University Place Entrepreneurialism In Society Ben Weston, "Healthy Classrooms Foundation: A Student's Vision" 10/20/2010  UP 506   cc >> Jeanan Yasiri: This is Entrepreneurialism in Society. It's a course that's offered through the University of Wisconsin School of Human Ecology. I'm Jeanan Yasiri. As we begin today I'd like to extend thanks to our partners in offering this course, the UW Office of Corporate Relations, the UW College of Engineering for their technical support, and financial support which is provided by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation which is committed to advancing academic education in entrepreneurship. Additionally, we'd like to thank our media partners, Wisconsin Public Television and their University Place crew for taping today's lecture. I'm quite pleased to introduce a special guest today. He is Ben Weston, founder of the Healthy Classrooms Foundation. As a student here at the University of Wisconsin, Ben had a vision a few years ago of creating a foundation that would convene educators around best practices that helped primary and secondary aged students lead healthier lifestyles. I'll always remember when he called us at the UW Center for Nonprofits, just over two years ago actually, to discuss his vision for creating that foundation. Today, the Healthy Classrooms Foundation is in full force, hosting annual symposia and providing grants to educators in communities across our state. 

All of this has been achieved while Ben has continued his medical studies, including having completed his master's degree in public health here at UW last spring. Today, he is a fourth-year medical school student and plans on graduating in 2011. I've asked Ben to come in today and share with us the story of the Healthy Classrooms Foundation, his initial vision for creating the organization, how he achieved that vision and the lessons that he learned along the way. It's a truly fine example of social entrepreneurship that's been advanced by a University of Wisconsin student. Please join me in welcoming Ben Weston. (applause)  >> Ben Weston: Thank you very much, Jeanan. And thank you for having me. I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself and a lot about the organization, but I thought before he started we could get everybody thinking real quick. So if everybody can just take out a sheet of paper and I know people are from a lot of different backgrounds but presumably you have some sort of idea of something you want to do in the future whether it's starting a business, starting a nonprofit, any kind of entrepreneurial effort. So take that sheet of paper and imagine it's the time when you want to start that. 

Over the next few weeks you want to get it rolling, and you're starting to make your first steps. So what's your first step that you want to do before anything else to start getting this idea moving. So take out a sheet, definitely write down what your first step is. If you want you can write down what the idea is, unless it's a secret and you don't want to share it, which is fine too. And then if you want you can write down your name. We'll talk about this stuff later, and if you want to kind of discuss it, feel free to put your name down. So we'll take just about 60 seconds, kind of think that through, write down whatever comes to your mind and maybe pass it all the way to the left.  Okay, looks like most people maybe had a chance to write something down. You don't have to think through it too much. Just whatever comes to your mind first just write it down and pass it on. 

So I thought first I'd, Jeanan gave a great introduction, maybe I'll tell you a little more about myself, how I came here. I'm from Milwaukee originally. For those of you who are from Milwaukee, I went to Shorewood High School. I graduated in 2001 from Shorewood, and I did my undergraduate at Lawrence University in Appleton. I majored in biology. I graduated from there in 2005. I took a year off of school and I did research in Milwaukee on cocaine use in inner city African Americans in Milwaukee. And then I began medical school here in 2006. I did my first three years of medical school and then took a year to get my master's in public health, as Jeanan mentioned. That was last year. 

And I did research during that in cost management and emergency medicine, totally unrelated to what we're talking about today. And I'll be graduating medical school this spring and going into emergency medicine, also unrelated to what we're doing today. So that's a little bit about myself. I think we'll have time for questions at the end. If people have questions about any of the stuff that we talk about, we could probably take them during the talk otherwise we could wait till the end. So I passed around some of the brochures, and maybe I'll steal somebody's because I didn't actually keep one for myself. I'll bring it back. So the first thing to tell you about the foundation, I think, is our mission statement. And if you open to the first page of the brochure is our mission statement, and that kind of summarizes what we're all about. So the Healthy Classrooms Foundation is committed to integrating public health education such as fitness, nutrition, developmental health and environmental responsibility into the primary and secondary school systems. 

