 Well I want to thank everybody for being here today on behalf of City Council. I'm grateful to have Councilman Brennan here and then of course our City Manager Teresa Wilson. By half of the whole city we're really excited about this this matchboard opportunity. As you know as we being a lead in the state on this is very exciting for us but it's also something we want more engagement. We want more inclusion as anybody who went to the swearing in our theme is open. Columbia is open for business. We're open arms to make sure that everybody in our community is engaged and this is a great program that is really going to help us get out there and get one of our biggest struggles has always been to get people involved in our community and boards and commissions are the backbone and we need to make sure that that we are reaching every corner of our community that diversity is a big part of it. We want to make sure that folks are engaged and right now we see this great opportunity because so many people in our community have reached out and said how can I help. Well number one apply for a board and we're going to make it easier for them. I know our clerk would love to have more and more applications coming in because she wants to make sure folks are inclusive. I hope that Columbia becomes the example for the rest of our local municipalities towns and cities and they engage in this so that they too are doing the same thing. I think it's an exciting time for us especially South Carolina with all the growth potentials people moving here investments coming and get making sure that we're capturing all of those folks and having them engage. So I'll leave you with this one thing again we are open for business. We're open for inclusion. We're open for ideas. We're open for innovation. And with that I'd like to ask Miss Barbara Racks to come forward. Y'all can give her hand. Come on. I do want to thank all of our special guests who are here from the South Carolina Association of Counties and a burger who's been with us since beginning of time. Tim Winslow the executive director. I'm going to skip titles if that's okay. Josh, Joanne, turnquist from Central Carolina Community Foundation, Erin Johnson. Oh goodness, Connie Portee from Orangeburg County. Crystal Barnes from McCormick County who's was one of our early adopters of this. Let's see who I missed. Lots of people from the Association of Counties the city. Oh, and I'm sorry, Stephanie O'Kane, who while she's technically not here representing the Municipal Association of South Carolina, she is a founder of Women in Leadership and she has been an editor extraordinaire of all of our materials to make sure that they spoke to the public and the private side of everything that we've been trying to do. So thank you and to my entire team who's here and all wonderful people. Thank you for being here. Some of them are recording. Some of them are taking names, right? So South Carolina Women in Leadership is a multi-partisan nonprofit corporation. Our mission is to increase gender and racial leadership from the ground up leadership and influence from the ground up. We believe that South Carolina needs all the talent that is available in this state in order to grow and prosper for the benefit of our children and our grandchildren. Sometimes I say our daughters and our granddaughters and I just mentioned we'll run in a minute ago that I don't want to exclude his sons. So I'm gonna say our children and our grandchildren. We want South Carolina to be a better place for all of them. So why did we develop Matchboard? Emily Barman who is our director of Matchboard and I were with Erica. Councilman DuVall. So we were in Greenville at a clerk and finance officer's conference a couple of months ago and a clerk raised her hand and she said this doesn't seem like it matches your mission for women in leadership. It's a good question. It's not exactly building a software application. It's not quite the same as doing a lot of the other things that we do but I had a good answer. I told her that we had spent two years doing manual labor just like the clerks in most of our cities and counties to of trying to keep up with all of the spreadsheets on which they retain vacancies and opportunities on boards and commissions and we would put forth messages to the 50,000 participants that are on our list encouraging them to go out and apply for a board but we never knew if they did because it would go into a mail slot somewhere. Well when the pandemic came along everything was made much worse because we started working remotely and many people were not populating I was gonna say manning I shouldn't say that populating the mailrooms in city and county councils and even when they were doing that they were pieces of paper that then had to be scanned that then had to be copied multiple times. So we began to feel the pain of the clerks in the cities and the counties. We already knew from our goal our mission of engaging more women in leadership opportunities that they were feeling the pain. They couldn't find the boards that had availabilities on it but now we knew both sides of it so we were kind of in the middle of this. So my good answer to that was that we could feel both sides we knew what was happening with both sides and voila we decided that we would launch a way of doing that all digitally. So I like to think of match board as a digital dating game connecting citizens in the community with the entities the cities and counties municipalities and counties who want to recruit qualified candidates to serve on their boards and commissions when mayor Rick and men mentioned how difficult it is sometimes for them to find qualified applicants to serve we were seeing both sides. So local governments wanted to recruit qualified candidates qualified candidates wanted to serve they wanted to make their communities and their counties in their state a better place to live and we birthed an innovative way to make that connection. I know that code is not a very exciting topic. So I'm not going to talk about the year that we spent trying to figure out how you were going to code all of these things but we did manage it. We had a wonderful steering team team that was comprised of Jennifer Baxley who I've never met. She's not here. She worked for three months writing outlines of code and stuff that I don't understand. Anna Berger from the