Building a Global Movement | Jacqueline Jodl & Haylie Wrubel

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Using Thought Leadership to gain allies and ambassadors for a global movement.

An interview with Jacqueline Jodl and Haylie Wrubel about using thought leadership to create a worldwide movement, gain allies, and create ambassadors.

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How do you grow a movement from a backyard enterprise to a global mission reaching hundreds of thousands of people each day?

Today, we discuss the ongoing 50+-year mission of the Special Olympics with Jacqueline Jodl, Senior Vice President of Global Youth & Education and Haylie Wrubel, Director of Global Unified Champion Schools.

We start our conversation by discussing the way Special Olympics is bringing together people with and without intellectual disabilities to share experiences and build a common language. Their goal: create an understanding of the value of social and academic inclusion. One of the methods by which they achieve this goal is through creating Unified Champion Schools, a worldwide network of schools with inclusive programs, both sport and academic. Together, they bring people with differences together to build friendship and create leadership.

Methods and Storytelling

Taking a grassroots idea to scale is never easy, but is exactly what the Special Olympics has done. Jackie and Haylie share some of the methods they’ve used to create an impact on a global level. We discover how thought leadership resides at the intersection of research, policy, and practice , and how creating that thought leadership is at the heart of their work. In addition, we learn how a focus on storytelling and sharing the real-life stories of individuals and schools can resonate with policymakers and move the needle on a global scale.

In addition, Jackie and Haylie discuss how they go about cultivating allies and ambassadors for their movement. They explain why you shouldn’t be too narrow while identifying allies, how you can co-create content, and how you can turn followers into allies and ambassadors.

This is a fascinating look at how the Special Olympics has grown, and continues to grow, across the world – creating a positive social impact for everyone.

 Three Key Takeaways:

• Scaling thought leadership can be done by using a policy that works in one area and modifying it to suit another.
• Thought leadership is more authentic when you give voice to those it is intended to impact.
• Creating thought leadership for a global movement involves having an infrastructure with staff and volunteers in the communities they are intending to work with.

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Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.

And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage!

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Transcript

Bill Sherman How do you change the world through an idea? Today we explore the work of Special Olympics, an organization founded on a vision of inclusion and a theory of change. Bring use with and without intellectual disabilities together and give them opportunities to share in the joy of winning, the disappointment of losing, and the satisfaction of doing one’s best. Today we talk with Jacqueline Joel, the senior vice president of Global Olympics Youth and Education. We also speak with Haley Rubel, who is the director of Global Unified Schools. In today’s conversation, I’m eager to talk with Jackie and Haley about how Special Olympics grew from a backyard event to a global movement. We’ll also talk about how Special Olympics is using thought leadership to attract allies and ambassadors. And we’ll explore how thought leadership ties to their global policy agenda for inclusion. I’m Bill Sherman and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, both Jacqueline and Haley.

Jacqueline Joel Thanks for happy to be here.

Bill Sherman So I’d like to start this conversation about Special Olympics focusing on the mission. And I know Special Olympics is very much a mission driven organization. But maybe not everyone is familiar with Special Olympics. So, Jacqueline, could you set the table for us in terms of what is Special Olympics mission and what is the big vision that you’re trying to achieve?

Jacqueline Joel So Special Olympics has been around for about 50 years and historically really was founded by Eunice Kennedy. You’ll see, I guess you can’t see behind me, but it really is a beautiful picture of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who was President Kennedy’s sister, who really started this in her backyard with this vision for an organization that would not only advocate for those with intellectual disabilities, but would really create a forum, a platform through sport to transform their lives and bring greater social inclusion. So that was the historic vision of Special Olympics. If we fast forward to today, our chairman is Tim Shriver, one of Eunice’s five children, and he has really broadened the mission of Special Olympics to being an organization that brings together those with and without intellectual disabilities and really creating many experiences through sport primarily, but education, sport and health, really bringing together those with and without intellect, intellectual disabilities to share experiences so that we start to build a common language and common understanding of the value of social inclusion and even academic inclusion for those with intellectual disabilities.

Bill Sherman Thank you, Jacqueline. Haley, I want to pick up on something that Jacqueline said in terms of inclusion. And I know that you focus on unified schools, right? So what are those? And let’s go a little bit further there.