And we support a community effort to invest in the sustainable development of healthy lifestyles and make classrooms a healthier place to learn. So what exactly does that mean? What exactly do we do? Hopefully that gives you an idea of the general idea of what we try to accomplish, but the way we accomplish it is through four main programs. And those are also in the brochure. Our first program is the annual symposium. So our first is the annual symposium. That takes place each April, and the idea of the symposium is to bring together educators, governmental officials, students, community members, parents, teachers from around the state and talk to them about public health in the classroom. So everything from physical fitness, nutrition, developmental health, environmental responsibility, all these different areas. And so we have people from throughout the state who come in and talk about all these subjects and how they can be integrated into the K-12 curriculum. We've had three symposia so far. We usually have about 300 attendees each. 

They take place here in Madison. Our next endeavor are project grants. Those are grants of over $2,000 or up to $2,000 for projects which kind of are spin-offs of the ideas that were gained in the symposium. So we have school gardens. We have running clubs. We have yoga groups. We have a recipe doctor who goes around and talks about how to make home recipes better. We have all these different project grants. This last year we were very excited to give out over $10,000 in project grants. The third category is our impact awards. 

The impact awards is our newest category, and it's kind of what it sounds like. It's for individuals in the community and throughout the state who are really making a difference as far as the health of their students and the health of their communities. And those are for up to a thousand dollars. And our last area is our online learning. You can kind of see that here. The website is www.hc-foundation.com, and on our website we have, first of all, links to all these different areas to apply for the impacts awards, to apply to the grants. We have an online forum where people can talk throughout the state about maybe something that worked in Green Bay would work really well in Janesville but they just haven't communicated about that. All the symposium lectures are available online. We're getting public service announcements up online and online curricula up there as well. So a little bit about the foundation, what it is right now, and then I'll get more into how it first started. 

The structure of the foundation, it's overseen by a board of directors. It's a board composed of both students and community members. The students hold most of the committee director rules. So we have five different committees and those are the events committee, which oversees the symposium as well as a few other events we have each year, finance committee, which does our budgeting, does all our taxes, everything like that, development committee, which does all our fundraising; a giving committee, which oversees our grants and impact awards; and then a public relations committee, which does both the design of the website, of the brochures, everything like that, as well as the going out in the community, going on radio shows and TV shows and things like that and advertising our organization and getting the word out. The board of directors includes members of the community such as the director of the UW Preventive Cardiology Program, business leaders from Milwaukee, an elementary school principal from Madison, the Associate Dean of Public Health, health law attorney, a nurse practitioner at St. Mary's, Superintendent Nerad of Madison and the CEO of the Boys and Girls Club of Dane County. We have directors of those committees and we have managers of subcommittees within the committee and then members on each of those subcommittees. All told, we have just over 50 members involved at this point. But that's just happening now. So to jump back to the process of creation, how it all started. It actually started with just a few of us, just four of us in the beginning. 

And so three years ago, a little over three years ago, we got together and we just had a fairly simple idea which was to bring public health to the public. So at the medical school, which is also where the School of Nursing is, physician assistants, the School of Pharmacy, all these different health field related sort of schools, there's talks every single day, there's three, four talks going on, but they're all related to health for those individuals. They talk about public health but it's geared toward nurses or it's geared toward physicians or it's geared toward pharmacists. But rarely, if ever, did they actually invite the community into those doors, into that building to talk about these same topics. So that's what we wanted to do. We couldn't think of a better audience to bring public health to than the public even though, typically, people don't talk to the public about all of these things and what's going on and what they can do to improve their health. And when we thought of different audiences, we couldn't think of a better audience than teachers because if we can get these ideas out to teachers, they could bring them to their students, the students could bring them back to their homes and to the communities and then everybody would have these ideas of nutrition and physical fitness. So public health to the public, that's how it all started. Some people are real familiar with what public health is, and it's kind of an ambiguous term to a lot of people. So just to talk real quick about that. 

When you go see your doctor or you go to UHS, it's more an individual level of health. You have a cold, you have pneumonia, you have a virus, whatever, they treat you. But public health is more about the health of populations. And it's a really broad term. It can be everything from water treatment, vaccinations, disaster preparedness and then physical education in schools, offices and everything in between. It's a wide variety of things. Everything that affects the health of the public in general. So anyhow, we started with that idea, bringing public health to the public. We were debating whether it should be a talk during lunchtime or a talk after classes or what it should be. And eventually we decided to make it a bigger thing and turn it into a symposium, have it in the evening on a weekday when teachers could come and have a few talks. 

