ERSEA: Strengthening Family and Community Engagement Practices for Recruitment

ERSEA Institute 2022

Session 2b

ERSEA – Strengthening Family and Community Engagement Practices in Recruitment

Anita Harvey-Dixon: Hello. My name is Anita Harvey-Dixon, and I’m the assistant director for training and technical assistance in the National Center on Parent, Family, and Community Engagement. I would like to welcome you to our session entitled Strengthening Family and Community Engagement Practices in Recruitment.

I have really been enjoying the institute thus far. That opening plenary was really motivational for me, and I hope it was for you, too. We’re going to keep that energy up and really deepen and really begin to think about this next session. We want you to bring all that energy, and please, please, please, have fun using that Q&A. My colleagues and I would just love to talk with you. Since I’ve mentioned them, let me introduce or allow them to introduce themselves – my two coworkers and colleagues and friends, co-presenters here. Leslie, you want to say hello?

Leslie Maxfield: Sure. Hi Anita. Thank you. Hi, everyone. My name is Leslie Maxfield, and I am a consultant with the National Center on Parent, Family, and Community Engagement. I’m really excited about the session because everyone loves getting new strategies that are research based, and we have some to share with you. Jennifer?

Jennifer Olson: Hi, Leslie and Anita. I’m Jennifer Olson, and I’m just really thrilled to be here today to talk about recruitment. Looking at all the exciting things that have already happened in the institute, I’m ready to get ourselves going.

Anita: Me too, Jennifer. With that, let’s take a look at our objectives for today. We’re going to want us to think a little more deeply about, and hopefully identify, how your program can promote and reinforce family engagement in your ERSEA practices. Along with that, we are also going to examine some research-informed strategies to help promote and to work hand in hand with staff to promote recruitment through outreach and promotion in our Head Start programs.

We want you to engage with us. We want you to look at your Q&A, get to typing, and let’s begin our conversation. We want you to please respond around telling us about a time you were recruited by someone or into a group. What did the group or program do to help you feel welcomed and excited to join?

I see in the Q&A that “Someone walked up to me and asked me how I was doing and truly cared to know and invited me in.” Jennifer, do you see something? [Pause] Jennifer, I think you might be muted.

Jennifer: “Asked me to tell a story about myself.” Isn’t that an interesting one, Anita, because everybody has a story. Here’s another one. “Someone sent a lovely, welcoming email,” and “I had a wonderful buddy that I was paired with.”

Anita: Thank you. Those are up. Leslie, I think I see one more coming through.

Leslie: Let me see. “I saw someone. They gave me a sense of belonging and made accommodations to support my unique needs,” which is really wonderful in terms of developing a relationship from the very start.

Jennifer: Thank you, thank you. I see one right before we go to the next, and it was very interesting to me. I’m just going to share this one. It says, “Someone saw my interest in DEIB work and invited me into a group doing that work.” Now diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging is a topic that is very close and near and dear to my heart. To hear that was very, very exciting, and to see that in the chat.

Please continue in our chat slash Q&A and continue sharing some of those awesome ideas and what made you feel so welcomed. As we think about that, as I said, keep your mind going there, because we’re talking today about recruitment. I want to thank you all for sharing those ideas.

Now we want to take a look and set the context for our discussion. We really want to take a look at the Head Start Performance Standard here because this is our guiding light. It tells us why we recruit. If we take little pieces of the standard apart, some elements that come up for me immediately are implementing a recruitment process.

When you think about the implementation of a recruitment process, to me, this sings of intentionality and planning. When you review community assessments, when you think about planning, you’re thinking about those community assessments, and accessing partnerships with all staff, community partners, and families to assist in the recruiting process.

You also begin to think about time. Recruiting is a year-round process. It’s a year-round process, because what we’re doing when we’re recruiting is seeking an opportunity. Of course also in the standard is applying for admission. What does that say to me? What do I begin to think about when I’m thinking about recruitment and applying for admission? I think about how easy the process is, or how difficult it is. Are the forms electronic? Thinking about that DEIB reference – or diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging reference – are they available in a language that I understand?

If we go to that next line, the standard also speaks to disabilities and other vulnerable children. When I think about this, this speaks to that equity and inclusion and cultural and linguistic responsivity and an acknowledgement of our prioritized populations.

Now that we’ve identified recruitment in the standards, I want us to take a look at the Parent, Family, and Community Engagement Framework. We heard about the Framework during our ERSEA foundational session earlier today. What I hope to do is I hope we can drive down and look a little closer at certain aspects of the Framework. In particular, I want us to look at those top two arrows.

