This session is for any conference attendee who is just beginning to work with SourceAmerica and the AbilityOne program. This will be a welcome and introduction to the organization with representation from Operations and Account Management, Business Development, Finance, Training and Government Affairs teams. There will also be a brief overview of the AbilityOne Program and the breakdown of the Conference tracks. Questions are welcome and networking with your fellow newcomers over breakfast is encouraged.

The National Council of SourceAmerica Employers (NCSE) is an independent network of executives that provide services or manufacture products under the AbilityOne Program. Each SourceAmerica NPA with an AbilityOne contract is a member of the NCSE.

The NCSE Executive Committee is the elected leadership of the organization and acts as a liaison between the NonProfit Agency (NPA) community and SourceAmerica.The president of the NCSE serves on the SourceAmerica Board of Directors, thus ensuring the NPA community has direct input into the deliberations and policy-making decisions of the Board.

The NCSE addresses issues of significant relevance to NPAs and their participation in AbilityOne, and assists SourceAmerica with research and data collection necessary to advance the AbilityOne Program.

During their meeting, the NCSE Executive Committee will present a brief update on critical issues impacting NPAs, present Management Excellence Awards and share election results.

New this year! This Forum is for nonprofit board members to better understand the AbilityOne Program requirements and procedures, helping you to be a more-informed board member!

• There’s a major distinction between “average” sales organizations and “world-class” sales teams  – the world-class organizations determine what their best, most-successful people do (often intuitively) to sell and serve their clients and prospects exceptionally and they are diligent about documenting these sales-related best practices for the benefit of both their clients and for the rest of their sales teams. This workshop will explore three major categories of best-practice “roadmaps” that allow you to proliferate repeatable success among your entire team including:
  • Winning Opportunity Best Practices – to win more than your fair share of new pursuits
  • Account Management Best Practices – to ensure we retain and grow our largest. Most strategic client relationships
  • Sales Tool Kit Best Practices – to leverage the tools, templates, and even the activities that have been proven most effective in winning new business

Learn how to use specific tools to immediately increase your negotiation effectiveness. You will learn both “hard” strategy and tactic skills (like when to make offers and concessions) as well as “soft” people skills (like how to negotiate with different personality types). The session is geared to both the novice and the more experienced negotiator. Trainer Peter Reilly has spent the last fifteen years teaching thousands of professionals how to negotiate better.

Social Enterprises of the Future is an initiative co-sponsored by SourceAmerica and the National Council of SourceAmerica Employers (NCSE) focused on the future of work and the disability community. This session will present the findings of several reports scheduled for release in FY18. Themes addressed in the reports include societal, legislative, economic, and technological trends impacting the disability community. We will also present operational responses designed by network members and supplemental best practices including funding, succession planning, impact measurement and advocacy. This session will summarize report findings and chart a course for the next phase of Social Enterprises of the Future.

• Most sales teams are transactional in their approach to their client opportunities and this makes them more reactive than proactive in approaching these opportunities.  They may be working hard to win new business but winning in today’s market requires us to work smart, not just hard.  In this workshop, we’ll dive  into the four key dimensions of strategy that make the difference between winning and losing significant opportunities including:
  •  Territory/Portfolio strategies – to focus on the right accounts
  •  Solution strategies – to clearly distinguish your solution in the mind of your client
  •  Stakeholder strategies – to ultimately win the votes of the key decision makers
  •  Competitive strategies – to differentiate your solution from other competitive alternatives (including the dreaded “do nothing” competitor)

Want to know more about the Cooperative Agreement between SourceAmerica and the U.S. AbilityOne Commission®? Join representatives from the Commission Program Management Office (PMO) and SourceAmerica’s PMO to get the inside story.

U.S. AbilityOne Commission leadership will provide an agency update and direction for the future.

The Federal Non-AbilityOne session will provide updates on SourceAmerica’s activities to expand Federal employment opportunities on GSA Schedules where SourceAmerica is the Prime.  A panel of Prime Contractors will also address opportunities for job growth with their organization and answer questions about how you can position your NPA for success with Prime Contractors.

The road to supporting people with disabilities with their employment requirements is full of obstacles and navigating today’s Federal procurement environment is a challenge.  SourceAmerica has prioritized five roadblocks to AbilityOne employment growth.  These barriers are being addressed at the highest level at SourceAmerica with a focus on ways to go over or around these barriers to achieve employment growth for people with disabilities.  This session will review these five top 5 barriers and provide an update on mitigating actions to steer around these issues.