We ended up having nine talks that first year. And we kind of had our fingers crossed that we'd maybe get a hundred people to attend. We sent out postcards, we sent out emails, we went around to schools, told everybody about it and we had an online RSVP and a few days after we opened it we already had over 200 people RSVP and by the time the event came we had over 300 people RSVP. So we kind of knew we were onto something. People were interested in these topics and they wanted to hear about these topics. And the symposium was a great success. We had a lot of good feedback. And so the four of us who kind of started this got together and decided that we wanted to do something more. We wanted to kind of take these ideas and make them more sustainable, allow teachers to actually take the ideas from the symposium and put them in their classroom. You can go to these events and you can hear about it and you can say, this is great, I wish I could do that, and then you just go back to what you've always been doing. 

But hopefully we could actually make a difference. And so that was how we came to decide we wanted to do something more. And that's when we started putting together our first steps like I had you guys do. So I don't know if anybody, did anybody actually write their name down? What did you, rather than going through all these, what did you write down? >> My idea is for an business incubator, and I said the first step would be to research. (inaudible) >> You said a business incubator and your idea was kind of to research business. So sort of kind of a needs assessment to see what's out there already, what can I do, how can I make it better? >> Yep. >> That's great. Somebody else had their hand up that they put their name down. Or if you didn't put your name down and you want to share your idea, that's fine too. Yeah? >> I want to open a nonprofit for the arts for youth in my neighborhood in New York City. 

So my first step would be to go back to the neighborhood and talk to the youth when I graduate. (inaudible) >> That's great. So her idea was to open up an arts for youth kind of program in her community back home. And so her first step would be to go and talk to the kids in that community and say, what do you want? And it's the same kind of idea. Needs assessment and that's perfect. Anybody else? I think there was, yeah? >> I'm interested in having a nonprofit to network other nonprofits so that instead of having a lot of different organizations that are each making a little bit of progress, nonprofits can share information and assets so that they can become a lot more successful together. >> Great. So she was saying that she wants to create a nonprofit that helps sort of network nonprofits together so that people can see what everybody else is doing and hopefully collaborate on ideas and improve what they're already doing. Anybody else? Okay. Well, those are good. 

So it sounds like kind of a needs assessment/figuring out what exactly it is specifically that you want to do was everybody's first step. And that's great. That's exactly what our first step was too. And I wrote down just construct an idea. And so we knew that, yeah, we wanted to improve health in classrooms, we wanted to make it sustainable but trying to get a group of people together, trying to get businesses to buy into something like that, you can't really go with that sort of an idea. So it started off just the four of us said, let's figure out what this idea is. And so what we decided was to bring public health to the classroom through doing three things. One was the symposium. One was grants to extend off of the symposium to make these ideas more sustainable in the classroom. And one was scholarships. 

And so the idea of scholarships was to reward people who were already doing these ideas and kind of make it, promote this in the community as a good thing to do. So those are our three ideas. And we kind of went from there. And our next step was to put together a working board of directors. So what I mean by working board of directors is a lot of organizations have a board of directors that are advisory boards. So they get together either once a year or four times a year or 10 times a year or whatever they do. And the company or the nonprofit tells them what they're doing and they say you could do this, you could do this, you could do this. They might be big names, they might not be big names but they're more advisory. We needed, from the start, a working board of directors, a board that would not just advise but would actually be there helping us put together the different things, help us file our taxes and apply to be a nonprofit and go out and meet with businesses and all that kind of stuff. And so the four of us were the beginning of the that board of directors. 

At that point it was four medical students so that's how it started off. And we kind of made four positions, five positions, actually. So it was leaderships, we made a president, a vice president. We had development so we knew we had to raise money. We had finance, we knew we had to somehow account for all that money we were raising, in theory. And we had public relations because somehow we had to get the word out there and we had to get good materials together to show people. So that was our second step, putting together that board of directors. I kind of took on the role of president, and then I also really enjoyed the development fundraising piece. So I have been involved in that up until very recently when we kind of split those positions apart and now have a director of development. And then after that we, from our original idea that we constructed, we made it more concrete and we made it into a mission statement, and that's what you have in the brochure now. 