Those arrows drive the work of Parent, Family, and Community Engagement. The top two arrows – we have positive and goal-oriented relationships; and demonstrating equity, inclusiveness, cultural, and linguistic responsiveness. When we think about that positive and goal-oriented relationship building, we know that it’s an interactive process. When we are recruiting families into our programs, we are establishing a relationship based on mutual respect and trust that provides opportunities for – and this is very, very important – two-way communication.

Then we have that equity, inclusiveness, cultural and linguistic responsiveness. This element ensures we reflect our own cultures, get to know the cultural strengths of families, and individualize our program services to meet the language and cultural interests of families that we are recruiting.

All of these things, all of these things come together in this statement. It’s really all about relationships. At the beginning of the day and at the end of the day, it’s about relationships. Leslie?

Leslie: Now we’re going to start talking about how we can meet families where they are and start diving into those research-informed strategies for an effective approach to recruitment. Given the diverse factors that impact families’ access to and use of services, our approach to recruitment must be flexible, multifaceted, and ongoing. Along with the successful strategies you may already have in place, consider the following strategies as a way that you can enhance your approach.

As Anita just mentioned, I want to go back and say a word about language. Reaching out to families that have not yet been able to be reached because we lack the knowledge, skills, or language requires us to think about what makes the offered services hard for families to accept or difficult for them to access. We want to start moving away from providing information to families and advancing towards listening to families and responding to their behaviors, their attitudes, and their concerns. This will really help to make a more effective recruitment process.

Another thing to think about is that, for decades, families that we have not been able to connect with through traditional outreach have been thought of as hard-to-reach. The phrase “hard-to-reach families” implies that they may be indifferent or uncooperative. This is so far from the truth. It does not account for the specific and individual barriers that many families have to face in order to access services. This phrase minimizes how difficult it may be for families to access services. Describing families as “hard to reach” also fails to recognize parents’ perspectives and strengths.

In truth, families are not hard to reach. It may be that our services are hard to reach. This simple but powerful statement demonstrates a shift in how we can think about families and outreach. Many families may perceive services as hard to reach because services seem to stigmatize them, or they’re not aligned with what the families value or think they need.

Families may also choose not to access services that are not promoted or delivered in ways that are culturally and linguistically responsive. By shifting our perspective and our terms, we have the wonderful opportunity to support a parent’s right and ability to choose what is best for his or her family.

We want to make sure that you directors who are in our audience today, understand that you shouldn’t be shouldering the burden of outreach and recruitment alone. We can work to create effective approaches to outreach that value and demonstrate our respect for diversity. Now let’s shift our attention to how we might individualize conversations with families related to recruitment.

We have 10 research-informed strategies for effective approaches through recruitment. I’ll go through them briefly because we’re going to go through them individually one at a time. The strategies are understanding recruitment and the value of partnerships; resources and funding; data and planning; policies, procedures, and processes; human resources; strengthening services; cultural responsiveness; positive and strengths-based messaging; clear, understandable language; and effective communication.

Let’s hop in. The first one is understanding recruitment and the value of partnership. Here we want to prioritize recruitment and work to build a shared understanding of recruitment and its importance among staff and partners. We can adopt a definition of recruitment and share the information in this overview we’re providing today to inform your recruitment efforts.

One thing that’s important to do is focus on data-informed, consistent yet flexible, and sustainable holistic approaches. Including recruitment requirements in funding applications is important, and also in program reporting requirements. It’s important also to build in requirements for using data to inform and continually improve your efforts. We’ll be talking more about data in a few minutes. What’s really critical, too, is to seek parent input and consult with cultural and community organizations that partner with families.

If you were joining us in our previous session, you’ll remember that there was a parent from Somalia who became very involved in the program, joined the Policy Council, and then through the community heard that there was a group of refugees from Afghanistan who had just moved in and had small children, were having difficulty finding housing. She brought that information back to the Policy Council to see what the program could do to support these families.

We’d want to consider ways that we partner with families and organizations that work with them to help achieve their common goals. This is also an excellent time look at your MOU, your memoranda of understanding with the local education agencies, with other agencies that provide support services for families within the community.

Moving on – number two is resources and funding. It’s really critical to allocate resources and funding for recruitment. This made me think about how many times do programs do this, and what are some new and creative ways that you could think about looking at resources and funding?

There might be some existing funding sources through your grant applications or other funding streams you might have. But there also might be some funding that’s available by partnering with other agencies within the community, and maybe some businesses, as well, that would be willing to provide support.

