAD. And the emergency system that we do have here. I think what I'll do is I'll send out the information along with the annual report. Those are like weekly meetings, always preparing for what's coming up. And that's part of our urgent action alert system as well. And Ben, you might not know this, but so much of who we are in terms of disaster, in terms of poverty, I mean, we can measure the whole thing, is San Antonio's literal geography. And so where there are floodplains, I mean, you can look at our geography. So Kristin Drennan from Trinity University has done extensive studies on our geography and how it impacts our community concerns. And she presented at one of our gatherings before. We have her on Nowcast and online. So we'll send out that link as well. So if you're not familiar with all those numbers and that data about what's happening because of our literal geography and topography and I'll send that in there as well. So you're gonna get a lot of stuff in that. Think too about how geography relates to bridging and bonding capital. It can help connect people who are already connected. Many times they connect in certain communities, but then if we are able to bridge some of those connections, again, we're cut back to resilience. We're back to knocking about how we build systems that address vulnerable populations in meaningful and important ways when we think about connecting across the usual systems and places where we connect. So real huge opportunities to do work in that space. Thank you for that comment. Share your name too. I haven't made sure where you do that, yeah. Thank you. What is your name by the way? Ben. Mr. Ben. My name is Nora Gonzalez. I do work for Metro Health. I'm a community health worker in the Highland Park area. First of all, I wanna say thank you because the things that you're sharing are amazing. I'm sitting here just like super excited because this is what we learn in the community. In the health department, Dr. Bridger does push the aces on us. I mean, that's like the thing that we're really working towards this year. Amazing, amazing stuff. Sometimes I'm like, what? That's like common sense, hello, right? Dumb moment, yeah. But I appreciate you bringing it up because I think sometimes, and I'm sorry, I'm just too excited with you, especially when we are privileged enough to have a role where we're able to look at systems or problems, we think we're the experts and it's like, you said it, you gotta fix yourself first, you know? When I learned about aces, I had to take that test for myself and be like, whoa, my aces are pretty high, you know? And the thing is that everything that I learned, I have to take it back to my family and try it with my family first, you know? Anything that I'm gonna take out into the community, I have to try it in my home base, right? So a lot of times when working with the faith-based community, you see people that are in leadership who don't even speak to their family members, but then you're trying to fix problems in the community, hold on, back it up, hold on, let's take a couple of steps back and let's try it out in our home and then we take it out. And I promised you it works 100 times better. I am very privileged that I do have a good relationship with Baptist Temple, they're right here in the front and we work together closely, but we have, I feel, and I hope they feel the same way too, that we have such a close relationship that we're able to call each other out when we're kind of struggling on an issue. And I think that that's something that everybody really needs to think about. If you don't know about aces, we do teach on it, we give presentations, but there's a lot of people who are picking it up and that's amazing. So I think that just speaking from a personal level, my life right now is, I want to say amazing, amazing. Like the flow in my home is amazing, it's taken me three years to get there, but everything that I learn, I try it on my home base first. So thank you for expressing that because that's super important to say me first, then I can give you some, and now I know how to navigate it, not go out there and be like, let me fix your problem because it's not realistic. So thank you, Mr. Ben, I appreciate it. Thank you, Nora, I appreciate it. No, I think it's so many great pieces of what you're talking about and sharing. Note that there are trainings on aces that other leaders can take and connect to and learn more about this kind of space, such a critical space, really contributing to a lot of learning in other sectors, substance use, people struggling with addiction, individuals who have higher numbers of aces are at higher risk of experiencing addiction. So many different components and considerations that we need to think about in this space and also this affirmation that we need to do it ourselves. We can't go out and tell the community that they're working on a problem that I'm not willing to work on myself. And just, oh, yeah, yes, yes, more, more. It makes me think too of the, so I only know this one number, one in five in a congregation are impacted in one way or another, by mental illness. And they tend to go to their faith leadership first before anyone else. I'm wondering, and I'm looking here at Terry from NAMI and Doug who's lead the action team on mental health wellness in the initiative. Is there a number like that, but among leadership? What's that number sound like? Among faith leaders or leaders in general who suffer? There's one study of faith leaders in Methodist leaders in North Carolina. It's called the Methodist, the Duke Methodist Leadership Study that did find that there are increasingly high numbers of individuals experiencing both suicidality and mental health concerns as a part of clergy, at least in the Methodist church in that space. We don't have a firm number nationally, but it means certainly there's an increased amount of attention specifically on suicidality, of risk of suicidality among clergy. As they, and again too, we're back at self-care. We're back at this consideration that they are carrying so many of those hurts and pains in the community. And if the work, as clergy leaders, if clergy leaders aren't doing the work of self-care, then it becomes overwhelming to carry all those concerns across the community. So really important for us to be looking at both those components. Yeah, no, simply the comment is just the sense of a non-anxious presence, right? So it's kind of just that, and then the idea of just Sabbath, you know, just that rest. So how would leaders really just model that, you know, and relax in there? Man, self-care looks like lots of different things. Sometimes it's just taking a break. Sometimes it is that calm presence and peace that can be presented and finding that peace and place for yourself and doing that compassion work. But yeah, and this is critically important in the mental health space. I wanna talk about that in our second kind of session about the critical importance of mental health that you guys are also addressing here too. But we're gonna think about some of those connections and possibilities that are present. Other thoughts about prevention, self-care, and how we have to take care of ourselves as a part of the work we do in our community. Bill's on his way to somebody else, but we'll come back over here. Ken Donahue over there. Bill did self-care by taking a loop around the rim here for a second. He's getting his steps in. There you go, exactly. His steps in, everybody needs to get, how many steps, 10,000? I don't know where that number came from. Anyway, what I've recognized is that I think we need to be open to other organizations that are doing preventative things. And I've come across, other than a faith-based organization, I've come across this other organization that is beginning to develop the numbers that you're looking for in terms of prevention of suicide, prevention of divorce, through a particular system that is being offered to military and both active vets and families. And so I think we need to be open to that and tie in those connections with our faith-based organizations as well. And by the way, I'm Ken Donahue. What's the name of that organization, Ken? It goes by an acronym. Of course. It's called TADSAW, T-A-D-S-A-W. And it's a program of providing service dogs to veterans in particular that are experiencing PSTD and other anxiety maladies. And they actually have begun to develop numbers related to the preventive aspects of this particular program. And I'll get you the literature in. And we'll send it out to everybody. I'm familiar with the project, or named organization called, I think it's Project Reboot, if I remember correctly. Two really cool things about what they're doing. One is that they are addressing trauma in service members. But they address trauma in service members through group work. They basically bring the group together and they encourage them to relate to each other. And in many ways, that service dog connection where you're building that relationship, they basically use other people as those relationships and connections. And they have a faith component. I love the director of this program said, I'm too faith-based for the science folks and I'm too science-based for the faith-based folks. Because he's really bringing all these pieces together to show how you can have an impact when you think about trauma, when you think about relationships and address populations in need. Let me speak to one other component that you shared and I think this is really critical. Sometimes when we're working with more conservative organizations, more organizations that aren't as comfortable with coming all in my space and working together, or, and I describe to people like this as a collaboration. Sometimes collaboration is overlapping circles. And somebody's like, no, don't come into my space. That's my space. No, no, no, no, no, no. That's not an opportunity to stop. That's not an opportunity to say, oh no, I'm not going to work with them. I always challenge people to think not just about collaboration, but complimenting. Complimenting says, so here's a circle. I've got a weakness, you've got a strength. I'm going to compliment. I'm gonna come alongside. It's like a puzzle piece coming together rather than circles overlapping. And when we think about how we can compliment each other, first I think you, as you noted, you have to recognize I have a weakness. I have a piece of this puzzle that I don't have. I have a piece of this that somebody can come in and someone else has a strength that fits into my weakness. Someone else has an expertise in prevention. Someone else has an expertise in something that I don't have an expertise in. As a faith community, as a community-based organization. And if we think about how we can fit our resources together, we can be an expression of a greater whole. A better understanding of the puzzle than if we'd only said, well, nope, this puzzle piece doesn't go with this couple of weeks, I'm not talking to you. Or just not even asking whether or not we fit together, which happens more often than not. We've got to really do the wrestling and the thinking through of how the pieces fit where my strengths relate to your weaknesses and vice versa, so that we can think about how we have a greater system of care for those who are struggling in our community. So compliment over collaboration. Back here in the back. Hi, I'm Trish Moy with Habitat for Humanity. You just made me think of one of the populations that we're currently serving a lot of families with is the former refugees from Burma and Miramar. They have come in from the refugee camps. Many of them grew up there, their whole lives. They've come into the country through Catholic Charities. Has worked with them and gotten them connected in communities. And then they get employment and then some of them move on to connection with Trinity Baptist Church. Trinity Baptist Church continues to connect them and foster that. And then they come through us and we teach them all about home ownership and they build their home right with us. And then they continue to help others that come in and serve them as translators or we're putting hours on their houses so they get built as well. So that's a great example of the puzzle pieces that you're talking about where multiple organizations of faith are serving these populations to get them successful and independent so they can serve themselves and they can continue to serve others and the cycle can grow. Yeah, our refugee populations and the work that we can do in that space is such a critical need. Thinking about, again, sometimes when we think about how to serve in our community if we think about how to serve the most vulnerable if we think about how to serve those people who are struggling the most the systems that we need, again, we're back to resilience as we build those connections and relationships so we actually will serve others who are less vulnerable in the community because we've created a system that will address a kind of a safety net that will catch those who struggle the most with the greatest number of challenges think about those as a refugee someone who's coming to the country may not have connections and relationships may not speak the language may not have some of those connections and resources if we think about how to