And the mission statement was more concise but also broad enough to allow us to do a lot of different efforts. It didn't say we're promoting physical fitness and then when we get a really great environmental responsibility speaker we couldn't bring him in because we're about promoting physical fitness. And so we had a broad mission but a mission that also allowed us to kind of focus in on what we wanted to do and allowed us to approach those same businesses and the principals and the superintendents and the volunteers to get people to come and rally to our idea. The next step was to take that mission statement and kind of apply it to, let's see here, kind of organize the mission statement a little bit. Is anybody here familiar with logic models? Nobody? Okay. So the idea of a logic model, and you can do, it's like a road map or you can make it a timeline or just a brain storming session or whatever, but the idea of a logic model is sort of to put together your thoughts in a way that you can organize your thoughts in a way that you can see what's going to come from them and what you need to do first. And so the first column is always inputs. So we needed volunteers, we needed people's time, we needed financial support, we needed some sort of overhead, computers, printers, whether it be our own or somebody else's, we needed a mission statement and luckily we had that, we had the beginnings of a board of directors, we needed articles of incorporation, these are things for a nonprofit, bylaws and then the actual nonprofit status. And from there I won't go through this entire thing. I'll pass out a couple at the end. 

But you can look up here for now. I'll leave this up for a little bit. So then activities, what are the different activities we had to do? We kind of organized them by committee. So development committee. Finance committee. Above that is public relations. The next one is just getting volunteers. Second to the top is the giving committee. That came up a little bit later. Once we actually had money to give out, we needed a committee to determine how we were going give that money out. 

And then the symposium committee to put together the symposium. And that has since changed to the events committee, as I mentioned. So you have activities, you have actions of what each of those committees are going to do and then maybe most importantly to what everybody else sees are your outcomes. So you have short-term outcomes, you have medium-term outcomes and you have long-term outcomes. So this is just one way that you can kind of organize your thoughts. If you just Google logic model. UW and the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are kind of two of the big organizations that use logic models. So if you Google logic models, you'll find this exact kind of format. And it's really nice to fill in and kind of flesh out your ideas, and when you approach everybody from volunteers to businesses, it kind of shows them exactly what you're planning on doing and exactly how you plan to do it. So after the logic model, I think it got a little more specific to our organization, our next steps. 

I would think to almost organization starting with constructing ideas, putting together some sort of working board of directors or a working group to get it started, putting together a mission statement and then organizing your mission statement into a logic model are kind of the first steps... in my mind. I'm sure there's a lot of variation. But then definite variation were our next steps. So the next thing we did, which we were kind of cautious about but we thought it was important, was to really focus on our PR committee and put together high quality materials. So a lot of organizations, and I think it's perfectly fine depending on the organization, will have a sheet of paper folded in half and that's their brochure. And depending on what the organization is and what they're doing, that can work perfectly well. Our organization, as I mentioned, started off as a group of students so this kind of applies to everybody here. If you go out and ask an organization, another business, to give you $500, $1,000, $5,000, $10,000, they will be a lot more hesitant to do it, we thought at least, if you have a folded over sheet of black and white paper and five students than if you show that you're serious about this, you've invested time, you have good thoughts about it, you have a good board of directors. And so really materials is what we did next. 

That brochure I handed out to you, the inside right now has our four programs on it. What it used to have is it had our board of directors. And we knew that was a big investment to make because our board of directors, half of them turn over every year. And so it's two-year terms. And so we knew that this brochure is only going to last us one year, we're putting a good amount of money into it. But having the people we had on our board at that time, we had the dean of the medical school, we had the health law attorney that I mentioned, we had a school principal, we had business leaders, showing that it wasn't just a group of students with a short-term idea that they're going to give money to and they might see something nice out of it for one year and then it's going to go away. And so we put a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of money into our materials right off the bat. Especially that brochure and then a few other materials as well. To be taken seriously, to clarify our ideas and to build confidence in our organization, both among our volunteers as well as the community in general. And that paid off for us. 

We were able to get pretty good funding right off the bat. We started, as far as funding, we started with organizations that were familiar to us. I had worked a lot with the Wisconsin Medical Society. And so we approached our local medical society, the Dane County Medical Society, and they gave us $5,000 to start off with. And then we approached Physicians Plus. I also, through that organization, knew somebody from Physicians Plus and they gave us another $5,000. And so with that $10,000 to kind of start off we were able to continue printing off more of those brochures. We were able to put together packets to go and meet with other donors. We were able to put on another symposium. We were able to give out a few grants that first year. 

