Hi everyone and welcome. We're just going to wait one minute to make sure that everyone joins the webinar and then we will go ahead and get started. Okay, it looks like things have slowed down for now, so we will go ahead and get started today with our new member webinar. Just a couple quick things about housekeeping before we do some introductions and dive into the agenda. All of our participants are muted during the webinar. You can use the Q&A to ask questions throughout the presentation. You can also use the chat functionality. We also will have a Q&A portion at the end, but feel free to ask questions along the way as well. Just a little bit about who we have with us here today, and I'll let them come off of mute and introduce themselves briefly. For those of you who don't know Aisha and Kelsey, they are great volunteers of NAPFA. They both sit on the membership committee, but they actually also have dual roles within NAPFA, Aisha on the Genesis Committee and then Kelsey on the NEMA Region Board. So Aisha, you want to introduce yourself real quick? Yeah, like Nikki said, I'm Aisha Bayliss, so I do membership for NAPFA Genesis, and I'm currently a Partner and Chief Compliance Officer at Elwood and Gadswill Advisory Group. Thanks, Aisha. Kelsey, how about you? My name is Kelsey. I've been a member of NAPFA since around 2018. I'm on the NEMA Board, and I'm the Membership Committee Chair, and I'm from the Boston area. Thank you, Kelsey and Aisha. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Nikki Peluzzi. I serve as the Senior Director of Member Services and Experience here at NAPFA, and then my colleague Heidi Tennant will also be joining us. She is the Senior Coordinator of Professional Development and Membership. So we're happy to have you today. Welcome to NAPFA, and we're going to talk a little bit about how you can get involved right away, and just some information about our organization. So today's topics include an introduction to NAPFA. We will keep that short and sweet, but if you have any questions, feel free to ask them. Heidi will then go through your CE requirements. We know that this only applies to NAPFA Registered Financial Advisors, but we also know that we are coming up on a CE deadline of December 31st of this year, and that many of you may have questions about how to complete that requirement. We'll also talk about how to learn new skills through NAPFA, how to build your network, which is really important, and then as I mentioned at the end, we'll just do some Q&A. So just a quick introduction to NAPFA. We'll keep it short. NAPFA was founded in 1983, so it is our 40th birthday this year. We've been celebrating through social media posts, talking about the history of the organization, and at both of our conferences, one of which is just in two weeks here in Louisville, which we're really excited about. It is a professional association to over 4,600 fee-only financial planners, and our mission is that we're an engaged community of fee-only fiduciary financial planners providing education, professional connections, business development resources, and advocacy, all in support of our members' success. So just a little bit about our organizational structure, and I have a graphic on the next slide that will put it into context a bit. At the national level, we have a board of directors, it's really their job to set the strategic direction for the organization and make sure that we stick to it. Committees, task forces, and working groups are all under the board of directors. They're really living into the values of our strategic plan and making sure that all the work that the board has directed us to do is getting executed on, so a really important group of volunteers, and then NAPFA has a professional staff as well. Heidi and I are members of that group, and our job is really to make sure that the work that all of the above volunteers are doing is executed and done in a timely manner. We also have a regional structure at NAPFA, so Kelsey mentioned that she's part of the NEMA board, which is Northeast Mid-Atlantic. We also have a Midwest board, South and West. Each of our region boards has a board of directors, and they're really tasked with making sure that they're providing member engagement opportunities at the local and regional level, and sometimes those groups also have committees and task forces underneath them to help them do things like build out their symposium events or to onboard new members. This org chart, it's brand new. We just started our fiscal year in September, so it's newly updated, and you can see there sort of what the layout looks like from a volunteer and staff perspective at NAPFA. On the left-hand side, you'll see the board of directors who I've mentioned. You'll see the region liaisons. We've included the leaders of each of those groups instead of all of them because it would take up the whole slide otherwise. The NAPFA staff on the right, and then underneath there, you'll see all of our committees, so as you can see, there's a lot of work that's being done at NAPFA in a lot of different areas with many volunteers behind all of those projects and programs, and then we also have some outsourced services for our advisor magazine, some of our exhibits and sponsorships, etc. So that's really just a little bit about the organization. We will send this information out after this call, so you'll have it if you ever want to take a look at that org chart, see if you know anybody on it, see if there's a place that you'd like to volunteer. You can definitely do that, but now we're going to go into CE requirements, so I'm going to turn things over to Heidi. Oops, sorry, I