Welcome and Opening Remarks

Good morning. We're doing a lot of things for the first time. I need to do something to test the equipment. My name is Elizabeth Rodriguez. I welcome you and I'm happy you are here for the fourth conference we're sponsoring with the Aspen Institute.

These conferences are based on some significant research that was completed by Kirsten and Greg. This research asks the question, how can we bring organizations to scale.

Each of the sessions to date has had a slightly different focus and emphasis. The last one in San Francisco was on collaborative structures in different sectors. We have people involved in community development working on collaborations to improve their work.

Community development is a field that continues to evolve and this field is changing again. Research shows that funding sources are becoming more limited while the needs are growing. Over today and tomorrow we are interested in exploring how organizations can achieve scale and have a greater impact. We can share infrastructures, pool and aggregate loans and we can do more business and lend more in those communities.

We can also tap organizations to fill some funding gaps that we are feeling. In bringing together industry experts like yourselves we want to provide information and have you share with each other. We want your input and we want your involvement and discussion.

We want to talk about these innovative models for collaboration and we want to know if these models can be used by you. We also want to discover where the opportunities are for collaboration. The agenda is designed to engage you and to see where there can be mutual dialog for benefit within the second district and beyond.

I want to thank you for joining us this morning. I want to invite Carolyn Lee Wong. A member of the community affairs staff here. It's been Carolyn and Arlene that have been organizing this meeting.

We're delighted you can join us this morning. This is the fourth conference in the series. It's a pleasure to introduce Kirsten Moy. SHe comes to us with extensive experience in community development. She has been in the field and knows first hand some of the issues we all face.

There are a couple of things to do this morning. We have a tight schedule. Patty will introduce the voting machines.