We had a number of other sponsors, but those are really our two big sponsors. I'll hand this around. Or actually I can just put it up here. This is our donor and sponsor card. So this hasn't, having it printed off on a nice thing like this has changed but the actual material on it or the content hasn't changed too much. So you can just look up at the top. So contributors are $10 to $99. Donors $100 to $500. Bronze $500 to $1,000. And then we have sponsor levels as well. 

Kind of a weird shine going on there. You don't really need to see all the other stuff but you can see the top. Maybe you want to see the other stuff. Do it like that. So anyhow, this is what we go around and raise our money with. So it makes it very clear. Originally we had it all on one sheet and it worked out pretty well, but people kind of, everybody's vision kind of goes to the center of the sheet as opposed to the two kind of largest and smallest donor levels. And so this kind of helped people focus in on just three sponsor levels and really see what they were being offered. We think it makes it relatively clear. And so this was a nice way for us to go around and show donors exactly what they'd be getting. 

They'll definitely get all this stuff. They don't have to be questioning what exactly are we going to get out of this. Are we going to get recognition in your program? What are we going to have? So they knew exactly what they'd get and we guaranteed everything on there that they would get that. And that's worked out really nicely and our donors, we have really good relationships with a number of large sponsors that we hope will continue with us for years to come. So once we started building up sponsors, once we had the Dane County Medical Society, once we had Physicians Plus, we were able to really use that momentum going forward. So if you go to whatever business and you don't have any sponsors, it's kind of hard to talk them into being your first sponsor. So that's why we went to somebody familiar. But once we had two familiar heavy hitting sponsors, the Medical Society is well-respected, Physicians Plus is well-respected, we could go to other organizations and use those sponsorships to show them that other organizations take us seriously and they can take us seriously as well. So that's kind of our first steps. Constructing the idea, putting together a working board of directors, putting together a shared mission, creating a logic model, organizing our materials in a professional way and then gaining funding. 

And once we had all those in place then we could go ahead and focus more on building our nonprofit, doing our activities and really making a difference in the community. The next step that we really had to take was to decide which route we wanted to go. Whether we wanted to become a business, a nonprofit, kind of under an umbrella organization like the UW Foundation which is a large nonprofit that supports other nonprofits, things like that. We decided to go the nonprofit route. We thought that being a 501(c)(3) organization along with all the details that go along with that would instill confidence in our donors and sponsors and would allow us to accept donations and sponsorships and deal with them in an independent kind of way. We could decide how we would do that and our decisions would then hopefully instill confidence in those donors and sponsors. We ended up going the independent route rather than under UW. We still have a really good relationship with UW. We bring in a UW student on our board every single year. We hold a lot of our events, our symposium is held over at the Health Science Learning Center, which is kind of on the far west side of campus if anybody ever gets over there. 

And we thought that that independent route would allow us to raise funds in a way that would be very different than if we were under another nonprofit. We thought we'd kind of get lost in the shuffle if we weren't our own organization. I think it worked out well, whether or not that was necessarily true is debatable because we never went the other route, but it's worked out well for us. Some of the unexpected details that we encountered. One was all the filings. There's a lot that goes into becoming a nonprofit. Luckily, we had a good working board of directors that could help us work through that and we had some funds to begin with so we ended up hiring an attorney to help us work through that as well which was very helpful. There's a lot of stuff that goes into becoming a nonprofit and attorneys are obviously very familiar with it. They gave us the latitude to do what we wanted but also the structure to help us put it together. Fundraising, I think we've had success with fundraising. 

We kind of started, our organization started in 2007-2008 which is right when the economy started going down pretty fast. And so fundraising is especially challenging in this economy, especially fundraising grants we've found to be very challenging. We've had more success with approaching businesses. And then I think all the details that go into starting a nonprofit was kind of surprising to us. I think we worked through them very well, but everything from how do you accept donations, how do you work with the IRS, putting together articles of incorporation, filing for 501(c)(3) status. You have a ton of files floating around. How do you organize all your files somehow so people can share them. Creating invoices, accounting for expenses, all that kind of stuff. There's a lot of details involved that we weren't necessarily expecting. So those were kind of some of the surprises. 