When we think about staffing, which we’ll go into in human resources, we also have to ensure that staff have time within their schedules to support recruitment and enrollment efforts. We don’t want to be taking people away from their primary responsibility, but we want to make sure that they have the opportunity to go out and support the recruitment efforts. It may be a time to think about conducting a wage-comparability study and factor recruitment into the design of your program and your positions.

As I said, we were going to come back to data and planning. It’s important to embed data into your agency’s overall communication plan, and to use data to identify the families that you want to reach. Then you can identify the recruitment strategies that might be effective. I was thinking about this and thinking about different communities where there may be an increase in families experiencing homelessness. Where I live, it’s close to where there are a lot of the huge fires in California a few years ago. We saw in our community an influx in families who were experiencing homelessness due to those fires because they had lost everything. You’ll want to think about recruitment strategies that might be effective.

Consider data when you’re creating strategies that address the general population, but also more specifically the prioritize populations that Anita referred to earlier. These might be groups of families who are often unrepresented and need extra support in accessing our services. You can also look to community partners to help you identify and collect data, and explore some data-sharing agreements.

Identify the resources you need to implement your plan, for instance, your community assessment. Community assessment is one of the first things that is listed in the Performance Standards under recruitment and ERSEA services. I think, too, thinking about types of recruitment strategies, maybe, the time that we’re in now that might be more virtual strategies that would be available. Word-of-mouth has always been one of the strongest strategies we have; providing new staff training or ongoing professional development about effective recruitment and relationship building; and then having some tangible products. I think we might have some of those for you later in the presentation.

Number four –  policies, procedures, and processes. How can we develop or enhance a “no wrong door” and “one-stop shop” policies, procedures, and processes? We’d like to make sure to explore opportunities from multi-agency teams or cross-agency staff roles. Consider opportunities to streamline referrals between services and enrollment processes, and provide our partners with information and materials about our services.

Tapping into partners’ existing relationships with families or groups of families; collaborating with other agencies to set and work towards goals to more effectively connect families with each other and with services that they value; using both technology and staff to reach both broad and specific audiences; really taking a broad look at what we’re seeing as recruitment and the “no wrong door” and “one-stop shop.”

I can’t think of anything harder for a family to face than being told they’ve gone to the wrong place to get information for Head Start. If we make sure that we have information available at clinics, WIC offices, anywhere families could go, local grocery stores. It really will make a difference.

Number five is human resources. Here we want to think about how we can dedicate staff or hire or otherwise engage family liaisons or parent ambassadors. We want to ensure that our staff have strong listening and relationship-building skills to assess whether partnering with and engaging a community leader as a family liaison would be helpful – probably doing an interview if someone has been referred to you by a family as a good community ambassador.

Another thing that we were thinking of was looking at the family partnership services. Is this something that could be part of a Family Partnership Agreement? That a family might say, “We want to develop our advocacy skills. We really want to be a part of the recruitment efforts because this program has done so much for us. We want to give back.” Maybe there’s a way that you can have temporary – during the big recruitment season – temporary jobs for families to go out into the community, and do recruitment, and talk about the program, and help people understand about Head Start eligibility. There’s really a wonderful way to be creative at this time. Now, we’re going to move forward, and I’m going to turn it over to Anita.

Anita: Thank you, Leslie. Thank you so very much. Those five strategies that you shared, they really left a mark on me as I really began to think about them. The one that I lean heavily into, even though they’re all important, but that one around human resources and that idea about potentially hiring families to go out and do some recruiting for you. That is a very important, strategic idea.

In the Q&A section, let’s really begin to think a little bit more about some of those strategies that were just shared with us, and also consider the next six that will come along. Leslie showed us the preview of what’s to come. As you watch the video, we want you to look for examples. We’re going to show you a little video, a little movie clip here, a little commercial break. As you watch the video, we want you to look for examples of recruitment connections. All right?  Hold onto that information as we move into the next six strategies. You’re going to look for the connections from the first five, and think about how you can connect to the next six.

[Video begins]

[Music]

Teacher: [Clapping] Bravo! Who else is here today? Who’s here today? Wesley? Delilah’s here today.

Daisy: They’re amazing. They’re there. They’re there to help you all the time. From the front to the teachers, from the staff in the kitchen, the receptionist, they’re all great. They’ve opened a whole new world.

Man: Thank you.

Welcoming Staff: Thank you, dear. Have good one.

Man: Likewise.