serve and to meet that level of vulnerability all the other populations that experience parts of that vulnerability can be served by a system that addresses the most vulnerable and so as we think about how to create systems of care as we think about how our puzzle pieces work together if we can be strategic in how we think about the most vulnerable we can often create a system that will care for all vulnerable populations in our community in meaningful and important ways now it's not gonna take away vulnerability not gonna take away need but it can create systems through which those individuals can move through to affect change and I think that's just an opportunity for us to think about as we create systems of care how is that being understood that when you're collaborating and complimenting that you're actually I guess what I'm capturing what you're saying you're actually doing heavy lifting so right now where you're getting the most vulnerable you're actually capturing it seems to me you have a greater scope of complexity It's a great point, Abel's kind of saying so how does that work? Where does it go? Or I would hope so and I think we're certainly seeing places that have comprehensive ways of meeting need that they are more effective in serving the populations that they serve one of the ways this is getting expressed is something called social determinants of health Secretary Azar just recently gave us speech talking about how as we address social determinants of health and I'll talk about what that is in a second that we have better systems of care so really let me use an example if someone comes into the emergency room and is sick and we don't think about where their next meal is gonna come from they're gonna come back to the emergency room because they didn't have their next meal planned they come in for malnourishment and we don't think about how they're gonna get healthy food then they're gonna come back to the emergency room malnourished and so if we're not thinking about how we provide systems of and prescribing healthy food and prescribing like systems of care letting them know where their SNAP benefit is letting them know where the local food bank is if we don't help them connect to that service they're gonna continue to be sick because even though malnourishment is a medical symptom there's what they're coming in for hunger is the challenge and if we don't think about the I mean hunger living situation we talked about housing you can talk about care in the family and support social connections as a form of social determinants of health if we don't think about all those other pieces then we won't have healthy people we won't have human flourishing let me say this too interesting and important the Center for Human Flourishing found that religion can be a significant factor in promoting health and wellness the social connections the sense of purpose and identity that comes from our faith communities can be a huge contributor to outcomes that we're looking for in populations and so as you're thinking just saying hey I wanna encourage you to participate in a community wherever that community is it can be rotary it can be the YMCA we're seeing an organization called Phoenix Multisport does anybody know about Phoenix Multisport? It's a gem for individuals struggling with addiction and they go they do their work out and they talk about how they struggle with addiction they find community and support and they actually maintain their health and they get healthier because they're working out like again, aha moment is a dumb moment in the sky you know it's that you could be prescribed a gym people talk about CrossFit is this place where people have this connection that they don't have any other place CrossFit can be something that you might need to help contribute to your health outcomes CrossFit may be something that someone who's trying sort of where some refugee would say ah this is great I have this place where I can go and work out and do all these things and then I'm more equipped to do all the other things I need to do we need to find and encourage those levels of connection and places of connection again social capital, relationship building relationships matter for the outcomes that we're looking to try and achieve so also I mean this has been my time in federal government I don't think I've seen a grant opportunity where it says oh apply for this grant you could do it alone just go ahead you know just don't tell us about anyone you're working with that's not important at all no almost every grant encourages you and gives you points about whether or not you say you have memory and understanding MOUs for partnerships that you have in the community because we know that you need partnerships there are even steps that are being taken in certain grant programs where if you say we're gonna address this and the population and greatest of need is this population in my community but if you don't have a partnership with someone in that community they come back to you and you say okay to get this grant you actually need a partnership to work with the population that is most in need that you said is most in need in your grant application I'm gonna keep saying it aha moment is a dumb moment in disguise it's this realization that as a part of your grant you actually need partners to work with the community that you need to serve and again here we're back at faith communities we're back at community based institutions who have those relationships that can contribute into outcomes that we're looking to achieve in these programs and pro activities so yeah I mean I think connectionality is great and I think that's one of the things we have to do but also having come from the corporate world we also need to be able to share the data and who you're working with and sharing with because I might have something that somebody else needs and we're servicing the same community but if we're not sharing our data we don't know who's doing what for who or with whom and we could find a lot of people who aren't being served and on the opposite hand we might find people who are double dipping could I take your one step further I think we don't need to just share data I think we need to share success we need to be saying hey we did this together I didn't do it nobody ever said you did it but we need to stay together and we need to celebrate success so not just do we need to collect data and share data and bring all these systems together but then we need to find opportunities to say yay we did this and we couldn't do it alone and so I think when you share success you have more reason to share more data you have more opportunities to build more relationship and greater things are possible when you put some of these pieces together so I encourage you not only to share data but also to revel in success but here too let's say this we need a greater system and an honor of the system and that means we need to revel in each other's success so not just share success but then also say this organization our community did this and it was amazing that they did that we wanna lift that up in our newsletter not about us but to say this other organization did great stuff Nora likes that idea so think about how we can yeah not just share success but also honor each other's successes I wanna speak to that hello everybody this is so cool that the people of faith are here to mobilize within our communities and I personally live by a quote that mother Teresa said and I think it might be appropriate to share she said if we have no peace it's because we've forgotten we belong to one another so this time is appropriate that we think about how we belong to one another in extending compassion within our community but I wanted to piggyback off of sharing successes our church, we have a church Bethel International Christian Fellowship and in 2006 we started the Bethel Community Development Corporation and since then even prior to establishing that so that we could tap into federal funding for work that we had already been doing within our community but one of the most successful things that we did talking about sharing was we instead of having our usual Sunday worship service we did two services one where we had a panel discussion for those who were suffering with HIV and AIDS we talked about those who had succumbed those who had gotten infected we did some conversation on sexual health to encourage various types of condom use that I didn't even have a clue about until I went through some Hermosa training and various trainings and when they found out they're like, what are you doing in here pastor? You know, what are you doing? Well, I'm trying to take care of people suffering in the community that other people have forgotten about and we collaborated with Beade AIDS San Antonio AIDS Foundation and other people who could come and awaken people's soul that we are responsible for the burdens that people are carrying in our community and then the last thing that we did last year we didn't have a church service we had a panel discussion on alcoholism and opioid addiction and we found out within our congregation as quiet as it had been kept many of our congregants were suffering with opioid addiction were too ashamed to hit the altar for prayer and that prayer is good, I believe in it I've seen miracles but we need to be able to direct persons and people without shame in the game can you write that down? Without shame in the game to organizations within the community that can help them outside of what we're able to do in providing that faithful support and the members loved it they're like, what's the next thing we're gonna do to shut down the regular worship service? So the next thing that I'm working on for April since April is sexual assault month a lot of women I have found through our women's fellowship have been sexually assaulted my niece unfortunately I don't know if you all are familiar with the R. Kelly drama that's been going on my niece got picked up here in the city by him as a young teenage girl and got caught up in the fiasco of that so we're gonna do a crucial conversation on substance abuse, sexual assault and trauma and that is how we do exactly what you're talking about doing so thank you for coming thank you, you're such a smart lady thank you for doing this so I just wanted to say that I thought it was important I didn't pay her but she gave me my transition oh, okay, no, no, we'll come back we got a couple more coming here what you're doing is redefining the word service there you go yeah right here, okay, go ahead hi, I'm Susan and I'm with Compassionate San Antonio I'm not with the city part of it I'm with the not-for-profit part of it that came out of the Peace Center but when you talked about celebrating success we're doing that here and let me tell you about it because everybody can be a part of it when this city council and this mayor first took over June almost two years ago now we became a Compassionate City on that day and a month later we said the Compassion is in the stories it's in the numbers but it's in the stories and we keep telling the stories and then losing them so let's start capturing them so what I do is every day I go through all of the newspapers, all of the television programs every newsletter from every organization I get and we tweet every Compassionate Act we find to lift up the organizations that are doing that work so we've been doing that now for it's almost 80 weeks I'd have to look it up and we're just approaching 2,000 Compassionate Acts and sometimes it's little things like neighbors putting together a barbecue fundraiser for a kid in the neighborhood who has cancer and sometimes it's huge things that affect the entire city and are very systemic a change to the way that we do things sometimes it's about based organizations sometimes it's about nonprofit organizations a lot of times it's just about individuals doing good things and more and more it's about our city doing Compassionate Acts so you can look for that if you're on Twitter at Compassionnet1, the number one and we're there on Twitter and you can find us and on our website which is sacompassion.net I do a weekly news roundup so you can get it that way every week and if Ann you could put that out those two addresses because we're doing that and it's stunning how many organizations I've never heard of are doing absolutely admirable, remarkable, amazing things within our city I get tired of writing about the food bank sometimes and habitat microphone by the way there it is but then sometimes they're just these new organizations or organizations who have been doing it for 30 years that we've never heard of and just celebrating celebrating the fact that there are good things being done I don't want to say I'm here because I've heard about the good things that are going on and excited to participate and support the work you guys are doing in these meaningful and important ways so I'm just I'm honored to be here with you all in the work that you're doing so, yes Yes, Mario San Antonio Food Bank Good timing, good timing but no thank you I really just comment just want to thank you for making the time to come down to San Antonio and to work with Ann at Human Services you know when you talk about faith-based initiative and compassion you know the food bank we're just very