Recruiting support, recruiting volunteers, we continue to try to recruit volunteers. Like I said we have over 50 people, but a lot of those people are community members but a lot are still students. I think students make outstanding volunteers, that's how the organization started, but students also have quite a bit of turn over. We're very happy to have students for a year, two years, three years, but not many students are around here for more than about four years. So we always have turnover. We're always looking for new people. We contact individuals certainly. We work with a lot of university deans, university professors. That's how I first had my interactions with the School of Nonprofits. We interact with the community, and now it's a little more structured. 

We have volunteer fairs where we send out emails to a lot of different areas and have people come together and we tell them about our organization. So it's become a little easier now that we have more contacts. But in the beginning it was just kind of reaching out to whoever we could and asking if they had ideas for volunteers. How has the mission changed, I thought I could talk about a little bit. And I don't think the mission has actually changed, and that's sort of been our key to stability and our guidance throughout. And we kind of created our mission so that it was a broad mission and so a lot of different efforts we could do to support that mission. But then again it was specific enough to give us guidance in which initiatives we wanted to do. And so I think our mission, and I don't know if we necessarily thought about this when we were putting it together or we just lucked out, but either way our mission worked out well in that it's broad in a lot of areas and yet specific in its focus. And so while our mission hasn't changed I think a lot of things about it have changed. Our symposium has changed as we get feedback. 

Now we have two sessions over three hours instead of three sessions, and we have an implementation fair. We bring in the community. We've done travel assistance where we bring in people throughout the state to the symposiums. So there's a lot of little things like that that we've done. I mentioned the scholarships that we did in the beginning. The scholarships have kind of been nixed. The original idea was to give actual scholarships like the way you guys think of scholarships for students who are doing good work in the community. Once we started moving with that and planning that there were some questions of whether it would be kind of odd for students to give other students scholarships and whether that could create problems. And so we kind of nixed that idea and changed it over to  travel scholarships so that people could travel to different symposiums, different conferences throughout the country, learn about those ideas and bring them back to their classrooms. Which we thought was a pretty neat idea, something kind of unusual. 

It turns out a lot of the applications were, we got some really good applications but a lot of them were people looking to go on trips and stuff like that. So we kind of nixed that idea. Now our newest one is the impact award. So I think that's kind of getting back to what our scholarships originally were going to be. But not necessarily just students, students can certainly apply, but members throughout the community at any level can apply for those impact awards. So we're pretty excited about that. And then our biggest change, I think, has been our statewide expansion. About one year ago we expanded statewide. Our symposiums have kind of always drawn a statewide audience but all our awards had been more local just within Dane County. And so obviously there's different areas of the state, Milwaukee and more rural communities, that are in desperate need of public health initiatives. 

So we were very excited to do that. And that's been good. Our first year we had about 15 or 20 grant applications within Dane County. We went statewide and I think we had over 70 grant applications last year. So that might have been another surprise. We had a lot more of those coming in but that was all good stuff. So overall I think we're kind of running to the end. So we'll start taking some questions. But I just wanted to kind of recap the things that I thought for me over the last three years have been the most important lessons that I've learned. One I think is managing time, and the working board of directors really helped with that. 

It's really easy, when you're getting into this, if it's an idea you're excited about and it's something you really want to do and you really want to make good, to try to have your hands in every different aspect of it and kind of micro-manage the whole thing. And that's really tempting but I try as much as I can, and sometimes it's difficult, depending on your personality maybe really difficult, to just let other people do stuff. Sometimes they make mistakes but then they learn from them and then you have a supportive person who knows how to do this stuff even better. So I think delegating, not letting this take over your life. And then the next thing I would say is kind of off of that which is finding good leaders. Your friends can be great but maybe your friends aren't the ideal people to help with this. Maybe there's a person who you kind of know who does a lot of leadership things or who has been really great in what they've done to bring into it. So I would say keep an open mind of who you bring in, and getting together a good leadership group to start things off can be a really strong foundation for going forward. Going off of that, having a diverse board, having people who will, not just yes people, people who will be willing to question what you're doing. And it can be really frustrating at times, but we have plenty of board members who say, you're moving too fast or you really don't want to do that. 

And bringing board members with experience who can not just help you as a working board but also have that advisory role and caution you when you're moving too fast or when you could do something a little bit different. So I'd say a diverse board that can give constructive criticism. And then the second to last one is creating sustainability. And that goes not just for your donors and sponsors but also for your board and your volunteers. Because nobody wants to be involved in an organization that's going to be a one hit wonder and be gone the next year. People want an organization that they know when they're gone is going to carry on and the work that they did is going to keep going after they're gone. And the last one again, just to recap, are those first steps. And the for us the first steps that worked were constructing the basic idea, creating a working board of directors, making a shared mission, creating a logic model or a road map or a timeline or something to guide your direction, putting together materials to show others what you're doing and bring others into your project and then gaining funding because just about anything you want to do is probably going to need some level of funding I would say. So that's all I've got. Thank you very much. 