was muted. Do you see my important CE information screen, Nikki? Yes. Okay. As Nikki mentioned, CE requirements are for NAPFER registered financial advisors only. The current two-year cycle runs from January 1st of last year through December 31st of this year. It's always the same cycle for all members if you want to set some reminders for yourself. And we know you've been pursuing education opportunities all along and certainly want to recognize that. So you can report any appropriate courses for NAPFER CEs that you've taken since the start of the two-year CE cycle. Therefore, since January 1st of last year, regardless of when you joined NAPFER. A full cycle requires 60 CEs with at least 30 coming from live or recorded programs offered by or accepted by NAPFER or NAPFER-approved sources, including an approved 2C ethics course. But of course, you have a prorated total if you joined between January and June of this year, that's 30 CEs, all from approved sources, including ethics. And if you joined since July, your prorated total is 15 CEs, including ethics. The approved sources are listed in the NAPFER CE guidelines I'll show you. And if you'd like a different course to be considered for CEs or approved CEs, send me complete information and we'll give it a look. You can earn CEs through attending a NAPFER local group. These are groups based on location, headed by volunteer leaders, and they meet in person or virtually for education and networking. And if you're interested in getting involved in NAPFER, that's a great way to start out as a local group leader or assistant leader or committee member. A virtual mixed group may be for you if you want to learn more about specific issues or network with like-minded practitioners nationwide. NAPFER can help you put together a mixed group by finding members with similar interests, challenges, positions, or firms as you. Then these virtual meetings can be eligible for CEs. You're gonna hear more about webinars, symposia, and conferences later. Many of these live NAPFER programs, including entire conference proceedings, are recorded and can be viewed on demand, some for free in NAPFER's Learning Center, which I'll show you in a minute. For the 2024-2025 CE cycle, when you have the full 60 CE requirement, you'll be able to report CEs from a wider range of sources and activities and include subjects that CFP doesn't accept, but NAPFER does, like marketing, practice management, personal development, and software. These CEs can come from activities other than programs as well, including eight CEs each from writing articles, presenting, reading trade journals with quizzes, and you can even perform pro bono work for up to four CEs per cycle, including through our own NAPFER Foundation. When you attend a program offered by NAPFER, we record the NAPFER CEs you earned in your online record in the Learning Center, which we'll look at next, and we report to CFP any CEs you earned there and any enrolled agent CEs to the IRS as well. We'll offer certificates of completion for these programs that you can always find in your Learning Center record. NAPFER's conference programs and some of our webinars offer NASBA CEs as well, for those of you involved in accounting, which we'll show on the certificates, but since NASBA requirements vary by state, you'll need to self-report those NAPFER does not do NASBA CEs for you. Okay, on the NAPFA website, you can find CE information here under CE guidelines. We have the guidelines, the basic overview, and then links that take you to FAQs and the Learning Center. This is NAPFA's Learning Center. I'm logged in as Cindy Gans, who most of you work with in setting up your membership. The calendar here shows you upcoming programs you may register for or are already registered for. Once you register for a course, you'll receive an email with an attachment to save it to your calendar, and you can always launch a program from here once you're registered. My courses will take you to everything you are registered for, as well as your purchases and past programs. The colored circles at the right of each course show you your status within that course, and you can stop watching a course at any time and pick up where you left off. Any handouts for a program can be found within a course under the Courses tab, and the videos are there as well. And you'll have access to this after you complete a session for as long as the course doesn't expire. Okay, NAPFA CEs are logged for you automatically when you finish viewing. Then the CFPC option, if there is one, will become available. And if you pass the quiz, we report those for you weekly. Your education history is like your transcript. It shows you everything that you completed. And if you took a course through NAPFA, you can download a certificate here. And this little book icon is important. That's your CE summary report. Cindy has 15 CEs required. She's reported six to date. That includes ethics. She's not done. She still needs to reach 15. Be sure when you're self-reporting a CE, again, everything you learned through NAPFA is going to be logged for you. You'll go to self-report. All of the study types are here. Your first cycle, again, you're going to be using ethics and classroom web. Please put your ethics course under ethics. That's what triggers it to show as complete on the summary report. All right. Under classroom web, you're going to do a new request, enter basic information. You can upload your supporting documentation here. So if you're looking at a certificate or a report while you're reporting, go ahead and upload it. That way, if you're chosen for the CE audit in January of the year following the CE