 The Emerging Leaders Program is about bringing young people to nonprofit boards of directors in Maine. And we not only teach them about nonprofits in Maine, what a nonprofit is, how it forms and why it forms, but we're also teaching them what it means to be an effective board member. With the hope that by matching them to a board, they continue to stay engaged civically. This is our opening session. It's the first two days out here on Cow Island doing experiential learning and team building. It's a group of people for the most part don't know each other. Ripple Effect is one of our partners. They do a great job with experiential learning and providing this wonderful safe haven to begin a process. Cow Island is the right place for them to begin to understand who they all are as individuals, who they could be as a collective, what we're trying to achieve with the program, and have them begin to play and talk to each other and relax with each other and get to know each other in a safe setting where they can begin to get to know who they can be as a network going forward. The program just started and I'm loving all of the topics that we're going through thus far and trying to understand accountabilities and how to be engaging and identify different roles that you can play as you're part of a nonprofit community. That's really a lot of fun to figure out where your strengths are and where you need to continue to learn and learn more about yourselves. There's a national statistic that says that only 7% of individuals serving on nonprofit boards are under the age of 40. We want to counter that proposition. We want to move that statistic. Maine has the highest number of nonprofits per capita and to me that's very visible. There are a number of different issues and initiatives that need attention in Maine that can't necessarily get met through for-profit means. And so I think that it's really important to get leaders and all kinds of different people involved in nonprofit work to bring new skill sets and new perspectives into that work and to try to adjust some of those issues that matter to all of us. This first day here on Ripple Effect, here on Cow Island with Ripple Effect is a perfect way for us to see how amazing the young people in Maine are. People want to be more engaged and want to meet new people and learn how they can better support our community. So you can already tell that we already have people that have strong leadership skills and abilities already but are eager to develop and improve upon those, learn more about what they can get involved with. I have really enjoyed my time today here with the emerging leader program. I think it's going to help us develop the correct, the right skills for us to be able to serve well in a nonprofit organization. The point of some of the initial exercises we do in the emerging leaders program is both to give people confidence in speaking and understanding but it's also to create a new form of dialogue and a new form of collaboration. I think if we start people with the understanding that collective is better than the individual, that you get better things done with collaboration, that strong communication leads to better results. I think when you give people that basis, it will make their board experience and their experience in their workplaces and all parts of their lives better. So that's sort of what we try to do is show people both how to be leaders but how to be effective leaders through collaboration and communication. Having the interpersonal skills and communication is important not just for the work within the organization and within working in a team of the board and directing the organization but also board members, one of their main functions is being a face and ambassador for the organization and so it's their job to be out in the community, to be a face for the community, to be able to give that 30 second elevator speech to that commercial to promote the organization and be that ambassador. We all know that the next generation is what's going to bring our country forward and bring our state and our local communities forward but it takes a really specific program that ICL does a really good job of making a specific way of getting young people involved in our community and I think what's so great about the emerging leaders program is it gives people the confidence and the skills to step onto a board and really excel.