humbled and privileged and honored really to be able to serve with a lot of organizations in our footprint that we cover the majority are faith-based you know food pantry is located at a church and so with respect to the work that Ann is doing at Human Services and even Metro Health we partner up with City Council District 3 and other of the council districts and the mayor's office just to be able to provide that service and that mission of fighting hunger and feeding hope when you talk about prevention, natural disaster man-made disaster I mean you see there's 200 food banks across the country 21 in the state of Texas they're all doing what we can do but we couldn't do it without all of y'all without the community, without partnering up and so really just want to say thank you again for taking time to come down here and to speak to us and thank you to Ann for putting this on by the way as of yesterday morning he wasn't coming it's that furlough thing yeah so they did the whole three week cause just for us on Friday so Ben could come on Monday you know I was like can I go? can I go? I really want to go otherwise it'd be this disembodied picture of a screen up here wouldn't it be a sun? I want to use the transition of what we talked about and to really focus on some issues spend some time in the issues that you all are focused on spend some time on the issues that we're focused on nationally so that you can hear about some of those key strategies and activities and think through some of those components we have the areas of community concern that are happening here so I want to be available for you all to say who's doing work on generational poverty who's doing work on homelessness what are some of the strategies and I joke with Ann I'm going to call that the mind my mind game because there's just all these examples running around in my head and you just have to help me pull them out so and if not there's someone I don't know about I'm going to call up and send Ann and send you examples so the two things that we're really focused on in the Center for Faith and Opportunity initiatives are the opioid crisis and just the struggle that people are having with addiction as well as mental health those are the two key issue areas that we've focused on but our solution to the opioid crisis wasn't by us staying in DC and telling everybody this is what you need to do and here's the solution that you need to implement in your community what we really did first was we wanted to help people know what the opioid crisis was where it came from what are some of the challenges what do you need to know about addiction that you might not know about otherwise and so what we did was we did a webinar series we just brought the expertise of the government all the leaders who are experts on the opioid crisis the experts I love this fact the experts in HHS on the opioid crisis come from the CDC Injury Center of a lot of the opioid work because people who experience injuries have pain people who have pain get pain killers, opioids are pain killers they were the ones who knew and even were working on some of these issues before it ever became this national consideration that we needed to think about with the opioid crisis and so we had leaders from the CDC Injury Center come on and talk to people about why they were having this moment, this challenge of losing 130 people a day to overdose deaths why this is crazy too we're seeing a shift that's happening where increasingly drug dealers are pushing meth as opposed to opioids because they're realizing that they're killing their clientele realtors are getting involved do you know why realtors need to get involved in the opioid crisis who knows Dr. Kelly do you want to tell us why well because people who have an addiction will go and act like they're looking at a house but their intention and true motive is to get into the restroom and get in the medicine cabinet and steal prescriptions that have unused prescriptions so we need realtors involved in the opioid crisis we need 30% of all youth exposure to opioids comes through a dentist opioid or Tylenol 3 has an opioid in it and many times when you experience general teeth pain or after you get it you know a teeth work done you get prescribed a low dose opioid painkiller and if you're not ready and you don't know that it has an addictive component then this may be something that takes you down the road towards addiction that starts with that youth experiencing doing sports who have a sports injury get prescribed a painkiller and it's the start of something that's larger and more challenging in their life that otherwise that wouldn't have happened had they not known that the opioid was had an addictive component to it these are all things that we heard from CDC and heard from leaders across the country and then we also went out and listened and maybe I would say that's another component of what we can do in our communities is just hear what's already working celebrate existing successes and then what we did was we put those all together in what we call our practical toolkit I was personally I put practical on here because I said I couldn't do another toolkit it had to be something that actually people could do and it's simple things we were talking earlier about just the act of including individuals who struggle with addiction as a part of your prayer time putting them on the prayer list in the bulletin and what happens when you start talking about people who struggle with addiction suddenly you didn't even know people who had struggled with addiction or had family members who struggle with addiction it's safe it's open it's on the table and now we can talk about it we can bring you those concerns and considerations because we've made it a part of the conversation or our community and we said it's okay for us to talk about this level of brokenness in our space but then there's there's more robust ways I mean that's just like a first step you can come someone who can minister in a lock zone in your community the Surgeon General has recommended that basically everyone be able to have in the lock zone food pantries community based institutions if they are more places where in the lock zone is available a drug that reverses the effects of an overdose death they call it some people call it the Lazarus drug because people are are resurrected after they look like they were going to pass away and this again you can not just be life-giving you can bring life into your community as someone who can administer in a lock zone if you've been trained on how to do that but then it's as well as we get ahead of the as we get ahead of people dying again 130 people dying a day that's why we have this national crisis and focus on it once we get ahead of that if we're going to actually help reduce the challenges we've actually got to get ahead of the problem not stay behind the problem and so what we need to do is create systems and opportunities to prevent addiction we need to again ASIS is a part of this knowing that producing or addressing ASIS can help reduce addiction or being at risk of addiction there are ways that you can collaborate and connect and partner we're right now building out a process by which we help people know how to do workforce individuals who previously struggled with addiction need jobs just like everybody else and then thinking through how you educate employers to work with somebody who experienced addiction who I love this point that people who experience addiction for people who experience addiction that relapse is a symptom of recovery again now we have to think differently about addiction in our communities because we're thinking about how it's something that happens as a part of getting better it's a part of like working through that challenge they're working on it but it's not to mean that we can't say that when you relapse you failed or you're not working on your recovery anymore no it's just a part of getting better and how can workforces be places that are working with individuals who are struggling with that and think through how they continue to employ those individuals who might be struggling but then also thinking about different ways and partnerships relationships that you can build in your community to strengthen those systems of care these are all strategy and activities that we outlined in this toolkit and we actually highlighted the communities and the organizations across the country who are doing this work and you can watch and listen to those webinars as well we also continue to advocate and challenge the system to partner with faith-based and community-based partners to address this opioid crisis and we just heard from senior leadership today saying that you know as much as we invest money in our communities and address the challenges we really need to see community leaders step up into this conversation to really bring about the cultural change that we need to see go alongside the systems change that we promote and connect the other area that we're really focused on is mental health this is such a critical challenge there's new laws that were created that created what's called the interagency serious mental illness coordinating committee or ISMIC I joke with people one way you can know that federal systems stick around is if the people give it an acronym it's kind of scary but it's kind of true so the ISMIC was something that was created and so with ISMIC what we're doing is really bringing national leaders together and thinking about how we create a comprehensive system of care for individuals struggling with serious mental illness as a part of that work and body of exercise we really had an opportunity to celebrate the world that faith leaders and community leaders play in addressing systems of need for individuals struggling with mental illness some people here today were able to participate in that conversation and help us think through some of those considerations and we're building on that with next steps we're going to do webinars introducing people to mental illness and helping people know signs and symptoms and already mentioned one in four individuals who struggle with mental illness go to their faith leader before they go to a mental health professional so 25% of individuals who struggle with mental illness go to the faith leader if a faith leader doesn't know the difference between just being down and depression it can mean the difference between suicide and life it's that clear cut if we don't recognize some of those signs and symptoms if it's not just a matter of saying oh you need some spiritual support and encouragement and I hope that you guys that are currently are experiencing a medical condition that is beyond the ability of my spirituality or my spiritual advice to address and while I want to be there supported you and encourage you spiritually there is something here that goes greater than that that needs medical support that I can't provide I like to joke with faith leaders and workshops and discussions that I do that churches don't have CT scanners in the nursery but my church doesn't and so in essence they don't have the tools and resources to address some of those mental health conditions that we are faith leaders need to see our expertise outside of their domain and then we need to think about how just like with someone who is in our congregation who are in communities or in a temple or mosque they may they may someone gets cancer no one expects that pastor to administer chemotherapy the person who gets cancer doesn't expect that pastor to administer chemotherapy if your pastor offers to administer chemotherapy don't do it but what is the expectation there is an expectation of social support there is an expectation of casserole we joke that mental health is the no casserole disease when was the last time you took casserole to someone who experienced a mental health condition when was the last time you heard of someone taking casserole to someone who experienced a mental health condition it's a medical condition just like cancer and it should be treated with a casserole just like cancer and it's the opportunity we have as faith leaders to come along and provide that social support that meaningful connection to individual struggling so that they can participate in recovery down the road that they can get better and find the ways that they can be healthy again there are roles and responsibilities there are opportunities for faith leaders to get involved in this space we're going to be doing also in the same time another critical component of this is that mental health professionals need to honor and respect people of faith as well community based institutions saying that community based institutions and faith based institutions and other agencies have a role in supporting that it's not just a symptom that we need to abate but a person we need to treat so thanks for giving that to me I appreciate you San Antonio that we don't just have a symptom we need to treat but a person we need to serve that's the opportunity that we have in mental health so we're celebrating and thinking through ways the American Psychological Association actually already has levels of competency that they've proposed and encouraged so we just want to make sure mental health professionals know about some of those things and can think about the