Public Meeting Success!

Note: This was supposed to be posted yesterday, but for some reason it didn't go through.

Our work this week
required brain food
like donuts and chai.

This afternoon, the Council had a public meeting to review the Council's proposed activities and interim recommendations to the President. The main outcome of the meeting was for the Council to come to consensus on the recommendation options and proposed next steps. This took a lot of behind-the-scenes work, and the public conference call was the culmination of a great deal of work on our end for the past month or so.

The Council consists of twenty-six CEOs and high-profile representatives of youth-serving organizations, foundations, corporations, universities, and more. These are all incredibly brilliant individuals and they bring with them smart staff members as well. Together, we had to work together across a variety of locations across the US and the world over the past few weeks to move from a laundry list of brainstormed ideas to big idea generation to consolidated work streams to a cohesive holistic recommendation. It took many conference calls, strings of emails, and negotiation to find order from apparent chaos and frame a range of ideas into something that really will drive the critical goal of "all citizens, all sectors, working together."

Here's a link to the document I created to share with the public before the conference call. Even with its lack of extreme detail, it demonstrates how much progress the Council has made over the past few weeks. Hopefully it'll give you a taste of what the Council aims to do, pending White House authorization. The public meeting went without a hitch, and a full consensus of the Council approved the direction of our drafted interim recommendations to the President. Twenty-six sets of strong and valid opinions have found one voice in these interim recommendations.