Hello and welcome. That was a bigger welcome than I had intended. I’m Erin Hart. And I’m Bobby Jones. We are so excited to be here. So happy to see everyone. For, I see some familiar faces in here, for those of you who were here last year, for the first year of Frank. It’s wonderful to see you again. Thank you again for coming. And for those of you here for your first time, either for your first time at Frank, or your first time in Gainesville, we welcome you with open arms. You’ll find that this gathering is one of the coolest things that you’ll come to all year. A bunch of awesome people generously sharing everything that they know from a career standpoint, from a personal standpoint, and so much gratitude for what’s being shared. So we’re excited to be here. It’s gonna be a fun few days, and we’re ready to get started. We are. So we’re gonna take a couple of minutes to go through what we call the Frank User’s Guide, so that you guys have some sense of how we’ve organized this, what to expect over the next couple of days, who to go to with questions, and all the different ways that you can engage while you’re here. But before we do that, we wanna share a little bit about how we came to do this kind of work, because I think we’ve all had different paths that have gotten us here. Most of us haven’t had a career where at one point, when we were 17, 18, 25, 35, that we said, hey, I wanna be a public interest communicator. We’ve all had very different ways of getting here. So we thought we’d share our stories with you. So I was introduced to space probably about eight years ago. I was in traditional marketing communications. I work with brands, and I help connect brands to youth culture and to popular culture, and I had no idea what public interest was, but one day I got the opportunity to work with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in my day to day job. Yes, give it up for Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. They do some amazing work, and I see some familiar faces from there. And got the opportunity to do some, work with some amazing people, and Anne Cristiano, I’m sure many of you know and love, was one of those amazing people. And I got the opportunity to work on this project that was all about focusing on young people who were perceived to be at risk, living in vulnerable communities and amongst vulnerable populations. And I got the opportunity to work with them to develop a communications plan that helped inspire and empower them to use their talent and their resources to help change their communities and their world. And it became one of the most rewarding, remarkable experiences of my career to that point and still to this day. And that work helped transform how I saw the work that I do for brands. And still to this day, I tried to find ways to help brands impact the greater good in the work that they do. So even though I had a very non-traditional path to this point, I’m happy to be here doing work that I love and doing work that matters and that’s meaningful. And I’m also in the process of sharing some of that in a book called Good is New Cool. And I’ll talk about that notion tomorrow, but it’s an exciting time for the field, it’s an exciting time to be a part of it. And this is a great time to come together. And I had a slightly different path. I actually was in this city about 25 years ago as a journalism student who thought that journalism was gonna be my path in communications to change the world. And I realized at some point that I really wanted to take sides in a bigger way. And I then, which yeah, we can debate whether or not that actually could have stayed in journalism and done that. Yes, yes. That’ll be a topic for discussion later, yes. But I did make that decision and that led me down a path where I started doing communications work in museums and government agencies for foundations, for nonprofits. And in this area that as Bobby said, I think more traditionally is self-identified with the idea of what public interest communications is. I am thrilled when I have the opportunity to talk with students who say to me, so you get to work on things that you care about and you actually can pay the bills, you’re able to do that. And I’m really happy to say that I have been because I’ve never had to work on an issue that I don’t believe in or that I don’t care about and that I don’t wanna spend my time on. And I think that’s the common thread that many of us have is that we’re here fighting for the things that matter to us and that we care about and that we really want to do every day. And whether it affects us personally, if it affects people in our families, other people who we care about, there are all these different drivers that bring us to doing that kind of work and that thankfully bring us here together at Frank. So there are five things we want you to know about Frank. And I’m kinda lying. We made the bigger list into five things. There’s a whole lot more than that. We want you to know about Frank. But we organize them into five things because we like alliteration. So here’s the Frank five. So the big 10. You’ll see a very dynamic cross-section of people from all different fields, from public interest communications to marketing, to nonprofits, for profit. And it’s intentional. Because we believe that public interest and communicating for a greater good shouldn’t be just limited to any one particular group. So you’ll see a very wide 10 and a very dynamic cross-section. And one group of people that I wanna call out to be talk a lot about professionals, but one thing I thought was amazing is the fact that there are 200 UF students that are volunteering at a part of Frank this year. And we just think that is so extraordinary and so amazing. And when we talk about a big 10 in which we’re exchanging ideas, make sure that these young people are part of that exchange. Make sure that you’re sharing your experiences with them and also make sure you’re learning from them. Because that’s the whole spirit of why we’re here. So the second thing is we’re here because we’re teaching and we’re all teaching each other. So that’s happening in a couple of different ways. So we