cycle close, all of your certificates will already be there. Okay. Please check out the Learning Center soon and make a plan to be done well ahead of time. December 31st, we'll be here before you know it. And feel free to reach out to me. I'm on contact us under the NAPFA list. Thanks. Thank you so much, Heidi. If you unshare your screen, I'll go back to where I was in the PowerPoint. It looks like it's not going to let me share mine until you stop sharing. It's not letting me. Here we go. All right, cool. Just a quick technical difficulty. You got to have at least one of those. Okay, so now we're going to talk a little bit about how to learn new skills through NAPFA. One of the things I'm going to talk about here, and again, this only applies to if you are a NAPFA registered financial advisor, is how to talk about or how to fill out your find an advisor profile. Rich Fate here, one of our longtime volunteers, has a great profile that's filled out completely, which is why I always pick on him and use his as the example here. Just a couple of things on this that I can help you with as you look at your profile. So when you're looking at that expertise area, which is up here, you have many options to choose from. You can only pick six client markets or areas of practice. This is because you can't be an expert in everything. So if you want to pick the ones that you most want consumers to see or the things that you feel like you specialize in the most, that's what I would do. You can go in and change those at any time. And the membership committee from time to time does look at these to make sure they're still the right selections for most of our advisors. Designations. So you can see that Rich is a CFP and an EA. You can add all of your designations to your profile as well. If you ever feel like there's something that is not there that you want added, just let us know and we will go ahead and add it for you. Make sure that you have all of the addresses. You can have a few of them added in here so people know where to find you. You can see here that Rich also has a picture and a logo. That's important. With so many different profiles to choose from, consumers definitely are not going to pick one where things are not fully filled out. You can see that he also has his email address linked here and his website link as well. The website link is an additional cost of $125, but it's a one time cost to add that to your site. Other things on here that are important. Additional profile information. So that's really the place where you can enter information about other groups you're affiliated with, what you do in your personal life. So family hobbies, etc. Social media handles, blogs, publications you contribute to. Anything that's interesting information that will help consumers connect with you. The planning specialty is up here. That's really where you can put information about your approach to financial planning and your individual experience and approach to working with clients. So I would say really the important piece here is that you fill it out completely. If you ever have any questions about this, you can contact us at headquarters and we're happy to work with you to make sure that it gets figured out. Just a couple more tips here. For the additional profile information block that I just showed you in the planning specialties, you can use up to 2000 characters, including spaces and code. We recommend that you first put your information into Word and then cut and paste it into your Find an Advisor profile to avoid formatting issues. If you hit update and then you see that your information has not updated, do not worry. It can take up to 24 hours to update. It usually only takes about four, but just be patient with the site and you will see those updates happen. If you paid for a web link, which I already said, you'll see the link to your firm's website on the side of your profile. If you haven't purchased it, you can contact membership at NAPFA.org. I will say that most of our consumers at this point use Find an Advisor as one tool of many. They generally don't come to Find an Advisor, see you and immediately give you a call. They're going to go out and look at your website, any online profiles you have. So just make sure that all the information you have out on the Internet is consistent and up to date. I think that's really important. As a NAPFA registered financial advisor or an associate, you receive a complimentary basic profile on feelonlynetwork.com, which is a partner of NAPFA. We are not merged with them. We do not own them, but we are partners. If you have information, if you want more information on this profile or you want to upgrade to a premium profile, which you get a discount on as a NAPFA member, contact Alan Slider. You can see his email address there. It's alan at feelonlynetwork.com. He's really great. He's a good resource in general to talk to you about websites and SEO. So I would recommend reaching out to Alan just to have a conversation. Even if you have a basic profile, he's just a good person to know. And then you can obviously use the NAPFA logo in all of your marketing and promotions as a NAPFA member. And you can see right here in this graphic where you can go on our website to get that information. You will have to be signed in in order to see it because we don't want everybody to just use our logos, even if they're not members. So now we're going to talk a little bit about other areas where you can learn as a NAPFA member. So we skipped right over virtual learning. Virtual learning is a great way for you to get involved at NAPFA. Obviously, you can't be at a conference all of the time