[MUSIC] A peak performance. My husband and I are blessed to have two beautiful children, Shamus who is 16 and Meredith who is 14. Shamus is a young man with special needs, he's in the autistic spectrum, and we made the very difficult decision just before his 12th birthday, to put him into a group home. We were blessed to get that placement, and low and behold there were 1,500 people on a wait list to get placement as well, and there continues to be. So armed with my education and creativity, I set forth to try to help out the people in our community to help them get their loved ones placed as well. And I facilitated a group through that exercise and they're still working on that big goal today. My role as a facilitator. When I approached this group of parents and siblings who had loved ones that were on the waiting list, they had been kind of floundering for a while. And I was really intrigued by this because, again, I had this new skill set, and I was curious to see how big of a goal could I take on, could we take on, and move the group towards action with creative problem solving. At first the groups was really reluctant. They had had a couple facilitators come in and try to help them in the past, and they just hadn't moved to action. So I went in and offered to do the work pro bono, and the first time I went in, the president stood me up, and secondly time he blatantly said no, and the third time he agreed. So we brought the group together, and I asked them, what is your vision here? And they said, vision? We don't have a vision. And I said, okay. It would be great if what? And they said, it would be great if we got all 1,500 people off the waiting list. So I thought, okay, that's big, but we can break this down. We can break this down into different challenge statements. How to get the folks off the waiting list, how to lobby our governor, how to get resources, people, and money to move this action forward. So we got to that clarification stage, and already you could feel that the people started to feel empowered, because now they understood what the individual challenges were with this overarching vision. Then we moved in to ideation. We came up with a myriad of ideas for each one of those challenges. The group brought about consensus and which ideas they wanted to move forward, we went into the development stage, they formulated their solution, and then I encouraged them as a facilitator to take a look at what they liked about their solution, the positives, the potentials, what it might lead to, what were some of their concerns, and how they might overcome those concerns. And again, the group just felt more, and more empowered. Then we moved towards implementation, and the group came together and decided who was going to do what actions, by when, and what resources were needed. And you could just see the look in their face as if oh my gosh, we have a plan. We really could accomplish this huge goal. What were the results? When you move towards a huge vision like this, it's a marathon, it's not a 5K. So, certainly there have been incremental successes along the way that we celebrate all the time. Have we gotten all 1,500 people off the wait list, no. Does the governor know who this group is? Yes. Does he call the President by her first name? Absolutely. Have we rallied folks from all across the state to come together on this common goal? Yes. And are we ultimately going to get all 1,500 people off that wait list? I believe so. And when they fall short, they can go back to their creative problem solving model and look at each one of those challenges, come up with ideas to help their solutions, and to move them forward. [MUSIC]