Daisy: This is like my second home. I’ve been here five, six months.

Masedonio: They really embrace our kids. I mean, they really do love our son and daughter, you know, like they love the other students. I mean, you can tell it’s genuine.

Maria: They show us love. They show us understanding. And if there’s any way that they can help us. . .

Multiple, simultaneous staff voices: Hi. How are you? Good.

Maria: If we have fallen on a hard time, they’re there to support us with resources and just things that, you know, could help us move up from the spot that we’re in.

Norma: They know what goes on personally, and you can talk to them, and they have door’s open whenever you need them.

Lizette: So, I oftentimes am very reflective with our parents. I ask them, well, what meaning does this have for you? What is it exactly that you want for us to do for your child? And just really hearing about what it is that they value as a parent, and then even more so as the child’s first teacher.

Masedonio: Monthly they have activities where you have to sit with them and play with them and talk with them and make instruments with them. And it’s very interactive.

Perla: And I didn’t realize just by me counting the steps with him or pointing out colors in the grocery store was helping him. So now I take every opportunity for anything.

Teacher: [What’s her name?

Masedonio: She can talk. She can count. She can do sign language, and she’s only two years old, you know?

Perla: Yeah, and at a young age, she already shows compassion. Like if one of her classmates starts crying, she goes to them and hugs them and starts shushing them and trying to see what’s wrong. And that’s really nice to see because I know when I had my son at home, of course, he didn’t express that. See Layla’s doing that, that’s great.

Teacher: Oh, like the bigger kids?

Lizzette: Whatever it is that they’re speaking to me about, obviously they have some passion and value behind it, and I want to make sure that the parent feels 100 percent validated.

Teacher 2: I’m right here. I’m right here. I’m right here with you. It’s okay.

Daisy: Now, because of this program, I can advocate better for my daughter.

Norma: I never thought parents had a voice.

Teacher: You want to push the button?

Nora: And my children, they see it, so it’s something that, you know, they will do the same, because they’re seeing it through me.

Masedonio: It’s very encouraging as a parent to belong to a school where you could tell everybody believes in the system.

Teacher 3: More water? More?

Masedonio: You don’t see any teachers that kind of just take it easy like they don’t really care. They all care. You can tell by the way they teach and the way they interact with our kids and the way they interact with us.

Daisy: I tell them every day, “You guys are wonderful. Where were you guys when I had my 17-year-old?” I’m very grateful.

[Music ends]

[Video ends]

Jennifer: Oh, my goodness! Wasn’t that just exciting, Anita and Leslie?

Anita: It sure was. I love that.

Jennifer: I could see so many of the things that Leslie mentioned in the first five, and I see things coming up in the chat. “Relationships are built based on understanding and positive interactions.” “Families can see many opportunities.” “Super-powerful,” people are saying – and the human resources piece. You know, Anita I’m struck by that also, when you spoke earlier, really thinking about what it costs to do quality recruitment.

Unless you talked about the wage studies, adding recruitment in as a possibility as part of their services or part of their job description, and then actually paying parents as ambassadors. I was touched by that. This video – I’m so excited to get into this, the next five strategies, because I think that the video helped demonstrate that as well.

As we can see on the screen, we have “strengthening services” – and strengthening services is “finding out what service features are important to the families you’re trying to reach,” and then promote that service as a match. You know, when Leslie was talking about those families that had moved there from the state of California that had experienced a fire, think about how helpful that would be if they knew that a Head Start program that was not only serving their children and themselves, but also had the direct connection to housing services. There’s just a perfect example of matching what families need with what we can offer.

How do we do that on a routine basis? When Leslie mentioned data and how important it is to plan for recruitment, as well, where do we get those data? As Head Start, we know exactly where we get the data: from our community assessment and from our ongoing conversations with those in our community, our partners, and also the families that we serve.

We have all these sources of data that we are constantly thinking about and planning for – how we can recruit those that are truly in need in our community or a different variety of needs in our community so we’re always up to date. As we all know, that community assessment tells us of eligible infants, toddlers, and children and expected mothers, of course. It tells their race, ethnicity, and languages that they speak.

Here’s just this wealth of information that we already have to think about using in our recruitment strategies. It also tells us families who lack housing, number of children in foster care, and children with disabilities. Again, when we’re thinking about recruiting those prioritized populations, we know where to go in our community resource assessment where to find those data. Then once we know what our families might need, we be sure to include them in our information and our messages that we send out to the community.

