This month, the MKE Creatives guest speaker was Carol Voss, of Independence First. Carol is the PR/Marketing director at IF, and has been there for 13 years! She is also the co-founder of the Bay View Neighborhood Association, and the “mother” of Chill On The Hill. Carol has always been about “creating community”; she’s also been working on the “transformation project” at BV High School. Besides all these other commitments, Carol is on the steering committee for Social Enterprise Alliance, too – who is just starting a MKE chapter. The Social Enterprise Alliance works to “provide social enterprises with the tools and resources they need to succeed.” They have 16 chapters in 14 states!
Carol basically “created” her position at Independence First. Initially, her role was as fundraiser, grant-writer, PR person, and marketing. They quickly realized that IF needed 3 people for those roles, and Carol ended up as becoming the PR/Marketing person.
Independence First advocates for all disabled people – offering over 20 programs and services – helping their clients towards a higher quality of living. With that many programs, and a large number of employees (50% of their employees/board members live with disabilities), IF >is< a very large org, but conservative in terms of PR/Marketing budget. They really put most of their money into programs and this forces Carol to be very creative in how she approaches PR/Marketing.
She has found social media to be pretty important in advancing Independence First’s mission and in increasing the public’s awareness of what they do. Carol maintains presences on all the main socmed networks – Twitter, Pinterest, 3 different Facebook pages, a Linkedin profile, and a YouTube channel! A big project she just completed is a full revision of their website – the third revision since she’s been there – to make the site more responsive to mobile. In her time at IF, Carol’s been able to work with photographer, Tom Olin, a historically significant photographer of disability rights movement – Mr. Olin has photos in the Smithsonian’s collection!
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Carol also mentioned that on August 23, 10a-2p: Independence First would be hosting an “eWaste Drive” at the Pettit Center – anything with a cord or battery, working or nonworking – bring it by to get recycled! (they also accept these material at their First St. location year-round, 8a-4p)
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Other topics covered…
–Paul Henning suggested Last Pass as being an easy-to-use- password-vault for all those various logins we have to maintain. Paul also gave out two USB-drives as door prizes from Matton Images, the stock photo/illustration/footage/music firm he works for.
–Northwoods Software, a web-development and web-design firm, offers free seminars on analytics, SEO, and other web-topics. They’re located in Shorewood.
–Deborah Mamon, a creative businesses consultant, told us about the Sept 7, Mt Mary Starving Artist show that she’s chairing. At last count, they had 238 juried artists showing. All the artwork at the show will be priced under $100!
–Charity Harvey, a local yoga and aerial art instructor, told us about her studio, encouraging both men and women to try it out!
–Mark Bradford – web developer and IT support, told us about the new dating site he’s built – onlyaglance.com. He also runs his own software and IT support company.
-Also present were regulars: Kristine Hansen (travel writer), Aurelia Schultz (intellectual property attorney), and myself (photographer, art educator).
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