Association of Counties Stephanie O'Kane and Emily and I we spent a lot of time looking at this. And the I'm going to talk more about our sponsors but I really want to ask Tim Winslow to come up and join us for a couple of minutes and tell us why the Association of Counties has been a huge partner to us on this. It's given us credibility but it's also connected us with a lot of entities that we might not have been able to connect with otherwise. Tim? I'm glad you have two sons but I have two daughters so I'm excited that they and and and my daughters will I hope decide to participate in the in the process of getting out in the community and leading themselves. So I'm always excited to provide divert for the provision of diversity and inclusion. So I mean personally it's an exciting project for me in and of itself. But why the Association of Counties I can I can tell you why and why we're very excited about it. When Anna brought it to you she knew that I was gonna be excited about it and this is why. The Association of Counties believes that all government of power derives from the people. We say that in our constitution we say that in all our constitutions. If that is true if all government power derives from the people then to me it is. Inherent that the best government is that government closest to the people which is local government city government county government the government has most responsive to the people of South Carolina. The idea it seems to me of matchboard is to marry people with their local government entities people that want to serve and local governments want these people to serve. So it's an exciting thing for the Association of Counties because this is exactly what part of our mission is. Can't strong counties and strong municipalities become stronger when people are involved in the process and that's what this program does. It gets people involved in the process. So I applaud y'all for what you're trying to do. I'm excited about being a participant and I just would like to thank y'all for letting us join y'all in this mission. That's all I have but I appreciate it unless you have any questions for me later. I'm very excited as y'all can tell. Let's keep going. Thank y'all. Thank you very much Tim. So I think we all believe that seeing is believing. So rather than just tell you about matchboard we're going to go ahead and show you a short demo of how it actually works. Boards and commissions are the backbone of local government. However the path the average citizen has to take to serve on a board is often onerous and frustrating. They'll start by checking their local county or city's website for information on boards and commissions. That information may or may not be available and if it's not available they'll then have to call or email the clerk and hope it doesn't result in a game of phone tag or email stuck in the spam folder. If it is available there's no guarantee that it's been recently updated or provides all the details they'll need in order to submit an application. Next they'll need to apply. Some entities may allow for applications to be emailed but others may require that the application be mailed or delivered to the office. Then comes the waiting. Unfortunately due to time constraints and the multitude of duties that staff have they may be unable to provide updates on the status of each application. That's all in the past thanks to matchboard. Now a citizen can find out about the boards in their area by visiting matchboard.tech or the local government website which has matchboard embedded in it. They'll know the information is up to date and they'll also be able to see if applications are being accepted, learn more about how the boards function and find out if their skills are a good match for the board. Matchboard allows each citizen to create a profile to better showcase their experience and passion when submitting an application. With just a few clicks a citizen is able to apply to the board or commission of their choosing. Rather than have to fill out a full application all they need to do is answer a few questions for the position and then provide a brief explanation on why they would like to serve. They can check on the status of their applications at any time. Plus if they have questions they can message the clerk directly within matchboard. Matchboard wasn't designed with only citizens in mind. It's structured to complement clerk's existing workflows so they can easily update board information, review new applications and even forward applications to council members for the review. Matchboard is a new way forward. Removing barriers to ensure our boards and commissions are as diverse and strong as the communities they serve. Matchboard.tech where citizens, government and service connect. So matchboard has a lot to offer far more than I could fit in just that short little video. So for just a few moments I'm going to go over some of the other benefits it has. For both citizens and for the county officials and city officials who work with matchboard. The first is for citizens. It allows them to create a personalized profile so they can include a picture of themselves, their LinkedIn profile, their full resume, note the areas of interest they have, their references, which creates a much better picture of who they actually are as a person, their areas of interest than just filling out a one page form could ever do. It's also really easy to share. They can find out about the boards and commissions by visiting their county or city's website, but they can also go to matchboard.tech. They can find out what they're interested in serving in, but they can also send it to their family, their friends, the organizations that they serve with to share. And anyone who goes to matchboard.tech can search for boards and commissions across the state no matter where they live to find how they can serve in their own community. As we saw, they're able to message back and forth with the clerks within matchboard themselves. All the messages are date and time stamped, so citizens can really know and keep track of the communication they're having. They don't have to go back through their emails to find all the emails they've done in their phone to check the calls. All the communication is housed in matchboard. And that's also partly because of the feedback we've heard from citizens that Barbara mentioned