We all know that all families want a welcoming environment. We start with that and make sure that all of our messages are welcoming. Then maybe they might include an introduction to community resources because that’s so important for our families. Or they might share information about the collaborative partnerships that we have, including services to children with disabilities.

We want to use recruitment messages to address how also we could maybe make parenting a little bit easier. During the pandemic, the Head Start programs were offering food and services and virtual interactions, doing all these incredible things to reach out to those in need in the community. It was so clear how we needed to change our services to meet that. But in an ongoing way, we also want to say to parents, “You know, do we have a deal for you. We can help you build positive relationship with your child.” Who doesn’t want that?

We can talk about parenting skills. We might even want to talk about basic financial skills and money management because I think all of us need a little bit of money management assistance. I know that I do. Finally, we want to emphasize the fact that we have highly trained staff, and maybe we hope those staff speak the languages of the families in our communities.

Let’s look at number seven –  cultural responsiveness. We want to always think about representing the cultures in our community, and that changes and can vary over time. We want to look at that data that we had. From the last slide, we talked about the community assessment and talking to our community partners on an ongoing basis, finding out who’s in the community, and then listening, as Leslie said, to our parents.

Who’s moving in, who’s moving out? Who do you know about that might be a family that we recruit and share the wonder of Head Start with. We want to pay real close attention to the cultural messages that we send. We can do that through [Inaudible], through etiquette, through routines, through meal settings – all the ways, as you see on this beautiful photo that we have on our slide here, all the ways that we can give a nod to different cultures that says to our families, “We are a welcoming environment.”

We want to choose images, again, referring to the slide here that represent diverse families, consider our race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, age, gender, sexual orientation, disability, religion, and family composition – and wow! Is that ever a mouthful? That was a lot of information to think about. But you know, you can actually make a little checklist and say, “What about my flyers today? Were they created four years ago? And maybe they were some web shots that we’re, we kind of went … You know, they might not even have been pictures of our families.” Take a look at the material around you and broaden your thinking about, does this really represent our community? Is this how we want to represent ourselves?

We want to also always emphasize the language of the families that we serve and try to put our materials into the language of families that are in our communities, or make it available to families in a different language by having interpreters. We want to consider the races and ethnicities of our staff and families. Do they align? Are they the same? Do families see themselves when they come into our program? As we talked about earlier today, we talked about the Somali families who wanted to come into our classrooms and hear about and make themselves the welcomers to new families and children.

Now we’re thinking about number eight, and this is where we want to talk about positive and strengths-based messaging. As Anita said so beautifully at the beginning, talking at the framework, you know, it’s all about relationships. If we do anything well, it’s to establish positive, strong relationships with our families. We want to advertise that. We want to talk about our families as effective decision makers, resourceful users of comprehensive services.

They know how to access those services, and they can bring information back to us about how better to access community resources and keep that feedback loop going. We want to go to trusted sources of information for families and think about what they tell us about the resources in our community.

We want to think about families as leaders who advance quality services for programs for their child and their community, so let’s use messages that affirm these roles, as well as the role of the parents as their child’s first and most important teacher. Did you hear them? The parents in the last video talking about – wow, I didn’t even know that when I said the counting in the supermarket or the colors that that was really an important thing for my child’s development. So many of the comments in that just three-minute clip affirmed that parent capacity as a child’s first teacher and those relationships.

Let’s take a peek at this new campaign. You guys may be the first ones to get to see it. It’s called #GetaHeadStart. Get a Head Start. I have to let that trip off my tongue. It’s a new program that’s been developed. We’re going to take a moment to watch this quick clip and look for some of the positive things around relationships that are evident in this clip.

[Video begins]

[Upbeat music]

[Video ends]

Jennifer: Wow! I tell you I was certainly excited by it. What about you, Anita and Leslie?

Anita: Was very excited.

Leslie: That’s great. I can really see families responding to that.

Jennifer: I can, too – and talk about affirming for families! It was just so quick, just so brief. You don’t have to make things lengthy. You don’t have to use a lot of money to develop and build things. You can just do a quick clip of families in your own community talking about what they’ve learned.

As we do these kinds of beautiful – you know, that was really over-the-top beautiful – but we also think about some of the flyers and some of the handouts that we use, and posters that we put in the laundromat or the supermarket. We want to be very careful that we make them accessible to all families.

As Leslie mentioned earlier, families have a hard time sometimes reaching us. They’re not resistive to reaching us. They don’t have the … We aren’t providing those avenues, so let’s think about clear and understandable language. Again, if we go back to the #GetaHeadStart campaign, we’ll see that this is an example of one of the posters or one of the flyers or tip sheets that can be put out. When you get a chance to look at it more closely, you’ll see that we are really demonstrating clear and understandable language throughout this campaign.