and some people just don't have the time, resource or desire to attend an in-person experience. But webinars are a great way to connect with speakers on topics that help you better serve clients and run your practice. NAPFA offers at least one free webinar a month as a member benefit and offers other webinars for a fee. You saw Heidi show you a little bit of the NAPFA Learning Center. You can find tons of recorded webinars in there. In conjunction with Marie Swift of Impact Communications, we also host a monthly podcast called NAPFA Nation, which is available on our website. And then I'm actually going to turn it over to Aisha to just tell us a little bit about her real life experience with our virtual learning and some of the things that she's maybe found value in as a member. Yeah, I mean, I planned webinars for a while as part of the webinar committee and then as part of Genesis, but also just really love attending them. I think one of the most recent ones that we just did was with Michael Kitsis on behavioral finance. It was really interesting. I mean, they cover a variety of topics, insurance, behavioral finance, investments. It's really, really great to to get some CE from the comfort of your home or desk or wherever you're at. So I personally like them a lot. Thank you, Aisha. So we also do have some upcoming events in person, too, and I wanted to mention those. I think that people who attend conferences often say that's one of the best benefits that NAPFA has to offer, both from an educational standpoint and then also from a networking and community perspective. So we have two upcoming. Our fall conference is just around the corner here, October 18th through 21st. It's going to be in Louisville, Kentucky, which is an easy drive for a lot of people in the country. And then we're going to be in Fort Worth, Texas in the spring. You can see the dates there, May 8th through 11th. So while it might be a little bit late for you to think about attending the Louisville conference, if you're a new member and conference experiences are something that you're interested in, I would start to plan for the May conference. I think it's going to be great. There's also many scholarships that are made available to our members to attend and get some assistance to attend these conferences. So if cost is something that you're worried about or concerned about, you know, there are always opportunities for you to apply for scholarships and attend that way. And I'm also going to turn it over to Aisha to just talk a little bit about conference experiences and the kind of things she gets out of her conference attendance. Yeah, I can't, I truly can't say enough good things about conferences. They're really incredible. I can honestly say I've never had a bad conference experience with NAPFA, and I've been going for years. They really let you escape kind of the daily monotonous routine that you have while still kind of being centered on growing professionally. So with that, there's always a variety of different sessions to attend. And I think in my experience, I usually have a hard time picking between the sessions because they're also fascinating. So it's definitely a good problem to have. And then even as an introvert, I would say the networking is great. I've met so many new people that have just become really good friends over the years. We always look forward to seeing each other at conferences and catching up. There's just truly nothing like being in a room of like-minded, friendly advisors. Everyone at NAPFA is always approachable and friendly, and it's just a wonderful experience to be at a conference with all those people. So I always return from them with new ideas, new approaches. And I always find myself being more effective, more efficient, and just come back feeling refreshed and excited, which is really the best part. Thanks, Aisha. So that was a ringing recommendation for our conferences. Thank you. And like I said, I know that October 18th is right around the corner, but you have plenty of time to make a plan for our May conference, and we would love to see you there. So the next thing we're going to talk about is how to build your network within NAPFA as a NAPFA member. And I know that community is above and beyond the number one thing that NAPFA members tell me they love about our association. So I think it's really important for you as new members to consider this from the get-go. And we're happy that you're here so we can give you a couple of tips and tricks for how to best do that. So in addition to the year-round learning opportunities that we have that I just mentioned, we also have year-round communities, because we know that conference and events are not the only time for you to do networking and build relationships. There's a desire in our community to do that year-round. So I'm just going to go over quickly what a couple of these are, and then I'm going to let our volunteers speak a little bit about their actual experience with some of these things. So our open forum is a place that you can go to ask any financial planning or any question, really, that you want. It's a discussion forum that everyone is a part of within NAPFA, so it's 4,600 people strong. I will tell you that I have worked in a lot of associations and I have never seen a discussion forum that's quite as active as the open forum. You will always get an answer to your question, a recommendation to solve your problem, or a private message giving you support when you post out on the open forum. So I would suggest that you do that. It's a really good, easy first step as a new member to just go out there, not even pose a question, but just read