role that faith can have in supporting and addressing increasing services for those populations let me just touch on a couple of areas of key concern we've already talked a little bit what you guys have as community concerns of addressing vulnerability whether or not someone is experiencing generational poverty or mental health challenges individuals and children who are in foster care at risk of their families going into foster care we're talking about levels of vulnerability we're talking about veterans they were returning from service they may have experiences that have led them to experience levels of vulnerability we need to think about those populations as well and their families all of these systems we can think about building systems of care systems of support that address those levels of vulnerability and think about how we can connect systems in care we can think about trauma as we think about those things we can think about prevention when we think about those things another thing that we're seeing in generational poverty is interesting we take the generational poverty and we say generational solution they're calling them two-gen solution two-generation solutions any time you're working with a child work with a parent work with a child some states are working on multi-generation strategies because they're recognizing and I jump back to opioids we're seeing an increasing number of grandparents becoming parents because both parents die of overdose deaths and they then get placed with grandparents or next to kin and so we're seeing increasing number of grandparents parenting we're seeing an increasing number of multi-generational challenges and so where possible and where opportunities present themselves we should not just be working with a parent and the child maybe we can also be working with a grandparent maybe we can also be working with all levels of the individual receiving services we're seeing those programs have significant outcomes meaningful change that's happening in some of those places and it's exciting to see that and certainly in children in foster care we are seeing huge numbers of faith communities step into this space and really say we want to be available and support families projects where you can go into and mentor a family that's struggling so not just actually take the child into foster care you take the mom and the child who are at risk of separation and you mentor both the mom and the child a program called safe families which is having some significant impacts and showing sometimes cost savings in some places where they're implementing that program in public health I would say too just increasing awareness and education is such a critical component of this space just knowing we talked about such determinants of health where hospital health systems are actually prescribing connections to community-based institutions as a way to address your health concern and so that's another strategy that might be something to consider as a partnership with the hospital health system and then just strategies for bringing people together creating partnerships and relationships we want to make sure that all organizations feel like they can participate in these systems no matter what their belief or lack thereof is and so thinking about how all these organizations can participate is something that we're really celebrating and strengthening at the national level I think I got all of them but there are things that you may be seeing there are challenges that you may be thinking about how to address and if you want to know at the national level solutions that we're seeing I'm glad to try and think of them yeah right here Amy I'm just wondering at the national level if you're talking about elder care and some of the probably growing crises as we have older populations growing Alzheimer's communities etc the joint education committee Jack as a part of Senate oh yeah I don't like double-miking how that was horrible sorry just released a study that talked about how increasingly are senior populations are experiencing levels of loneliness and and again now we're back small solution we don't need a national program on loneliness what we need is people to talk to each other go go forth and prosper you know we need to create these connections and relationships now interestingly the UK has actually a minister on loneliness the United Kingdom has actually created a position where there's someone who's in charge of just helping people think about how to connect with each other we haven't got there nationally but we are having some significant conversations especially in elder care about how we address loneliness among our seniors building up connections and relationships to address some of those populations creating spaces where they can come together and connect separate from institutionalization and this is the whole push that used to be that there was just the office of administration on aging now it's called administration on community living reflects the shift away from just saying it's about elderly populations to about actually participating in community and settings and living as a part of that community to bring strength and opportunity there's great leadership over there and the administration for community living and a lot of thought and process about how we strength and partnerships one of the things I'm excited about to they're actually implementing some concepts related or similar to asset based community development where instead of saying our seniors are lonely what are we going to do about it they're saying our seniors are lonely what existing places can we help them connect to what are the existing opportunities that are places where we can build relationships and connections instead of kind of building the wheel how do we connect them to the existing wheels that are already in our community if we just think about ways to partner and connect and I'm excited about that initiative because I think it's a strength approach I think it says that there are places where our seniors can participate if we just again invite them to be involved. Peggy back on that so and I'm moving because I want to make sure this person over here talks but there is a summit being planned and sister Jane Ann is going to raise her hand if you want to hear more about the senior Sabbath summit that's coming in May for the whole city and all this conversation part of the department of human services and that's happening but I'm hoping that Dan would talk a little bit about senior planet Thank you Ann My name is Deanne Coyar and I'm with older adult technology services and director of senior planet and we are working on connecting San Antonio 60 years or older to digital literacy training and classes to build a base of people 60 years older who are social change advocates here in San Antonio and long story short we raise money and we provide free classes to people who are 60 years older in the hope of just increasing socialization decreasing isolation and you know trying to you know confront all of those social determinants the long list that you mentioned and one thing I like hearing about everybody in the audience and I love about today as I love how you all are talking about the core morbidity at that's the right term of how all of these things are connected and impact each other so thank you very much co-morbidity is a good word so many of these challenges people don't just have one thing they have many things again aha moment some moment people are people they're not their problems and they're not their conditions and they're not the reasons that they come to our nonprofits just people who have challenges and if we honor and respect them as people we need to see that they have many different needs and many different ways in which organizations in our community can connect and contribute or can connect and contribute address support those needs but we have if we as an organization just think we have our one thing and that's going to be the one solution that they need we don't honor and respect the complexity of who they are and so we need to think about how all these pieces come together to address those so that we can think about this for people as people not just a problem I hope that we have several action teams from the initiative in this room I hope they're thinking about what they're going to say the microphone under mine mine mine right right so Bill handed the mic over hi my name is Nina I am a family support worker for the city of San Antonio and I work with the Head Start program but I kind of just wanted to mention about kind of marketing your programs and your initiatives your faith based initiatives and what your program does because for my program specifically sometimes parents come in and they believe it's just free day care they believe it's a pre-k for SA type program where they're just going to get free education for their three and four year olds and that's not the case our program does a comprehensive service it's a multi-generational approach as you were saying earlier and we help them with food services housing stability self sustainability and I think that in doing that it helps them our goal and our mission is school readiness and lifelong success so that way they don't get to the point where they have a mental health condition where they're dealing with trauma so we're trying to do preventative care so a lot of the topics that you've touched today are a lot of the things that I've seen our program do I'm only in my going into my second year but I've kind of seen a lot or heard a lot of the topics that you've kind of touched on I now realize that our program does a lot of that and not very many people know when they come to apply for our program that that's what we're intending to do is to try to break that cycle of generational poverty and to try to get them to self sustain to maybe get off of food stamps to maybe get off of housing to go into training for job success to go into really becoming an example for their next generation so I kind of just wanted to one thank you for saying all those topics because it's really touched home because it makes me really truly understand that the purpose that I'm serving is actually going to hopefully really help these families that I'm taking care of so thank you Head Start and our child care centers can be a great place for connecting and coordinating with populations in need I might say too one of my projects that I was really excited to find out about was a project that was reworking a Head Start center so that the parents would connect with each other better and once parents connect with each other one of the things they found was that at the end of the program where they were really focusing on parents connecting with each other individuals reported that they had three times as many people they could go to in a crisis so again we're back at social capital we're back at these measures of just thinking through how relationships make a difference if there are three times as many people as you can have in a crisis to go to for support that means you keep your job when you're late at work and you can't pick up your child from Head Start that means that when your power goes out or your AC or your water heater flood then you have one more person who can take your child or program to another place and that is that support that makes such a huge difference in the outcomes that are being achieved you need to get something else In that I had a recent experience with one of my families who is experiencing domestic abuse and she did not have any support she does not have her own family all she had was her husband's family and they were not on her side they were on her on their son's side so luckily I was able to gain enough rapport with this mother who came to me and asked for help and in that now she's thriving now she has you know she's in career training she's looking to be a medical assistant she's back in school her kids are happy it's just it's amazing because support in itself does so much when you don't have it you don't have anyone to turn to you don't know what resources to look for and one thing I'm kind of really looking forward to is we have this new initiative that's about to start called Youth Re-Engagement and it's for the 16 to 24 year olds who are no longer engaged in the community and so they're trying to find ways to get them back into the community get them back into going into school but the thing with about it is that they're so disengaged that we need to reach out to them we need to be that support we need to tell them hey I'm here and I can get you to a place where you will feel good about yourself and maybe hopefully help someone else along the way so yeah sorry thank you it's all about relationship again good afternoon and again thank you for being here Dr. Ricardo Gonzalez with the University of the Incarnate Word I want to thank everybody for being here and if there's a way we can get a listing of everybody that's here so that we can connect the network because if we're talking about resources I've been in higher ed for over 25 years and we may not even know who's in this room and how to make those resources and make those connections as the complexity is getting so very complex I say that because you're mentoring culture you're mentoring gender you're