And if there's any questions, I would be more than happy to talk more about anything that I have or anything else. >> We've got some questions down front here, Ben. And I'll hand off the mic to students, and I know they'll be anxious to introduce themselves as well. >> Also while we're doing this I'll pass around the logic model, the sponsor levels and then these are just some of our symposium materials in case people are curious to look through those. >> Hi, Ben. I'm Rachel. I work for a healthcare IT company, and so I'm sort of wondering how the recent healthcare legislation has affected your organization. >> That's a good question. I think my answer isn't very exciting. I would say it hasn't affected our organization much at all. 

One of the things, I don't know whether it will affect it in the future. I think it probably will. For example, in the past we've had talks about insurance coverage, specifically for kids, and I think that will change, I hope that will change. But I think one of the things about the healthcare that I think maybe is going to make it a little slow, the reform bill is very progressive over time. And so just a few weeks ago I think some of them started going into effect and in 2014 a lot more are and I think it's going to extend over I think almost 10 years. And so I think as we go on in the future certainly it will affect us. I would say right now it's certainly affecting public health, but as far as our organization in particular, I would say it hasn't had too much of an effect. But that's a good question. >> Hi, Ben. My name is Monique. 

I was just wondering, you said you had a great diverse board of directors and you said some of the directors you had you were already in contact with. What were some of the troubles you faced when getting your other ones? As far as maybe even the people from the medicine area? >> That's a good question. So I would say it's sort of the same story as with gaining funding. So we started with a board of directors that we were familiar with. Which isn't necessarily ideal because you want people who you're not familiar with and who have diverse opinions. I think we were familiar with people who had diverse opinions so it worked out all right. So the first year we had the dean of the medical school and we were medical students so we had connections with him. We had the director of the UW Preventive Cardiology Program and so we were familiar with him. We had the dean of public health and he worked a lot with the med school so we were familiar with him. We had a principal from the first symposium who had given us really good feedback and had kind of helped work with us through that. 

And she joined our board. And then the attorney and the business woman were kind of just connections that our board already had. And so I think we started off with our connections to create our initial board. We still tried to create a diverse board. We certainly wanted people from education and people from that health side to kind of balance those two areas. And ideally people from a lot of other areas as well. But then the second year of our organization is when we were really able to reach out to other community members. In certain areas of the community we had kind of gained a name. The school districts were certainly familiar with us, and then a lot of the health areas, certainly the insurance companies and the hospitals were familiar with our organization. So we were able to reach out to them and have them kind of connect us with other areas. 

So for example, people from one of the hospitals connected me with Michael Johnson who is the CEO of the Boys and Girls Club. I had already had connections with Superintendent Nerad through the organization. So it was kind of just like through donors and sponsors. Once we had a few that we were familiar with we could use kind of that clout for those organizations to go to others and ask them to join in. Same sort of thing with the board. Once we had good board members and we had a good organization, we could go forward and ask other people to join in. And people were a lot more eager, obviously, that second year than they were that first year when it was kind of an iffy organization. >> Hi, Ben. I'm Matt. So thinking back to your time at even Lawrence, what kind of made you decide you wanted to even start this foundation? Was it just you were laying down one day and you thought of it or had you always wanted to do something like this? >> Kind of a combination. 

I hadn't necessarily always wanted to do something like this certainly. I really enjoyed getting involved in a lot of different groups and leadership opportunities and community organizations while I was at Lawrence. And then when I came to the med school, I got involved in public health and started really enjoying that. I kind of touched on that a little bit at Lawrence but got more involved. And the symposium kind of came out of that. But then the idea to actually start the foundation actually was kind of one day I was sitting around, I don't know if you guys have had this feeling, but you do a big event and you put all this work into it and the event takes place and it's great and the next day you're sitting there and you're kind of bored, you want to do something else. And the entire time you've been doing it you've been like running around like an idiot and all of a sudden you're done and you can finally relax and all you want to do is like kind of get doing something else again. So it was kind of like that. I was kind of stir crazy sitting around thinking of what I wanted to do. And I really enjoyed the symposium. 

