SESSIONS

11:00am Essential Strategies for Becoming or Enhancing Your Skills as an Emerging Leader

Al Coleman, Jr.
This comprehensive session will teach you the skills needed to develop or enhance your skills as an Emerging Leader. Gain insights to transform into a highly confident, high performing leader through actionable and easily applicable steps. Learn the rules of the new economy and understand the new currency. Find out why you need a board of directors and how to assemble your board. Explore the self-assessment tools and process that all successful Emerging Leaders use, and discuss how to deploy those tools to achieve exceptional results in a competitive environment.

11:00am Race & Privilege
        
Rinal Ray                     Kelly Rowan
Explore race and privilege from different lenses — the personal, professional and community. This session will mold to your conversation preferences, from one-on-one to larger circle dialogues. The session will move from foundational definitions and motivations, quickly to intentional brainstorming for steps moving forward. We assume attendees will have some experience talking about race and privilege, and are comfortable exploring our shared stake in confronting race and privilege.

11:00am The Minnesota Brand

Taylor Larson
This interactive workshop is designed to discover the Minnesota Brand and teach you how to discover your brand or your organization’s brand. Talk about what you think MN is known for? What you want it to be known for? What makes our state unique? The outcomes of this session may be used in continuing conversations around MN and the role of the young professional. Come learn a new skill and contribute to civic conversation!

11:00am Minnesota Rising 101
         
Diane Tran                                Jenny Hegland
This combined large group session introduces Minnesota Rising’s past and current activities in order to provide background for the Minnesota Rising and Cascading Conversation tracks of the Un/Conference. Want to learn more about the strategic intentions for Minnesota Rising’s efforts and help brainstorm and point the direction for its future? We hope you’ll join us during this collaborative design session figure out how we build a network for what’s next in order to make our marks on Minnesota!

12:00pm Get the Most for Your Giving

Robyn Schein
With a limited budget and constraints on your resources, how do you ensure that your giving is meaningful and strategic? Through a facilitated conversation, learn to set goals and priorities for your charitable giving. This session will require you to consider the values drive your involvement in the community and focus on the impact you want to make. All participants will leave with a simple plan to guide your giving.

12:00pm Civic Entrepreneurs and Today’s Politics- To Change the Rules We Must Play the Game

Andy Cook
Our community is full of enthusiastic, eager people with great ideas to improve our community. Many of us are fed up with partisan politics and an inability in St. Paul and in Washington to craft meaningful public policy solutions. We have the ideas, the energy and the desire! But how do we take that from idea to reality? How do we overcome politics and make progress?

12:00pm Strategic Communication Through Improv
           
Brandon Boat                               Tane S. Danger
Improvisational theater demands performers hone acute listening skills, think on their feet, and can move a story forward collectively. The same skills are equally valuable off stage, in the conference room, the office, or a on a team project. In this session you’ll learn and try out specific exercises improvers use to hone these skills. We’ll work in small groups to practice the concepts of “Yes and…”, group story telling, and heightening ideas. Be prepared to move around, engage with fellow conference-goers, and have a good time. You’ll leave with new ways of thinking about communication and new confidence to put it into practice.

12:00pm Collaboration and Next Practices: Sharing Power And Responsibility Across a Generation
                
Jenny Johnson                                Mike Marcotte
Have you heard of the United Way Emerging Leaders, PROPEL, or Connect? What about Citizens League Emerging Leaders, the Fargo Moorhead Young Professionals Network, or Fuel Rochester? There are dozens of groups focused on reaching out to young professionals statewide, including Minnesota Rising’s 2011 Un/Conference Network Partners. This session, targeted at leaders of emerging leader groups, will provide a forum for young professional organizations’ leadership to network and share their stories, discuss possible future collaborative efforts, highlight lessons learned for improving organizational programming and practices, and reflect on the collective impact of these individual organizations on the future of Minnesota.

12:00pm Framing Powerful Questions: The Minnesota Rising Cascading Conversations Tour

Jenny Hegland
People move in the direction of their questions and conversations. As young leaders, how can we be sure to move in the right direction? By learning how to frame powerful, open questions, we can lead with the intention to be curious, strategic, and innovative in our own lives and in the life of our state. Over the next two years, the Minnesota Rising Cascading Conversations Tour will aim to pose intentional questions to the emerging generation which can give rise to increased trust and a shared vision. Join us in this session to help design how we can engage with young people across this state and also to draft the questions for the beta launch of the Cascading Conversations Tour, kicking off at 3:00pm at the Minnesota Rising 2011 Un/Conference!

2:00pm A Sense of Urgency: Closing the Achievement Gap—The civil rights issue of our time.

Dan Wick
Minnesota has one of the largest achievement gaps in the nation among low-income and minority students. We’re leaving thousands of children by the roadside –even as we tout the excellence of our educational system- while headed to an uncertain future. But we can (and must) change the tides. Minnesota’s success depends on it: Better educated communities mean a better workforce, a better business climate, and a better future for us all. In this session, you’ll get the must know facts about the achievement gap and discuss how we can contribute to a solution as emerging leaders. This session also will draw on the collective knowledge of attendees to create intellectual capital for designing future innovative efforts and provide a connection point for people interested in doing further work towards this vital issue.

2:00pm How to Start a Corporation (For Profit or Not)

Jeffrey Miller
Have a great idea, but not sure how to turn it into a profitable business or sustainable non-profit? Join Jeffrey Miller as we highlight the various components required to start any corporation, whether for profit, or not. Topics covered to include: the 9 key aspects of any business model, what is customer development, the A/B/C’s of for-profit leadership and the B/C/D’s of the non-profit world, cashflow, & legal considerations. There will be a time for Q/A as well.

2:00pm Personal Economic Sanity

Jared Rendell
An interactive, relevant to our age and stage, conversation about living with more freedom, wisdom, and even generosity when it comes to our money.  Through worksheets, team work, and large group conversation, we’ll learn from each other’s experience and come away with usable tools and action steps. These will help us to worry less about this part of life, often the part that people have the most anxiety around. This will not be a sales pitch for a financial product not will it be in any way boring.

2:00pm Movement-Building: The Architects of What We Might Create

Diane Tran
As young Minnesotans, we can no longer wait for some appointed time to reach out and serve our communities. The tough problems we face as a state will not be solved with short-sightedness and polarization. Today’s problems will only grow increasingly complex as we age, and we have learned in our short time that change takes a long time. That’s why we need to begin the work now. Join this open space session to discuss current movements, highlight their characteristics and strengths, and to apply those learnings to revealing and crafting the strategy and infrastructure for Minnesota Rising’s work over the next two years. Emerging leaders are poised to be the next greatest generation; in this session, help us brainstorm how Minnesota Rising, and you, can make this our ultimate legacy!

2:00pm The Non-Usual Suspects: How Can Everyone Be a Changemaker?
          
Morea Steinhauer              Patwin Lawrence
With massive numbers of Baby Boomers retiring, Minnesota’s workforce and demographics will look dramatically different in just a few short years. With the societal challenges and political gridlock our state faces, we will need everyone to be an active citizen and a changemaker. How, though, can we expand the conversation beyond those who are already engaged? In this session, learn about how two emerging leader groups – the FM League and Torch Community – engage in non-traditional tactics to bring new folks into the fold, share your own strategies for successful outreach, and brainstorm with other emerging leaders about where and how to surface leadership for a stronger Minnesota.