mentoring gender issues race discrimination socioeconomics there's our population is so complex in so many different ways I've worked with so many districts with so many non-profits and everybody has a different issue and sometimes we get siloed in our issue and that's okay because if there's a way that we can focus on that we cannot do mental health all the time we cannot do pre-K for we cannot be doing senior services but everybody in the community is doing that right so focus on that and do that well and then let us connect those connections like you're saying working together collaborate together finding our weaknesses and latching on together but and if we can again put those connections and this is a great way to do that the other thing I was going to mention I have a colleague here for Give Pulse but if there's a way that we can also be on the same platform for example you're talking technology so everybody knows I don't know if many people in this room know but all of our undergraduate students you know IEW are required to do community service they have to do 45 hours before they graduate I know everybody in this room is going to contact UIW my office we need volunteers and that's fine this is we need to get the word out and help each other right I live in the northwest side in Helotus driving all the way in town but there's so much need between Helotus and WWW White there's so much need from Southwest ISD to wow we can go all the way to shirts there's need everywhere but we just need to work together and really see what we can do so I just say thank you I know there's so much going on the last thing I want to say is I think in San Antonio but across the country when it comes to faith-based we get stuck sometimes with only seeing our faith-based community come together when it's racism or religious issue and they don't see our faith-based community like I'm seeing right now is with all issues that impact our community and if we were to do monthly celebrations like you were saying on poverty and showing all the faith-based community coming out saying we're going to tackle poverty together we're going to tackle hunger and I know they will start saying 24-7-365 it's not just when there's a racism or anti-Semitic thing this is all the time we're here together because God love the government but if the government shuts down we're still going to be here no matter what you still were here so yes we'll get the list out of everyone here if you don't want your name on that list you'll need to tell us that and it also depends on how clear your printing is just to say so if you've given us your email we really have your email so thank you for that one of the things that we're just this coming month starting next Tuesday we have a weekly newsletter that goes out news we can use if you're not on that but this next month in particular we're going to be sending out those resourcing lists of connectivity alright so each week you're going to just get another layer of that of other places and other ways and we're trying to pull many of those together but one step at a time so we'll be watching for those every week you're going to be getting another whole set that's out there but you'll also get this list along with all the other things now in your ginormous email was there somebody over there? let me just say real quick complexity is complex and how we think about addressing these challenges is something that everybody is wrestling with because everybody sees that people have many different problems but how do we have our own expertise but also leverage other expertise how do we not just be one huge nonprofit that takes care of everyone and everything because we put it all under this hat and just say it's all here just meet all these needs right away this is not going to happen we each have our own systems I mean I'll go back this is what's really interesting we have a system by which the social sector contributes from us going to 2022 in the world to all those organizations all those different activities both local government, state government federal government just individual contributions and services we're all wrestling with how we address that complexity I think what Anne and you're doing is by focusing on some areas of concern that are some things that connect to people that's great because I think it actually gives you some organizational strategy and some opportunities to orchestrate and organize around some key issues that a lot of people care about I think increasing you'll see that there are intersections and relationships between those different issues and opportunities but how we work through that is both the answer and the question I believe part of it has to do with increased communication because that's how it happens all the rest of the time but how we do it and how we leverage technology effectively and again I'll go back communication, speech is a technology just like our phones are how we leverage that is one of the many things we're all wrestling with right now and so know you're in good company I think is what I'm trying to say San Antonio know that others are wrestling and trying to figure out these pieces too and I think what's exciting is where we do see it happening there's a lot of pieces coming together and a lot more conversation and dialogue that's really critical for seeing some of these changes occur so Ed Sackett and as we're talking about mental health and trauma one of the things that we're discovering and we're actually teaching at Austin Seminary is because we treat things at the present but we don't think about the systemic issues that could go back generations and as faith leaders if we will start using geniograms when we're talking with parishioners and those who seek help from us and have them start doing geniograms they can discover where the trauma has started often generations back they can also discover where the mental health problems have started generations back so that they realize that it's just not them it's just not the now this actually connects further back and you can help them understand many of the issues they face you know abuse and all of these cycles that we're trying to break if people can see them in their past and see where they've come from a lot of times it gives them a greater ability to grasp that and realize that it's not their fault and gives them the ideas that okay here's where it started let me break this cycle by not allowing you to go past my generation the geniogram and kind of mapping maybe think of two other strategies that I think are really important one is what a graduate student can help you with is social network analysis where you can go into your community and actually see where the people are and who they connect with and talk to and then know that my favorite example is on Sally if you don't talk to on Sally then you haven't talked to anybody in the community if an on Sally doesn't approve of you then no one approves of you and so if you're as your organization or your service minute organization is not talking to on Sally then you're missing a huge part of your population you can find on Sally's through social network analysis to help you know where those people are sometimes they're people sometimes they're institutions sometimes they're community center like this one that can help you identify but let me say this too and we mentioned it graduate students can be a great research PhD candidates can be an asset for you and your community to come in and do some of that data collection that they need for their research paper to help showcase some of those opportunities so leverage graduate students leverage other individuals and help support some of these outcomes hi I'm George on the pastor of Baptist Temple in southeast San Antonio we were one of the largest churches very rich back in the 1950s and now we're a congregation of 100 with 80,000 square foot facility on on three acres so we could either let it deteriorate and shut down like so often happens we decided instead that we're going to open it up to the community to become a hub of services so we have six other churches meeting with us on Sundays we have two schools an early learning center and a charter school and we have a variety of not for profits that work out of our building we have no money but we have lots of building we don't have a lot of social capital but we attracted so the secret to our success has been partnering with outside organizations we have the facilities and we have a network we have access to one of the most underprivileged areas in San Antonio on the south side and so it can be done even if you have a smaller facility you can always have one or two other people meeting there but it's and we're still looking for people recently we were able to purchase a house next door we had a very generous donation and a lot of volunteers came in and got it up to speed and our goal was to have uh students resident interns either social work students or ministry students that will live in there for a semester and work with the children of our community we have our our goal is to work with not children nine to fourteen in order to get them to the point where they will graduate from high school you know we have some uh what people think are bad high schools uh in the south side you know what they're not they have great teachers they have great programs two of our kids of two kids from our school one graduated from highlands and one from a column they both have full ride uh scholarships to Incarnate Word and uh in fact the drum major for Incarnate Word came from Baptist temple uh I can't say that often enough I'm more more proud than you can imagine and uh so uh and we still need more right now we don't have uh any students living in the house it's it's still we're we're recruiting well we just did it this is our first year doing the house so we don't know what we're doing we just know we knew how to build a house and we thought if we built it they would come so I'm making an appeal right now help me get some people in that house because we want to work with these children uh we've that's the only way that we know of to break the cycle of poverty is to get these children graduating from high school get them into Incarnate Word get them into the military get them jobs get them something thanks for that um they make you think of a couple different points we're gonna come to Doug Neck um many times we wrestle with resource in our community we wrestle with not having enough resources and many times that's funding but we often neglect other forms of capital that we may be rich in uh because we are thinking in terms of scarcity rather than abundance when we think about an abundance methodology we say I have all this space that no one's using how can it be leveraged what could it be used for some great examples of faith communities and community based institutions hosting non-profit incubators or business incubators um some churches who are leveraging their um kitchen that may not be using as much on Wednesday night anymore convert bringing it up to code so it's commercially available and then renting it out one day a week to use for um small business cooking incubators to create jobs in the community to create a business in the community for individuals who are struggling leveraging some amazing cooking um which can be such a great resource and again thinking about how cooks in our community are capital rather than resources being something we struggle with um so thinking through our different levels of capital then let me share this one story because I love sharing this story um there was a domestic violence program uh a partner violence program that was working in the community who's uh where they usually met um was being renovated so they went to a church down the street and uh they asked if they could meet there and when they uh asked the the faith leader said yes be wonderful go ahead we'll use this space it's not being used on this night so they used it and the pastor just happened to walk by and visit the the session and was just really personally moved by the discussion that was happening and how these women were being served so he approached the director of the program and said okay I'm on board tell me how I can help what am I going to do and so um the director said well you know it's been great using your space it's been great hosting the class here um we have to pay to use our other space could we use this space for free no one else is using it the pastor said great that's good not enough tell me more what else can I do to help well many times the women who come to this class um don't have have child care and so the kids are running around the class when they can't get to child care um so I don't know what we can do about that he says well I have I'm a church I have a nursery I have nursery workers who can come by the congregation watch the kids in the in the nursery while the women go through the domestic violence training course conversation that you want to facilitate um person says great he says what else can I do well the the women many times you're using public transportation and they'll have a hard time getting dinner as a part of coming to the meeting and he says well if you come on Wednesday night we have Wednesday night dinner they'll get dinner for free and then they can go to the