through it and see what other people are talking about and see if you have a place that you can contribute. NAPFA Genesis is our group of young planners who are 33 and under. Aisha is a part of that group. It's a great group. They do a lot of programming, a lot of work on career pathing and soft skills, which I don't love that term, but I haven't thought of another one yet, so we'll continue to use it. It's a really tight-knit community and a good place to go if you fit in that age bracket. Our diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative is very important to us here at NAPFA. DEI is one of our strategic pillars. We only have three, and this is one of them. So for us, it's important for us to equip our NAPFA members with tools and resources and safe spaces for conversations about how to actually implement DEI work in their firms or in their communities. They do webinar programming. They do live conversation circles, conference programming. They give out scholarships. They have a DEI training and certificate program and a new set of case studies that we just released from firms that have done a really good job of implementing DEI, so lots of work around that that you can go out and take a look at on our website. And then our women's initiative has been around for a really long time. We're trying to make progress with women in the profession. It's a great group. Again, they do some of the same work that the DEI initiative does. They give out scholarships to students. They have a mentorship program. They do conversation circles, webinars. They have a conference reception, an active Facebook community, just a lot of really great ways for you to get involved in NAPFA based on your interests. So I'm going to go back to the open forum just briefly and let Kelsey talk a little bit about her experience with the open forum and any tips that she has for using it successfully. Yeah, so the open forum has been a really good resource for me, especially I think I find it the most useful coming from a really small firm where there's only me and three other people working here. Just when I have like a very specific question or I want to bounce an idea off of people, it's great. You can just go in there and like Nikki said, you'll always get an answer to your question. Or you can also search and you'll find that like there's probably at least one other person that's asked a similar question. And you can go in the history and kind of see what people have responded to that. I try to go in there at least a couple times a week, but you can also sign up to get emails that summarize, you know, what happened the previous day in the forum and you can kind of scan that and see if there's anything that interests you. It's also a great place, especially if you're looking for, like, a local recommendation for an estate planning attorney, or a tax preparer, or especially if you're looking for someone that specializes in a specific type of client, good place to get referrals that you can pass along to your clients. Thanks, Kelsey. And since Asia's here, partly on behalf of Napa Genesis, I'll let her talk a little bit more about what they've been up to. Yeah, so we do a lot of things that are really targeted for the younger planners, like Nikki said, 33 and under. So we do a lot of different scholarships for conferences and CFP exams. And we do webinars and conversation circles and mixed groups that are really, the topics really center around those that are more relevant for our younger planners. So it's a good thing to be involved. And if you're 33 and under, you get a lot of great information. And then we also have our own kind of community in that NAPFA Engage area. And kind of like Kelsey said, we post questions in there. I think I got a good number of responses to the last question I posed about just like employee benefits for younger planners. So that was really, yeah, it's a really helpful place to find information. Thank you, Asia. So those are our year-round communities, but NAPFA has a number of additional ways to connect. And again, we're going to all tag team this one. I know Heidi already talked a little bit about mixed groups. But I'll just give you a little bit more information on how the groups are actually created. So these groups are usually up to 10 advisors who can meet virtually and in person. They are formed based on a shared business issue or an area of focus. I always refer to them as like your personal board of directors. So if you're someone who really wants to go really deep on an issue with a trusted group of other advisors, I would say that this is the way that you should go. The groups do meet virtually really any way that you want to do it. So the way that it works is that NAPFA will help you to facilitate and start the group. So we do that by asking you to fill out a form, which I know Heidi linked to in the chat, and tell us, you know, what kind of group you're looking to start and, you know, how many, what kind of people you're looking to have join your group. And from there, we promote that out to our full membership. So you have the power of 4,600 other advisors. Once those people reply and say, hey, I'd like to be a part of that group, we help you to decide and put together the right people in that group. And then from there, you really decide how you want to run the group. You can meet virtually every month, you can meet once a quarter, you can meet for an hour, for two hours. Some of our groups have been together so long that they go on vacation together, they have retreats, they meet in person, they meet at conference. So there are lots of ways to run your mixed group. But I know it's