earlier about not knowing where their application was in the status, even if it had been received in the first place. We have notifications built into matchboard and also email notifications as well, so they don't just have to check matchboard constantly. And then what I'm most excited about is how it changes things on the clerk side. We've worked with clerks over the past two years and really learned how painful the boards and commission process is for management for them. So to start, they can take all the spreadsheets they have, the Word documents and the PDFs with all their board and commission information, put it onto our template and automatically upload their boards so they don't have to enter all their boards manually. Everything gets imported for them. They also get alerts, 90 days out, 60 days out and 30 days out when a board member's term is set to expire. So they can follow up with the board member to see if they'd like to be reappointed and start advertising that vacancy to get new applicants in. Then once they're ready to appoint somebody, all they have to do is hit one little button that says appoint. It'll automatically pull that applicant's information over, their contact information, demographic information. And it also automatically calculates their term date, which is great because boards all have different term lengths of three years, four years. The clerk doesn't have to worry about keeping track of that. The match board does it for them. That's not the only calculation it does though. The clerk will note the areas of experience, expertise and interest for each particular board. And match board will compare that with the citizen's own areas of interest, expertise and interest and give a percentage on how well that applicant matches the position they're applying for. So the county officials and city officials can see if that applicant is truly qualified. It also allows for input from appointing authorities. We saw that they can forward applications to council members, but that's not all. They can also forward it to the people who are currently serving on the boards. We know a lot of boards need input from the legislative delegation or the governor's office. The clerk can actually forward the application to the legislative delegation, the governor's office or any other organizations all within match board and match board will track their feedback for them as well. And then last we talked about how important diversity is and match board gives an opportunity for officials to track the diversity and the demographic information for their boards and commissions. So they can truly ensure that their boards are a reflection of the community themselves. Emily has a complete grasp of this and not only does she have a grasp of it, she knows all of the benefits that it's going to bring to us. County Portee, I remember the first time I met you. County is the clerk for Orangeburg County. Sorry, I was going to say Orangeburg City, City of Orange. She stood up in a meeting and she said, I keep 29 spreadsheets of all of my boards and commissions. When something changes, I have to go back and look at all 29 of those, then I have to update them, then I have to send that one update to the IT guy who puts it on our website. Then I have to go check the website to see if he did it correctly. Think of that 29, just to say there are 10 seats on each one of those boards or commissions. That's a lot of manual labor that is guaranteed to be fraught with opportunities for error. So we hope that this is going to help make all of our cities and counties more efficient and all of our information more accurate. So I want to thank, I want to recognize Tamika Isaac Devine who's joined us. Tamika is a former council, city council member, but she is also a founding member of and a board member of women in leadership. So this is something I'm not supposed to move. Okay. I don't want to change the the decibel level for anything. We have some great sponsors for this. Our first two sponsors were Affleck and Nefron. And that was two years ago. And if they hadn't had a vision for what increasing community outreach could be and development of boards and commissions, we would never have gotten this started. So they were our very first two. But since that time, we're very grateful to have the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fund, Central Carolina Community Foundation. Have to get all these words in the right order. I mentioned Jen Baxley, the invisible, who did all of the behind the scenes things that we're so grateful for. Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina, Scott Middleton and LTC. Our other council member who had a conflict this morning, Joe Taylor, is a sponsor the Nord Family Foundation and Unum Slash Colonial Life. We'd also like to mention that Bank of America and Duke Energy are sponsoring a conference that we're having in May that will help women will help, I'm sorry, they'll help all people, anybody who chooses to attend, learn how to seek opportunities on boards and commissions, how to create effective applications, how to do references, all of those kinds of things. So we're grateful to them for doing what will be the next step. Now I'd like to introduce Joanne Turnquist, Central Carolina Community Foundation and all the other John S. and James L. Knight, blah, blah, blah. Without the Knight Foundation Grant, we would never have been able to take this to the next stage of where we are now. So thank you so much, Joanne. And then I'll do just a quick wrap up, but we'll have some comments from our Erica Hammond, who has been front and center of everything that we've been doing, the city clerk, city clerk, not clerk to council. She's been with us since day one almost as what sometimes I call our guinea pig and other times she is the person who helped us with every kind of refinement we could possibly have needed. So Joanne, thank you for being here and thank you for everything you've done. Again, thank you all so very, very much. And thank you to Barbara and the entire Will team. When you think about converting 19 spreadsheets to a technology based platform that really can appeal to folks that currently are under represented, whose voices aren't being heard. Mayor Rick and men pointed out, you know, how do we engage more people? How do we ensure that there are more young people, more women, more