class and we'll have the Sunday school workers who are the the nursery workers who are already here to watch the kids anyway so it'll be great we'll do that okay great what else can I do to help he was he's really moved it was a really good session um and so the woman says well they have to use public transportation they have to use ride the bus and sometimes they're not on the bus route and so it's hard for them to get here this is great I have a van I'm going to drive and pick up as many as I can to bring them here to the church to eat the food where we can take care of their kids where you can then provide the class nursery bus space and people who care not money not a grant just existing assets in the community that could be leveraged to strengthen the program tells the pastor you've just addressed the three top reasons why women drop out of our program with existing resources that that faith leader had and all happened because someone was renovating space um these are ways that we can leverage resources in our community that are already there assets that are available in our uniquely in our faith communities sometimes buses that aren't being used anymore because we don't have as many people to pick up or connect with but we can still connect and leverage to serve our community so just think about all the different assets that are available to you in different spaces and places to address need Ben Doug Beach thank you for making my point that I was just going to make I didn't mean to no because earlier you said something about how can we reduce complexity to make answers and solutions more attainable and part of that was the next part of that conversation was relationships and trust so what happened in that example you just gave was people got into conversation and I think that and I worked a lot in the mental health area and I can assure you that when you're working with people with significant mental health issues the complexity sometimes becomes and being a parent of a person with a mental illness it's it's overwhelming you know you just sort of at some point you just want to give up and I think that so a lot of people that work in the area mental health it's easy to get overwhelmed but I think that what saves us a lot of times is you focus on one person and that's where the relationship and the trust come in it's very difficult to work with anybody where there's not a relationship and there's no trust so one of the things we work on in NAMI is helping build relationships and helping people understand that it's not always the solution you come up with it's the trust that person has so in working with people in faith communities what's the coin of the realm you know a lot of it is relationship and trust and faith and I think we should not cut ourselves short in terms of one of the best tools we have to work with which is reaching out to the other part three years ago when Kay Warren was here from California and she talked about crawl, walk, run in your congregations as far as how to move along this path of doing more and more for people with mental illness she said too often times we're sitting on a pew with somebody and they mention that they have depression they had a hard time getting to church today and she says oftentimes the impulse is for people to move further away she said move closer lean in so you know these are complex problems but they have to begin in solving some of these with caring for other people and then I think if we can share information if we can share resources just like you've illustrated we can solve a lot of these problems or at least we can things get better that way thanks Doug and I want to honor Doug and thank him for the contributions he's made for me and my learning in this space and the mental health work and so many different ways I appreciate that and the Pathways of Hope conference was such a meaningful conference for me to really see some of the great work going on in this space so I want to thank Doug for that conference and the meet work that they're doing there too yes I'm going to emphasize the one point which is that we have to lean into challenges rather than backing away from them we have to step toward concerns and challenges rather than being afraid of them fear can be something that keeps us from connecting and relating and actually I would say to not seeking understanding not just seeking and here we're back at compassion and empathy and we're back at relationships those people we care about we listen to we spend time with we connect with I'll say this I always think about this we're talking about human services today humans connect but in the fact that we're going back to this idea that relationships matter and that we listen to people that we work with it's just such a novel concept but it's really not it goes all the way back it's that ancient technology of communication that's so critical and listening maybe that's the other technology we need to leverage a little bit more is being able to listen as much as we communicate to be a participant in those relationships and really seek out the change that we're looking for Ben would you say that the pathways to mental health conference in San Antonio, Texas is like leading that effort by having that conference across the country very much so and that's something we are he said that I'm quoting him I mean we would love and I came to the mental health pathways of conference because I have heard such great things from other people around the country about what that conference is doing helping people lean into mental health better understand mental health here from individuals who struggle with mental health issues so that they can understand and then relate better and serve better in the community so yeah it's a great example intentional connection I got a person here I'm just interjecting Doug what are the dates on pathways this year August 23rd and 24th the best conference in the city and it's free good to know thank you I'm Wendy Holbrook with Interfaith San Antonio Alliance and we're a new organization but our point is bringing together congregational leaders for civic engagement and our current project is affordable housing so this is an area where the resources in congregations are just really coming to the fore because this is happening around the country but I'm going to call out my friend Eric back here because Travis Park United Methodist is well engaged in the process of repurposing property that they own their space to create affordable housing Mission Concepcion is spearheading the work of the Archdiocese as they repurpose the St. John Seminary for multi-income housing but making sure that affordable housing is provided for the people who are already there and have lived in that community for generations so think about your resources you have amazing assets I was in an event a week or so ago and an architect says to me well it's all about money you got to have money money's the answer to all this and I said well okay yeah I mean you know it's going to take a lot of money I don't question that but then I said are you aware of what congregations are doing in utilizing their assets and he's like oh no I don't wow that's great I had no idea so we have incredible assets on all kinds of levels we just have to start thinking creatively how to utilize those very much so yeah I think being creative think outside the box I think and can I say this too I think we have an opportunity to educate systems on those opportunities and connections and going and encouraging openness with those nonprofit systems encouraging saying I have a strength and I want to develop and create support that strength within your organization by sharing what I know in this space and what I'm able to think about I think we have to build capacity in the whole by bringing our strength into other people's space and then sharing honoring that as a part of that complimenting structure we talked about earlier so yes excellent yeah my name is Fatma I'm coming from a very small organization actually we only have only one staff and a hundred maybe members and we mostly do work on interfaith intercultural mutual understanding being bridges between people you know connecting hopefully people and the best thing we do as Turkish Americans is to cook cook different kind of food and supposedly everybody likes the food so what we do is we share our food and then we collaborated with the food bank last Ramadan for 28 nights and invited everybody else not only the Muslims but everybody who wants to come to our organization we collaborated with other churches but every night a community was our guest for they just you know we ate together we break our fast together but then we collected lots of beans for the food bank and then other thing we do is on Sundays I don't know if you know about this but Turkish breakfast is very huge on Sundays large breakfast so we do once in a month a breakfast and then we invite everybody else and we always share the benefits with a local like habitat for humanity food bank or you know anybody who wants to share it so it's something small but something you can do but it's an example we as a community we honor food we love food we're going to share that strength with others in our community and honor and bring that to the end of the space I love that I think it's amazing I think we often don't think about how we can leverage the table again for ancient technology have you heard of this thing they call the table it's amazing we get around it and we talk and then we put food on top and we eat it too it's amazing and we have better conversation when we have food around the table and we enjoy each other we spend time together as a part of celebrating success how are you just spending time together not just to say our success not just to do our newsletter just to enjoy each other's company it's a part of relationships that we neglect because we think we have to be so service oriented you got to get the job done sometimes we just need to enjoy each other's company and just celebrate I always love to tell and share in the C community have gudwaras and gudwaras are also places where if you come they will serve you food and I've encouraged various gudwaras that I've talked to in the C community just to make their eating time something that they invite nonprofits into the community to participate in to invite the community and say hey we're cooking we're going to be making enough food you should be here to eat some too because you need to eat again an ancient technology called eating for load workers exactly hey we're going to be cooking we're going to come in and participate I think there's so many of these places that we can participate and connect and build relationships around and food can be an amazing place that does that so thank you for sharing that story Fatma didn't tell you and there's some numbers here it's like a community of a hundred and during Ramadan last year they fed 30,000 people beyond the 100 so if you've never been to Raindrop Turkish House you could see Fatma it's great food and nonprofits, congregations and go during Ramadan to learn about Ramadan and just enjoy fabulous food how do a hundred people serve 30,000 every night and they're not a restaurant anyone else or mind, mind, mind time it's been amazing this last week today I got two friends of mine that surprised me very positively surprised me I've been in charge of literacy to some extent and will tell you maybe, maybe not anyway there's a literacy problem in San Antonio if you don't know it you're not watching there's a lot of children especially those in elementary school we found out that pre-4PK is working but we've still got a serious problem in San Antonio in literacy we have so many people here we're 75th in the number of large cities in the United States in literacy on another note last week I visited with an apartment manager about two blocks from the church where I attend and also somebody from the school where all my kids went to school you may not realize it and I may want to talk to the young lady who just spoke but there are a significant number of Muslims moving to San Antonio a significant number I worked for one about all summer long this summer and got to know and love her as much as I could it was a great experience and I think that we all need to realize I think one lady here today representing her faith where we've got all these other people here who represent their own particular faith but we are going to be having a growing number of Muslims and when we approach the school about what we can do for that school they said we need for those parents to learn English the last thing I thought we'd be asking to be done is we're going to talk about coats and pants and uniforms and things like that but the families want to learn how to speak English the apartment house that I talked to they have 500 departments and 80% of them are rented by Muslims and I'm not, that's not bad it's just change and that's what we have to be thinking about Thanks for that and honoring the diversity that's in our community is such a critical challenge that I like to describe and put in people's minds sometimes it may be exciting to switch from having ESL classes to SSL classes Spanish language classes how can your community be some place where the Spanish people come to teach