In today’s dynamic environment, nonprofits need business models that can evolve quickly to changing community needs. This interactive session introduces participants to the matrix map, an engaging tool that turns an organization’s business model into a dynamic visual integrating the mission impact and financial viability of the organization. The matrix map offers strategic inquiries for board and staff to frame choices and make the necessary and, at times difficult, adjustments to strengthen their business model and pursue nonprofit sustainability. This session is designed to provide an overview of theory around sustainability and the fundamental skills and dispositions necessary to produce and analyze the map. Participants will leave with a tool they can use immediately to engage staff and board in this pursuit.

Attend this session to learn how leading compliance departments in the nonprofit world, are creating sustainable improvements in culture within their organizations, and leveraging limited resources and best practices to reduce employee misconduct. You’ll learn how to:

• Critically impact an employee’s view of the organization’s culture
• Conduct difficult conversations with examples of case studies
• Reduce misconduct and compliance risk within the organization

Join the SourceAmerica Board of Directors to discuss the Board’s vision for the organization and their BODACIOUS goals, share information and experience, and take part in a lively question and answer session.

Implementation is the only real proof of Innovation.  More jobs for people with disabilities provide that proof.  Join NCSE, SourceAmerica and EdgeDweller to learn more about the launch of Intentional Innovation®, our 12-month commitment to results, and how you can engage to make it happen. This session will be followed with an ad hoc session designed to provide a closer look at deliverables, project schedules, and engagement details.

Innovation starts with an open mind and a passion to improve our world. We invite you to bring both to the table.

The many benefits of operating as a tax-exempt organization come with strict limitations on how your organization does business.  In this session, we will explore several key areas worth monitoring: unrelated business income (UBI), lobbying expenses, and related entities such as subsidiaries.  Speakers Tim Riffle, partner and chair of the Corporate Tax Division at Barnes & Thornburg, LLP, and Jennifer Beckman, senior corporate counsel at SourceAmerica, will walk through both general, and AbilityOne Program-specific strategies to protect your tax-exempt status as your organization grows and evolves.

The ability to write winning proposals is key to growing your organization.  Yet, too many proposals focus on proposal compliance and do not consider the bigger picture.  Proposals must address more than the Statement of Work.  What is your customer really looking for from a contractor?  How can your organization rise above the competition?  Learn new strategies and techniques to present integrated, customer-based proposals that impress your customers and better position your NPA to win new business.

Promotions and placements are important to providing opportunities for people with disabilities.  Join us for an interactive discussion about how to support upward mobility of the AbilityOne workforce.

What are the services?  How is this unique?  What clients can benefit the most?  How does this benefit my agency?  What are the costs?  Is it sustainable?  How do you overcome the challenges with state funding systems?  What is SourceAmerica’s plan for expansion?  What do we need to do to get involved?

These are some of the commonly asked questions regarding the Pathways Initiative.   A panel of Pathways project site and national office staff, and other national experts will respond to these questions and any others you may have in an open Q & A discussion.

In this session, we will explore how applying the principals of performance excellence — leveraging a tool such as the Baldridge model—can improve mutual accountability with SourceAmerica and the Non-Profit Agencies to expand employment opportunities for people with disabilities.  The session will be led by Norm Lorentz, SourceAmerica board member and former CTO of the US Postal Service, and Leejay Acham of SourceAmerica, former Baldridge examiner.

For nonprofit organizations raising money is a challenging necessity. The complexity of creating a plan that involves numerous fundraising strategies based on compelling reasons for voluntary support is perhaps the ultimate test of an organization’s internal culture. To be successful requires that staff and volunteers operate at peak efficiency. This session addresses the role that the board plays in fundraising and ways to best structure your organization to support this role. Further, the concepts necessary to change the culture of your organization and how it recruits and trains board members is explored.

Learn how the Quality Work Environment Initiative (QWE) has been utilized by nonprofit agencies to better the work experience for employees with disabilities. Come join in this information sharing session aimed at showcasing agency staff and employees as they share their practices and experiences as participants in QWE.

Dozens of leading NPAs are shifting their employment strategies to an emphasis on purpose and seeing remarkable results. Recent studies are showing that employees in NPAs are significantly more likely to demand purpose at work and people who work with purpose are 125% more productive at work and 50% to become leaders in their organizations.

In this session you will hear from NPA executives who are already integrating purpose into their employment strategies and the results they are seeing. You will gain the specific best practices, strategies and resources for getting started in the work and connect with likeminded leaders who are engaged in this work.

Maximizethe value of your information. Minimizethe risk of keeping too much or too little.
Minimizeinformation costs.

You will take away these templates to customize for your business.

1. Policy– Defines for everyone the Program and their roles and responsibilities
2. Records Retention Schedule– Defines what records are created and how long to keep them
3. Key Procedures
   1. Disposition Procedure – how to destroy paper and electronic records
   2. Certificate of Destruction – proof of legally compliant destruction
   3. Litigation Preservation – The exception process. How to manage the halting of destruction for legal considerations