And people were already in line to do it the next year. We already had directors in line to do another symposium. I was going to totally be hands off, hand it off and be done with it. And it kind of occurred to me, just the idea to continue the symposium and give grants was really all that occurred to me because I wanted to make it more sustainable. So I would say it's kind of a combination. I always enjoyed the leadership things, I always enjoyed community involvement and working with other groups of people. But the actual idea for the foundation was just kind of sitting around and it came to me. Yeah? >> Hi, Ben. Have talks of expansion been discussed within the board? And if so, are there particular areas that you think would be more successful or maybe hot spots? >> You mean geographic expansion? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, it's absolutely been discussed. 

The statewide expansion was pretty big for us. And so I think we're still working on that for the time being. Reaching out to different communities, so we started off the first symposium was, I don't have the exact numbers, but I'd say something like 90% of people were from Dane County. And then we had a few from the outlying counties. And the second year probably 80% of people were from Dane County, maybe 10% from the outlying counties, then there were little dots of people from all over the state. A couple from like Illinois, maybe one from Minnesota, which we were kind of excited about those people. And then the third year was when we actually really reached out to these different communities. We talked to superintendents around the state. We talked to teachers around the state. We sent postcards around the state. 

We sent emails around the state. We talked to a lot of statewide organizations like teacher unions, things like that. And then we got a much larger percentage from around the state. But I think continuing to work with this statewide audience is really going to be our focus right now. As far as further expansion to other states or regions, yeah, I'd be pretty excited about that. I think it will be long after I'm gone, but I'd like to see that happen eventually. >> I've got a couple questions, Ben. One, just to clarify, don't have any paid staff yet, right? >> Right, yeah. I should have mentioned that. Thank you. 

We don't have any paid staff right now. We contract with a couple different organizations. So as I mentioned, we hired an attorney or a law firm to do our original 501(c)(3) work, and occasionally when we need something done from that standpoint we go back to them. So we certainly pay them a reduced rate but we pay them for that work. We work with a design firm. We kind of have some in-house design that we do through graphic design students and students who have interest in that area, web design, things like that. But a lot of our design is done by this design firm which is Chrysalis Design. And then, so for example they designed our website which may reappear. So like they designed our website but then our symposium page was designed by students. So sometimes, which is kind of bare right now because there's not a symposium coming up, but some sites within the website are more designed by the students. 

It's been a really good experience for those students because they can work with those web design companies and say we want this over here, this over here and then the companies do that and they can kind of get experience like that. So we pay the attorney, we pay the web design, we pay like caterers for our events and stuff like that, but as far as the volunteers, the students and the community members who work for our organization, there are no paid volunteers at this point. >> But a significant amount of work that comes from those volunteers which is exactly why I wanted you to express that because, certainly, you're a very viable nonprofit providing great service but really all volunteer labor. >> Right. >> I have a follow up question, unrelated but Rachel's question actually made me think of it. One of the challenges that nonprofits have is really expressing, articulating, their niche, their brand if you will. So you may have multiple organizations in a community that have breast cancer or breast cancer recovery in their name, but being able to articulate what you do and why it's different and then, of course, getting supporters as a result of that, how have you managed that? >> I was actually thinking that when you mentioned your idea to kind of network, when you mentioned your idea to network nonprofits. So one of the other first things, there's a lot of details obviously I left out, but one of the things we did is we looked up all the nonprofits in Madison and Dane County. And you can look up 501(c)(3) records and stuff like that, but there's all kinds of different websites and they all list all sorts of different nonprofits. So it's actually quite a job to look up all these different nonprofits. 

And we saw tons of education nonprofits, a lot of health nonprofits but not too many that brought those two ideas together. And that was kind of the niche that we had. And I think kind of expanding on that niche was your previous question that we were an all volunteer organization. We were an organization started by medical students, exclusively medical students at that time. At this point, we have both community members, as I mentioned, and students from I think right now it's like 12 different areas of campus, nonprofits, journalism, business, economics, all these different areas. So those were kind of the different niches that we were able to fill, and that's how we were able to, one of the main ways that we were able to get donations and sponsorships. >> Great. I know the students join me in thanking you for your time. We know you're very busy and very accomplished. >> Thank you. 

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