other people Spanish rather than them coming to you to speak English one community I shared this idea with they were really wanting to hear from the Hispanic community about the challenges they were experiencing but the Hispanic community wouldn't come to them because they wouldn't bring their challenges and their frustrations and the things that were hard to the community and when I said what would it look like if you encourage them to teach Spanish to you which help them see their own authority so that they could see they have the expertise and knowledge to come to you when they have a problem and a challenge that you could be helpful with so that you can create this authority for them that they have something that's worth us listening to and educating on that can then lead to change the other part of that conversation was that one of the faith leaders in that community led a congregation Spanish speaking congregation and he worked in a lot of construction so he said why don't you have that faith leader who works in construction teach construction workers Spanish so that it's not just Spanish like ESL or just Spanish for the sake of Spanish it's actually what terms do I need to know on the construction sites so that I can speak well to other people who are doing construction and how can that pastor be empowered to speak to other communities with some of this knowledge they were so excited about what possibilities were possible by empowering local leadership and minority leadership to have authority and to teach others in the community what might be possible and then to think about what change might be possible on some of the job sites where these job foremen would have a better understanding of the Spanish language that can lead to better work because they know you know for lack of a better word construction Spanish and so there may be opportunities where we can kind of flip the script and create opportunities where we can learn from communities being served rather than necessarily serving the community so or creating promoting agency is what that really is about so two more than the exercise before we go hi I'll be quick I'm Dawn and I work with a nonprofit and interfaith nonprofit here and I'm relatively new only two years and one thing that I've been inspired by and struck by in building collaborations in San Antonio and I'd like to hear your experience from a national standpoint on reflection and I think it kind of adds complexity to the complementarity that you were talking about is so many agencies communities groups individuals willing to enter into risk and transform risk into possibility so when we're creating collaborations where maybe it was like oh we've never done that or we cannot collaborate with them it becomes can we and so there's been this amazing kind of transformation or shift that I've experienced being involved where you have yes you have a risk assessment you have risk management but you also have this kind of foray this entering into risk mobilization and risk transformation how do we go there and be with one another in ways that we haven't been before and so it's not territorial it's not complementarity it's going in there and saying well people don't expect this or they haven't done this before but how do we inhabit risk in a way that's responsible and responsive to the needs that we see ourselves met with I love it well one first thing I say to some staff in the office sometimes I say I say the question is the answer so first the question is the answer yes let me frame this a couple different ways one when we work together and we share success we also share failure or we should I think what we need are feedback loops constantly where we're asking are we achieving what we're setting out to achieve so that we minimize risk as much as possible and we're communicating that process in an effective and structured way so that all of us are working toward the thing we're actually working toward but if we don't have an honest and robust appreciation of risk we're not going to have an honest and robust appreciation of success and the fear of risk is going to keep us from moving towards good outcomes I would again go back to relationships and saying that it goes back again to understanding that partnerships and collaborations are just big networks of relationships and if so we're not treating collaborations let's say when I talk about do a workshop on collaboration I say I don't know about you but marriage is not the easiest thing in my life what are you guys laughing about what are you talking about it's hard being in relationship the best things are the hardest things my marriage and my kids are my best things and my hardest things I don't know about you and they're good kids and have amazing life but they're really hard because relationships are hard they include risk and they include success so as a part of our collaborative structures and the ways we work together we have to treat them similarly with that both honor and a sense of realization that they're a relationship they're a challenge a well structured collaboration is very similar to a marriage with the understanding and considerations of challenges they're in so when we are asking those questions we're asking the right questions and we're wrestling with the right things so that we can be about the right ends ultimately but it is a increasingly understanding that but I say too in the social capital space it's still an understanding that the soft things understanding and working on the soft things lead to hard outcomes and if we don't appreciate those relationship challenges then we're not actually getting to the hard outcomes that we're looking to achieve so it's an increasing realization but not something that has been realized yet okay thinking of lots of different things connections with all the things people have been saying starting with this gentleman here about education because I'm a presentation sister and our charism has always been education to justice so I just think of it this whole sense of when we're talking about compassionate San Antonio we're talking about social justice and what I see lacking in much of the faith community is the challenge to our people to do something change the system I belong to the interfaith welcome coalition and we work with immigrants welcoming them all the time we have a presentation ministry place where we teach English as a second language citizenship community building we believe in the two feet one is the direct action but the other is the justice piece that I feel is missing I my heart was foot flopping this morning and reading the article in the paper about the poverty here in San Antonio and the base poverty has decreased but what is increasing is the working families lack of possibilities they called it Alice an acronym I'm concerned about the angry people in our society that are not wanting the poor to receive help because they're not getting help what is our response to the working poor in our midst answer question question answer I'm just calling you man I've been saying all day the question is the answer it works so well it gets me out of so many challenges no we need to think through and wrestle with the challenges that anyone in our community is facing but I think here what I would say too we not just need to think about the need but we need to think the system that's creating them when we think about people who are frustrated in the community about what we need to think about as a system we need to honor and respect that anger just as much as we honor and respect the need to serve the population because we're not going to solve solutions that are systemic until we think about both because they're all part of the system I think we have opportunities to listen we have opportunities to speak to seek out change and then we have the challenge I'm reminded that mercy happens quickly but justice takes time it is a super long road and so while we can be merciful and mercy comes quickly justice takes time and so our participation in the conversations and the dialogues that we have lead to changes about bringing about change and I think the way that San Antonio is approaching these things with compassion in mind and then thinking through how we have the conversations to think about the changes in the system those are the conversations we need to be having those are the dialogues and the sharing and the discussion that needs to happen because I don't think it will happen without conversation, it won't happen without relationships, it won't happen without listening and then seeking, bringing about participating in the change that we want to see happen and I think you talked about how you are involved in those conversations and dialogues and I would go back to Doug's comment too which I thought was so powerful one person at a time one person experiencing justice at a time one person experiencing human flourishing at a time because unless we think about that one person it can get super over it's even just the question is super overwhelming at the same time but if we go back and we think about individuals and then we think about how we change it for one individual then we change it for a family then we change it for a geographic block then we change it for a neighborhood then we change it for part of a city I'll share this as a model as a quick example whenever somebody comes to us and asks for a federal grant they say do you get local funding? Are you great at getting local donations? First and foremost if you're not great at receiving local donations then you're not going to get a federal grant because the next step from getting local donation is getting city funding or county funding if you're not going to get county funding then you're not going to get federal funding and you kind of just go up state funding and then after you're competitive at the state level you may consider the same thing goes for the change that we're seeking in our community one change in one life and then it starts with the next step and the next step and the next step and we see that happen as we participate in those conversations we'll see changes occur as we advocate because I think what you said two steps mercy and justice, mercy and justice like serve the need address the change in the system serve the need address the change in the system so that they go hand in hand and we see the difference made that we're looking for in our communities because we're passionate seeing needs abated but actually problems solved the system that's not creating challenges but actually changing the system so that problems less frequently occur that's what we want to work towards as faith leaders I think it's what many faith traditions call us to is what community leaders are looking for and if we participate in those conversations we'll see more of that happen here's the deal though and I'm moving to the exercise so when I hear that conversation and you use the word passion it comes from that heart set right and then if we like push it a little bit it becomes our mindset but the truth of the matter is to add compassion into a system which is made up of people is a skill set and we haven't yet done all the work about how do you build the skills to actually interject within a whole entire system compassion not just a nice idea after skills come habits and then they become habits so I'm going to put up here and then Ben is going to start the exercise I'm going to put up here the link to the compassion integrity training that specifically teaches how the skill set for adding compassion systemically okay it's now yours do it actually it's yours mention the card here's what I want you to what you wrote on your card meets this requirement or could related to areas of concern both nationally and locally so all the different issues we talked about all the different issues you raised what big idea would you want to be a part of or invest in what big idea would you want to be a part of or invest in what first step could you take to get started what big idea are you already a part of that you might want to tweak after hearing something today so this doesn't have to be a new thing it can be something that you're already doing that can be slightly different or it can just be the thing you're already doing you're excited about it's a big thing you're already participating then think about it this way if you were 10 times bolder if you were or another way of looking at this I love this they call it the 15% solution if you were 15% bolder just enough to make you think hard but not enough to overwhelm you 15% what would you propose here are some key things to think about it has to be something that's feasible for you to implement so we talked about how it's not something that you're going to say we're going to create a grant program well do you have someone to create a grant you don't have a person to create a grant then don't propose a grant program unless you're going to fund the grant and then please propose it we're excited to hear about your grant program it has to originate within your sector your idea cannot volunteer sector the idea to implement I typed in vol untold to my word document and didn't auto correct I'm so proud that vol untold is officially a word now because word said so so your idea can't say we want San Antonio Health and Human Services too