people of color, people that represent the communities that we all call home? And today those paper applications, they get stuck in a mailbox because we're working remotely. Don't do it. And that's why the Knight Foundation's donor advice fund at Central Carolina Community Foundation invested in this platform. On behalf of Aaron Johnson, who helps manage the Knight Foundation fund in our entire team and board, we are extremely proud that since 1993, the Knight Foundation has called our community foundation their home for their fund. They invest in programs that help prepare folks for leadership, that help engage and recruit and retain young talent, that build equity, that help build an informed and engaged community because if we don't have an informed and engaged community that represents ourselves, we're going to fail regardless of the strength of leadership. So that's why they invested in this platform. It's going to make it easy. It's going to make it accessible. When I heard the words, you can upload your LinkedIn profile. You know, 18 year olds and 19 year olds and 20 year olds don't use paper. 60 year olds do. But we're serving. Our voices are being heard. So by having a program like this, we are going to be able to not only in the city of Columbia, which is where the Knight Foundation invests, but across our region and importantly across our state, have an informed and engaged citizen, informed folks who want to be engaged because they know there are opportunities, who want to be engaged because they can follow the process, who are engaged because our clerks and our elected officials have an opportunity to connect with them. So again, Barbara, congratulations. You are a force to be reckoned with and we are grateful for your leadership. So thank you. Thank you, Barbara. So under the leadership of our Columbia City Council, both current and former members and our mayor and our city manager, we've been just excited to take on this opportunity to launch Match Board. I've been dealing with boards and commissions for 20 years and I remember when I first came on site, Peggy McMurray handed me a rather large, maybe a five inch red binder that was busting at the seams and had all of this historical information on every board and commission the city had ever set up. And from there, of course, we've evolved, but we still had a long ways to go. And so Match Board not only gets rid of that binder, but like they said, it gets rid of the spreadsheets and the word documents. And so we're just excited on today to announce this new platform that the city of Columbia will be going live within the near future. It's taking a lot of Zoom meetings, a lot of phone calls, a lot of work in the background. But I'm glad that as the clerk, I'm not in it alone. I have my partner in Match Board, Ms. Ashley Jenkins. She actually manages the about 30 boards and commissions that the city of Columbia currently has. And I just see Match Board as being a game changer. And so for each and every one of you sitting in this room, I believe it's a personal investment, whether it was your time, your energy, your finances. As a municipal clerk, I'm grateful. Because I always want citizens to feel like they can serve in the city of Columbia. And I don't want something as simple as our website to be a hindrance to their service. And so thank you for your commitment and just being a great part of what we're trying to do. So I'd like to give Ashley just a moment to close out. But again, just thank you for everything. As Erica mentioned earlier, it definitely, we're excited about it because it takes everything from simply being in a red binder or printed or constant printouts to a more exciting and improved interface that really streamlines the process for citizens, makes them feel more connected and makes the boards and commissions and opportunities to serve more accessible. So we're definitely excited about accessibility. We're definitely open for ideas and we're looking forward to input from the community and any ideas that you have regarding the boards and commissions. So stay tuned for updates. We'll be sending those out, I guess, via media release as needed and other opportunities to engage. Thank you. On behalf of our chairman and chairman Wright of Orangeburg County Council, who wasn't able to be here today, I want to say thank you for giving me the opportunity to come and say what Matchboard is going to do for Orangeburg County. First I want to say thank you to the Association of Counties for their leadership and taking on this task, helping us as clerks to take on this task. As clerk, I could concur with what everybody else is saying. I remember the first demo that Erica did and I was sitting there watching, I was like, you got to be kidding me. This is going to be amazing. But how can we, you know, convert it to be for counties instead of, you know, city because she was showing it from a city perspective. And once everything got going and we were at the Association of Counties meeting and then once I find out that Anna was on board, I was like, oh, yes, we definitely got to do this. But I want to share in the words of our chairman, Chairman Johnny Wright, who says, I think Matchboard would be a great tool for Orangeburg County when trying to recruit qualified applicants for our boards and commissions. It would let citizens know that the appointment process is impartial and not political. And that's more important because citizens needs to know that they have a voice and being on boards and commissions give them that opportunity to express themselves with their voice. And I want to say again, thank you for giving me a chance to come and speak to you all today. Thank you. We started with the city of Columbia that was our focus. It's the capital. It's the center point of the state and we're added to that the city of Spartanburg, Jasper County, McCormick County, Orangeburg County, and I'm missing one. Buford County, excuse me, who are all live now, you can go and see them on matchboard.tech. But that's just the beginning. So while we started in the center part of the state, we are now open for business as mayor Rick and men would say and we invite you to encourage your own city and county to get in touch with us and we'll help them get on boarded. So thank you very much for being here. Sorry, it took us a little while, but you know, it's a lot to understand.