a really good way to build deep, meaningful friendships, and then also to improve your business. And Kelsey, I'm going to let you talk about any other experiences with mixed groups that you've had. Yeah, that's, I'd say you pretty much covered all the big things that I was going to say. But I, I've been part of a couple of mixed groups over the years. And I think the thing that kind of differentiates them from maybe some of the conversation circles or the bigger webinars are that you're just meeting with the same people regularly, you know, usually monthly. So you get to know one another. And usually, in most cases, we're kind of just talking about whatever's on our mind that day that we meet. And because we're all similar, either like similar sizes or fee structures or focuses, it's just nice to see like what problems, you know, other people have going on. Like, if I have a client meeting, and I have a particular situation that I'm trying to work through, it's nice to just be able to bring that to the study group and say, you know, what do you guys think of this situation? What would you do? And just have like a small group of people to bounce ideas off of. So I find them to be really valuable. Thanks, Kelsey. Another way that you can get involved more on a regional or local level are through our local groups. So NEPA has 50 plus local groups that are all over the country. It's a great way for you to connect with the only financial planners in your area. Many local groups offer CE credit. All of our local groups operate a little bit differently depending on the needs of their constituents. So we have some groups that meet a couple times a year for a half a day. We have some groups that meet, you know, maybe monthly for a couple hours, some meet in the morning, some meet in the afternoon. You can take a look on our website to see what local groups we have in your area. Some of our groups are still operating in a hybrid capacity post-pandemic. So sometimes they meet virtually, sometimes they meet in person. Every group is a little bit different. If you do not see a group in your area and you are up for it, we have Heidi here who can definitely help you to start a local group in your area. They're a great opportunity and a great way for you to meet folks in your general geographic region. And so we would love for you to take advantage of that. The other thing that's cool about local groups is, and the same is true of Conversation Circles, they're open to non-members. So if you know someone who might need to be a NAPFA member or are thinking about NAPFA membership, local groups are a great way to introduce them to the community. And then Conversation Circles is our newest program, but it's not really that new anymore. I think it's been around for about three years. So these are weekly opportunities to focus on a specific topic or community. So we do these on Thursday afternoons at 1 p.m. Eastern, almost every week. We take some breaks around tax time, conference time in the summer and the holidays, but you will see on our website where you can see the Conversation Circles schedule. We do anything from tax planning to little user groups on technology, Women's Initiative, Genesis, DEI. They all do community-focused conversation circles that are very successful. We also organize them by firm size. So solo, midsize, and large firms all have their own community Conversation Circles as well. They're really popular and they're really easy, I think, if you're a new member who doesn't have a lot of time because you sit in for an hour, there's no pre-work, there's no post-work, you maybe meet a couple of cool people, you learn a few things, and you go about your day. So it's not a big time commitment, but I think that it's a really valuable offering that NAFA has. They are not webinars, so webinars are great, but they're not presentation-based. They're really focused in on interactive discussions with your peers. And Aisha, I'm going to turn it to you to talk a little bit about Conversation Circles as well. Yeah, I think you covered a lot of it, but I think I like that they're generally facilitated by an expert in that particular topic area or another NAFA member. And I just like how lively they are and how the topics change every week. So you could join as many as you want if the topics are interesting to you. And I think, you know, you come away with a lot of good ideas from them. And like Nikki said, there's no pre-work or post-work, so they're a really neat, easy way to begin getting involved. They're definitely also great for NAFA, too, because if you're a member who has feedback, we hear you on those Conversation Circles, and sometimes they can lead to opportunities for us to do programming around the feedback that we get. So one example of that is that the Women's Initiative a few years ago did a Conversation Circle about mentorship, and it seemed like maybe we were lacking a positive mentoring opportunity in the financial planning space, and we were able to start our own program, which was very successful. So they're a great place to go if you have some ideas about things that you could be getting from your NAFA membership as well. And then just a little bit here, if you have been through this whole presentation with us and you're like, this is great, but we would love to do more, we would say that we would love to have you come on as a volunteer with NAFA. So our recruitment campaign is in mid-June, and it runs through mid-July. That's focused on committee work and local group leaders. We also have some other times of year when we're doing recruiting. The National Board recruits in the fall, winter, Genesis is