if you're not and from Health and Human Services you say you can't say I want all nonprofits too if you're not working for all nonprofits you can say if you're from your nonprofit your nonprofit can do that but not all nonprofits you're a temple Baptist you can't say all the churches are going to do this you can say temple Baptist can do this I want to remember that big problems often have small solutions so your big idea doesn't have to be big it might be small but it could have a big impact and remember what you've learned from compassion and action that we want to seek the greatest change for the least amount of negative impact so take your card write your big idea down we're going to give you four minutes everybody needs a card if you don't have a card and we're going to do something with these in a second yes starting out your four minutes started now write down your big idea what is your big idea for San Antonio what is your big idea for you what is the big idea for your sector that you could implement don't volunteer with someone else for those of you who are still who are wrapped up this is called a crowd sourcing exercise it's something you can do to gather ideas quickly from a room and identify the best ideas in the room it comes from a set of strategies called liberating structures which we've used in various meetings to really capture the wisdom of everybody in the room you can go to that website and look for other strategies that can really instead of having experts speak up front it really helps everyone in the room contribute to the conversation so it can be a really powerful way to draw information out from a meeting we had a meeting at the White House one time where we used this we had 60 people and everybody felt like they contributed to the dialogue that we had at that meeting as a result of using the structure that we did so everybody take the card here's what we're going to do you're going to stand everybody stand you're moving around for this bring your pen, grab your pen keep your pen in your hand you didn't have a pen, let me know here's what's going to happen you're going to take someone's card someone's going to take your card then you're going to take that card and hand it to another person's card you're going to ring the bell you're going to stop you're going to read that card you're going to write that idea so if you don't think it's a good idea you're going to give it a 1 if you think it's a great idea you're going to give it a 5 it's going to be a random card you don't know who wrote it, you don't know where it came from you're just going to say what you think about that idea I want to encourage you to be honest this doesn't work if you're like oh all these ideas are great let's do them all unless you want to do all the ideas that come up in the room don't rate them all well could be your best friend who wrote it but it's okay be honest with your feedback it's going to help us have ideas that's going to lead to next steps that you can take as compassionate San Antonio so we're going to do this 4 times you're going to take your idea you're going to read a card 4 times no so everybody ready okay exchange 5 is best but you're not rating right now you're just exchanging move cards around make sure everybody's got your card we're going to do it 4 times you're going to give 4 ratings okay take your card read it flip it over and give it a score of 1 to 5 1 being bad and not a good idea something you don't want to participate in implementing 1 through 5 1 is not a good idea 5 is a great idea and look up me give me your eyes let me make sure you're ready everybody's given a score remember you don't want to implement everybody's ideas you just want to implement the best ideas okay exchange yep go again FYI if you get your card back guess what you get to give it a 5 you should really like your idea okay if you get your card back read and score read and score again if you got your card back it's a great idea give it a 5 this is our second of 4 rounds everybody ready okay exchange make sure move around the room so you see different cards cards should travel okay read and score everybody ready last time go ahead and exchange say hi to a friend go ahead and score last score while you're back there add up the score on the back if you have 6 scores randomly strike 2 you should have 4 scores on the card just add them up this is called a crowd sourcing exercise it's a way to surface ideas from the room if you can use it in meetings you can use it as a structure for collecting ideas it's really fun to see stuff surface so who has a 25 who has a score that got 5, 5, 5, 4, 5 no 20 excuse me 25 we have a 25 where's the microphone Bill 20 I originally thought of 5 5 rounds but I wanted to get you guys out of here can you read us the idea homeless outreach and mental health outreach noting that many of our homeless have challenges related to mental health so 20s thank you not on the card one of the things it says people in the room saw homelessness and mental health outreach and said that's something we should be doing more of what that looks like the colors and shapes of that can be defined by a set of people you bring together to say let's think about what this could look like let's talk to the mental health space and say how can we make sure more of these resources get connected into it's interesting too that it said homelessness outreach and mental health isn't it interesting that it puts it both together if that person wants to identify themselves they can say more about what but we don't have to know that to know it was a good idea in the room that we talked about today so and that can be follow up information that person who shared that idea can reach out the answer this is what I had a thought of it sounds like there's a lot of excitement in the room about it a 19 a score of 19 oh 18 yes go ahead Super Sunday if everyone on Super Bowl Sunday could donate a canned good from their local grocery store to the food bank or a collection center it's had a a score of 18 and I crossed one out there was 1 to 6 exchanges I mean you just collected how many gift cards who knows how many $75,000 how many canned goods can you collect if you just ask actually the Presbyterian churches in Austin right now are having a competition amongst the youth to see which church can collect the most canned goods for Super Sunday you can also call it Super Sunday so that got 18 and again this is not something that you know is maybe some people saw that and were like hey that's really something we could do tomorrow that's really easily implementable it's not a grant program that's great action we have something we're doing let's see if we have a 17 oh Ken go ahead common faith-based personal finance curriculum to help at-risk families create and stick to budgets and build self-reliance able to be leveraged by any non-profit or faith group think about is that a 17 or 16 17 think about all the different communities, faith communities that already host financial literacy classes financial peace university or the curriculums that Dave Ramsey hosts and say how could more populations receive some of that information that might be vulnerable communities as opposed to just working families perhaps it leverages an existing strength that might be present in a lot of our communities that could be connected to other services and program activities 16 216 right here in San Antonio coordinate social services in one website with all contact information and services provided all agencies have access at that free website they could be an idea that we had and so people are noting that this would be something that would be helpful and would be a great thing that we could have and this is again so what you're working on is a good thing yay that's a good thing I saw somebody recently say when everyone starts saying what you've always been saying don't be frustrated realize they're coming alongside you you're in good company so be excited that the thing that's on the board is something you're already working on other 16 idea at three excellent I said okay go ahead encourage the living waste by all groups so here let's talk about this real quick that self-care is also reflected in how we reimburse people that work in nonprofits just saying and so how we think about how we support people in the service industry that are the nonprofits where we're working is something we need to wrestle with and think through it's a part of self-care if we're taking care of the people we're working with appropriately so hard challenges yeah but something we should wrestle with and think through so how are we reflecting what we want to see in the community happen within our own organizations something to wrestle with other 16 idea to have a safe place for pastors and families of all denominations to come together and address the physical and mental and spiritual wellness could we start a sign up list for them one one I've even seen let's stop there 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and we'll collect the cards and we'll be able to see the other scores there may be some that are in that top tier that would surface that would bring about some exciting ideas there are faith leaders I've seen online who started online safe spaces discussion boards where clergy can come together from across the country and just share that they're worried about things and I think it can be a really powerful way to kind of and again a way to address risk if I'm talking to a clergy who's in Minnesota and they're struggling and I'm struggling here in San Antonio does it make it safer for me to talk about some of the things I'm struggling with because it's not going to get back around that ministry leader X is having a challenge and it can be a way disaggregating relationships from risk can be a way of managing risk so how do we create safe places I think can be a great thing the other thing we're working on in mental health is really promoting self-care in mental health work in general too and mental health self-care among clergy one of the things we want to work on is a toolkit for seminaries to implement to promote self-care in seminaries so that seminarians and anybody working in a religious training institution can be thinking about mental health needs before they go into ministry when they experience all the stress of ministry so we're thinking about some of those things nationally as well and I don't mind hosting I don't mind the University of Oklahoma hosting the first state-based meeting bam you're just like that and I just met you hahaha so see see how there are already things we're going to do an action alert from one idea we are leveraging existing strengths we see that there's something really specific around homeless outreach and connecting to mental health this has just brought up so thank one thank you and let's thank each other for sharing the ideas that we shared um know that these are areas that we can take steps in and you guys can use this strategy moving forward you can use it in the workshops that you or the little discussion groups around the conversations you can action teams action teams can bring up these ideas and say hey let's surface the things that we think would be great you can you can actually also do it you can bring different action teams together um so that you can have outside perspective um so that you can get a new perspective on ideas so it's a great strategy for really surfacing ideas so um thank you so much for having me here today thank you for allowing me to spend time with you all um I've been encouraged I hope you have too um and I hope that we can continue um from the national level connecting to you all here in the city and the great work that you're doing through and in partnership with Ann in the city to really strengthen and serve your community it's such an honor to participate and to celebrate what you all are doing and to take that back and to think about what that means for us nationally so thank you so much so I also want to do a couple other thank yous and some information all of the different kind of brochures and flyers I've organized them they're in the table out there and you can get more of whatever's there so you can take that don't forget to mark your calendars for April 30th which is the next one of these plus I wrote down up here that compassion skill training in terms of systems highly recommended our civic leaders are going through this training as in our council person staff our mayor staff so there's no reason the rest of the other leaders shouldn't be taking it too right right um I want to thank all of us because it was our federal tax dollars that got Ben here today woo for all of us right isn't it nice when you see those things that moving right I also have you know we really go all out here when it comes to gifts and um I don't have a budget just so you know anyway so this mug that you've been drinking out of Ben was created by a San Antonio artist so there we got San Antonio mug you've got a compassion toolkit that doesn't look anything like your tool kits from the grassroots of compassionate San Antonio you've got an extraordinary journal from the department of human services you can never have too many journals and I really want you to read the card so I just ran into the card today and it says thank you all for coming