actually were intentional about making sure that we were all going to be here in this space together for the bulk of the time, so that we would be having, creating the shared experience and having that together so that we’re having that teaching opportunity. So this time here together, this little guide that I’m holding is actually probably a better user’s guide than Bobby and I. The thing that you’re hanging around your neck, it’s not only your name tag, it’s your program, it’s your drink coupons. It’s lots of important things that you wanna know. I told you you’d like it better than Bobby and me. But look at this for all those kinds of goodies and most importantly, to find all those teaching opportunities. So they’ll be happening here in this room, like I said, they’ll be happening during the speaker’s office hours, which instead of having Q and A after each of the sessions, the many of the speakers are going to go to the Frank Lounge down the lower level and be there to have deeper conversations with any of you who wanna go to visit them during the huddle time. The other thing that will be happening during the huddle time is that you’ll have the opportunity to self-select places that you wanna go and have a conversation by topic. So we’ll have volunteers, some of those amazing 200 that Bobby mentioned, out front holding up signs and you can follow them to go have a conversation about the environment, about public health, about whatever interest area you want to participate in. And we’re gonna have those conversations in places that we think are a little more natural to the way people talk. So instead of traditional breakout rooms, you’re gonna go to a couple local coffee shops and bars and you’re gonna use the little goodies that you have in your passport here and you’re gonna get a cup of coffee and you’re gonna sit down and have a conversation and hopefully figure out ways to work together and learn together. Exactly, and so in the spirit of learning, I mean, obviously we are in Gainesville, Florida, home of one of the largest and most respected learning institutions in the country. And so learning is gonna be a big part of the reason why we’re here. To exchange and to walk away with a better understanding of not only public interest, but also the future of communications as a whole. As part of Frank and as part of the Frank Carrell overall initiative and the legacy, there will be seven Carrell fellows who are here. I’m not sure if all of them are here right now. Stand up. There we go. There we go. There we go. They are a collective of some amazing young people who have already started to make a commitment and express a passion for this field and we’ll have the opportunity to hear from three of them. There are always some of the highlights of the gathering for me. So we definitely look forward to hearing from a lot of great speakers. I think we have 40 in total. So it should be a great experience and yeah, we should all be a lot smarter. We would be. So in this smarter group of people, we really wanna build this community. So one of the other things by design that’s happened with this event is it’s a little smaller than it could be. It’s also invitation only as you guys know. And it’s not because we’re snooty snotty people because we’re not snooty snotty people. It’s because we wanted to be really intentional about who was here in the room so that it wasn’t one or two organizations coming in and kind of taking things over so that we had good representation from lots of different sectors so that we’re building that big tent that Bobby described and that we could be really thoughtful about growing this community in a way that helps us to bring more students in to better measure the work that we’re doing to find ways to collaborate. So that’s the reason behind some of those devices that we’ve used in building this event. A couple of things while we’re here to continue building community. So we’ve talked about, we’ve talked about the huddles, we’ve talked about the time here, the Frank Lounge on the lower level. If you need to make phone call, need to be on your computer, don’t wanna miss content, hang out in the Frank Lounge and watch the simulcast there. It is very cool. You will like the space very much, I have no doubt. That’s the space like I said where the speaker’s office hours will be. So spend a little bit of time there. There’s also a Frank store there. So if you wanna get books from some of the speakers that you’re hearing or other goodies, that’s available in that space. And you’ll see a number of other things around the downtown area that the Frank team’s put together. There’s a blackboard out front. As Liz mentioned, we do have everything covered on social media with the hashtag Frank2015. So you’ll see information there. And then you’ll have your family of your crews as well. Celebration. I put this in here so it’s not his fault. I mean, look how much fun that guy’s having right now. Nothing brings out the joy like free drinks. Trust me, by nine o’clock you all will be smiling like that. So it’s gonna be a lot of fun. As Erin mentioned, everyone in here will be part of a crew. Your crew will be like your home base. It’ll be your circle of friends while you’re here at Frank. There will be a variety of activities. The first one will be tonight, there will be a venture hunt. That will be hosted in the area, which should be really fun. You get the opportunity to go get clues. Everyone should be there before 6.30 or 6.30. The clues are shared and there will be a competition tonight. And as well as for the overall Frank gathering for the best crew, you all will be part of it. You all will be part of a crew in the competition. Of course my crew will win, but you guys, we have so much fun that you won’t even trip. It’ll just be like nothing. So we welcome you and as I said, enjoy your crew, connect with them, they’re your home base. It’ll be a great time. And yeah, it’s time to get started. That’s it. So connect with each other, ask questions, lots of volunteers around, use your passport and have a great time. Thank you for joining me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks guys. Thank you.