You can consult – it’s called the Federal Plain Language Guidelines, where you actually can go and find out what does good, old, plain language look like. One of the things that we want to talk about is being concise, being clear, and to write as you speak. You might think about, too, the literacy and reading level. Eighth-grade level is typically thought about as a good level to start out, but sometimes we even want to use the sixth-grade level for developing language. We want to be very clear that we look at all of the ways that we’re developing our worded content and on our websites. Think about using fewer syllables, sometimes using shorter sentences, and, of course, really thinking about avoiding jargon.

We have a whole language in Head Start. Don’t we? Sometimes we use so many acronyms – ERSEAs, you know, IEPs, all these different things that we just use so easily. It trips off our tongues, words like “ratio,” “developmentally appropriate.” We know what we’re talking about, but we have to remember that people outside our small circle probably may not, so let’s look at the communication channels and tactics that we can use to think about the preferences of families.

This is all about effective communication. That’s what we’re trying to do, again, in these wonderful clips that we’re going to see with #GetaHeadStart and the examples that you can do in your programs. They’re not that hard. Many of you are already using social media. All of you probably have a website. Just make sure that, when you are using your social media and you’re reviewing your website, that you think back to these strategies that Leslie and I have shared with you today, those 10 strategies and then Anita introduced us to, because you want to constantly be looking at and improving your services.

Let’s say you you have a group of young people. Many of our families are families under 25. They’re primarily texting. They’re primarily on their phones. Aren’t they? Think about ways to reach your community through those types of resources.

Also use trusted partners in the community. Go where families go. Go where they go to enjoy themselves, where they play, where they seek services, where they do their laundry, where they shop for their food, and be there and be present and part of those trusted partners. You can even go to the barbershop and the beautician. Think about places like that where you know families are visiting, and we can share our information in a meaningful way.

We also want to partner with other agencies. Think about the local school district, or health fair that might be happening, and be a presence there.

Wow! We’ve been through a lot of information. We’ve shown you some examples, and we just want to touch briefly on these 10 strategies that are research informed for effective approaches to recruitment. There we see them on the screen. I’ll just let you absorb them for a second here, looking at all 10. Remember that’s how we want to be thinking about revamping, re-looking, revising, and reaching out. Anita, time for a little bit of chat.

Anita: Thank you so very much. I’m looking in the Q&A and some things are already beginning to get stirred up, and I’m so, so excited. But I did want to make a reference back to the video that we saw. Prior to, we saw seeing the #GetaHeadStart video. Just want to say, you might have noticed that that video was filmed before the pandemic, so there was a lot of openness and closeness and stuff like that. I just wanted to acknowledge that and to share that.

Also the strategies that you shared, Jennifer, I just wanted to remind us that we’ve got some marketing sessions. That’ll be coming up at the institute, also. We might want to tap into those around that effective communication and so forth as we’re recruiting our families.

Here we go. There are things coming through the chat, and I’m hoping that my colleagues here, Jennifer and Leslie, will at least give me one or two. Share which research-informed strategies you plan to implement or strengthen. Our audience is a-buzz. Do you see anything in the chat, Jennifer?

Jennifer: I do. I see something from number six. Sorry. I’m jumping in, but I was excited. Positive and strengths-based messages. This is such an excellent strategy to motivate families who already are in the program to become advocates and leaders in the program.

Leslie: I’ve got one, Anita. Strategy five: human resources. “I want to find a way to involve all staff in recruitment and registration efforts. This is a team effort, which requires the efforts of all of us. We can only do it together.”

Anita: I actually, I’m looking at the clock, Jennifer. I don’t think we’ll have any more time, but I want to encourage everyone to keep the conversation going. We’ll have some practical application sessions later on. That’s an awesome opportunity for you to really think together with your colleagues, to share together with them, and keep talking, keep chatting and keep networking.

With all of that, our time has gone away so quickly. Just really want to say in our time together with this quote from Maya Angelou, by saying, “We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.”

I just want to acknowledge that we have some resources. You’ve got that resource widget on the console. Please, please, download those resources. With that, I just want to say thank you all for your time, for your energy. Have an awesome time at the institute. Keep networking, keep grabbing resources. Join, visit the Wellness Center – all that good stuff. Jennifer, Leslie?

Jennifer: Thank you so much.

Leslie: Thank you.

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