in the spring, and so is our Region Board recruitment also happens in early spring. So we are doing volunteering for much of the year. If you are off-cycle for all of that, like right now is an example of that, but you want to get involved, please feel free to contact me or someone at NAFA, and we'll be happy to try and figure out a place to plug you in. All members are eligible to be NAFA volunteers, so I know that sometimes new members feel like maybe they have to wait until they've been with NAFA for a while, or newer planners think they need to wait until they have some more experience. But I will tell you that NAFA really wants to have volunteers who are at all stages in their career, at all tenures in their NAFA membership. We think it's really important to have all of those perspectives. We also have worked really hard over the past couple of years to make sure that we have opportunities for people who have all kinds of time. So if you only have like an hour and you want to facilitate a conversation circle, we would love to have you. If you have a ton of time and you really want to give back to the profession, and you want to be on the National Board, that's great too. We have kind of everything in between as well. So we don't want you to think we're new members, so we have to wait a while, or I don't have a lot of time, so I probably shouldn't volunteer or raise my hand. If you have an interest in being involved, we would love for you to get involved. So please feel free to reach out to us and take that first step, and we'll help plug you in where it makes the most sense. And then these are all the ways that you can get involved, and there's probably more too, but here are some of the ones that we always highlight. So local group leaders, I mentioned conversation circles, region board work, committee work, National Board, Genesis, our foundation is another good example of a place you can volunteer if pro bono is something that's important to you. And then NEPFA always has projects going on, so we would love to have you just raise your hand and say, I'm happy to work on a project as well. And then I'm going to have both Aisha and Kelsey talk to us a little bit about how they came to NEPFA as volunteers and how that's been good for them and their professional development and their personal development as well, and I'll start with Aisha. I think I started, I think I started doing project work. So I started doing a project for academic outreach, and then eventually joined the webinar committee, and then eventually moved to Genesis and was on a conference planning committee, so I've done a little bit of a lot of different things over the years, and I mean I'll stay involved as long as I can. Volunteering has just been really great. It's so helpful to just get to know everyone in NEPFA, and I think it's a really big close-knit community of volunteers, so you really get to know everyone on your committees or at conferences when you see other people there. It's really great, and I think just like knowing other people in different states has been helpful to my own profession, just like connecting clients with like a state attorney, it's because you have someone you can ask who lives in that state, so I think that's been really helpful in terms of like just networking in the community. Thanks, Aisha. How about you, Kelsey? Yeah, so I started, my first kind of volunteer thing was the membership committee, and then I started doing some conversation circles here and there, and then eventually decided to pursue the NEMA board position. For me, it was great because joining the membership committee was a really easy way to start getting into volunteering, and like Nikki said, there's a lot of these are very low commitment, you know, you might meet once a month or once every other month depending on what it is, especially if it's just like project work or for a certain period of time. So, it's nice to kind of get your toes in the water and connect with other people and get an idea of what you're interested in, and then you can decide if you want, like I did, to take a more active role and pursue something that you're really interested in. If it's like leading conversation circles or leading a local group or whatever that may be, there's a lot of different paths that you can take, and it's a really great way to feel like you have a community outside of just your regular day-to-day colleagues. Thanks, Kelsey. So, as I mentioned before, we would love to have you. I think having new members, for me especially, means that we have perspective of people who haven't been entrenched in that for a long time, so their ideas are sometimes fresh and interesting, and so if this is something you're interested in, we recommend that you reach out. And that really brings us to the end of our agenda today. We just wanted to... and Kelsey, I can connect you with them too pretty easily, but thank you so much. We'll just give it a second here and see if anyone has any questions that we didn't answer yet. We only had one CE question today, Heidi, so great job explaining that to everybody. They're going easy on me. All right, well, if no one has any other questions, thank you so much for participating today. We are going to send this recording out, so I hope that you didn't take too many notes because you will have all this information at your fingertips. Welcome to NAPFA again. If any of us can be helpful in any capacity, please feel free to reach out and thanks again and have a great day. Bye.

NAPFA introduction

learning new skills

building a network

volunteering opportunities

webinars

conferences

local group meetings

Q&A session