Haley Rubel Yes. So one of the big things that Special Olympics focuses on is creating the social infrastructure for inclusion to thrive. And one thing that we recognize is that one of the largest infrastructure pieces that our young people are part of our schools worldwide. And so it’s not just enough for us to build inclusion on the playing field. It’s through our initiative of unified Sports, which brings together people with and without intellectual disabilities onto the sport field. But we have to take that to a new level. We have to take the inclusion that’s built on the sport field and impact school climate as a whole. So how can we take the inclusion, the social inclusion that’s felt by those people with and without intellectual disabilities and really develop that into a school climate of acceptance, inclusion and a welcoming place for all. And so that’s the concept that we started with, was creating schools of acceptance and inclusion. And now we have over 100,000 schools worldwide in over 100 countries that are participating in unified schools, which are unified school programing, also known as Unified Champion Schools. We use both terminologies, is a multi component model that we bring to schools and that we partner with schools to bring social inclusion. So first, the core of our programing is unified sports. So providing opportunities for students with and without intellectual disabilities to play on the same team. Recognizing that some of the fastest friendships and the best friendships are formed through sport. Then coupling additional components such as inclusive youth leadership. So providing the opportunity for our young people to not just be the leaders of the future, but to be the leaders of today and to really take an ownership stake within their social inclusion within their schools. And then lastly, we focus on whole school engagement, which provides an opportunity for the entire school to be engaged in Special Olympics programing, to be engaged in the mission of inclusion. And so we partner with schools and with Special Olympics country programs around the world to bring this level of inclusion to, as I mentioned, over 100,000 schools.

Bill Sherman So what I love if we take the two pieces of the story that Jacqueline shared and Hayley shared, is an idea that literally started in a backyard, has now gone to reach not just 100,000 schools, but then you count basically generations of students. And so this taking this idea to scale really becomes manifest through this process. And Haley, you described what I would call very much a bottoms up, starting with individual interactions. But I think there’s also on at the same time this very complicated challenge of being an advocate, as you said, at the international level. So let’s talk for a moment about taking this idea to scale both bottoms up and top down. Jacqueline, would you like to jump in there?

Jacqueline Joel In my view? Thought leadership really needs to have this foundation, this grassroots foundation of impact. I spent the last several years of my professional life really at the intersection of where I think thought leadership needs to reside. And that is the intersection of research, policy and practice. And practice is, I think, has to be foundational to the other two pieces of research and policy. So what do I mean by that? So Special Olympics has, over the last 50 years, really built out a footprint of programing of impact all over the U.S. and is really scaling globally. And out of that work. What we’ve started to develop is a research base to really demonstrate how we work, when we work, where we’re not working, how we do it, how we need to adjust. And from that research base, that research base really starts to inform a policy agenda. And we have, you know, a terrific policy agenda, I should say, robust policy agenda in the US where we really advocate for those with intellectual disabilities. There’s lots of work to be done, but I would describe it as robust. That’s not the case around the world. So it’s our challenge as thought leadership to raise this to the international level at a point where we bring together all of the evidence base and really start to advocate among policy decision makers using that evidence to demonstrate, okay, these are the types of policies that we need. And when you put those policies in place, what do they do? They create the conditions for the type of programing that Haley’s describing, the type of scale that we need of the programing that Haley was describing.

Bill Sherman And one of the things that I think is impactful on the policy level is there are some policymakers who respond very much to research data and evidence. And there are also some who they connect through story and the example. Right.

Jacqueline Joel That is absolutely that that is that such a beautiful articulation of what I just described, that the stories come from the work that’s going on the ground, the, you know, the work that that Haley’s team is doing in Kenya, the work that Haley’s team is doing in Athens, those stories and to do elevate those stories to policymakers really resonates in a way that often moves to action. At the same time, there are other types of policymakers that want to say, okay, that’s great, but show me that, you know, show me the numbers, Show me how it actually moves the needle on the key outcomes that we’re looking for, which also which often happens to be what we describe as social and emotional development or, you know, clearly any academic or school outcomes which are equally important. So both pathways to thought leadership are absolutely essential to an overall thought leadership strategy.

Haley Rubel I completely agree with Jackie and something that we really focus on at Special Olympics is that storytelling piece and not just saying we’re in 100,000 schools around the world, but reading the story of one of those schools, of a dozen of those schools to really paint the picture of what inclusion means that school context and to ensure that our audience not only understands that through the research and through the evidence based this does work, but also look at the faces, look at the impact this is making. Look at the names that their lives have forever been changed. So the combination of those two is the sweet spot. The Special Olympics is trying to to hit and to focus on with our youth and education work.

Jacqueline Joel And one of the most important endeavors that we’re pursuing in the next three years that we just launched a week ago is with the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. And it’s what we call the global Campaign for inclusion. And that’s exactly what we’re what we’re going to try to do is we’re going to try to bring the stories to life. We’re going to make sure that we elevate Youth Voice to bring those stories to life, because we believe as an organization that the youth are the key to articulating those stories, and they’re obviously the key to our future. So that’s one of the most important things that we’ll be working on in the next few years.

Bill Sherman And to build on something that both of you said, the moments and the stories that happen in the classroom together between children or on the playground, if no one is keeping an eye out for those moments, if no one is curating that process, it is very hard to then elevate those stories to decision makers, policymakers or even researchers to formulate questions from those. And so for leadership sits really, in my mind, in a curatorial place to make sure that good questions get asked and answered as well as stories get told. And I love what you said, Haley, about making sure that it’s not just the numbers, but really finding those moments and celebrating them.

Haley Rubel I completely agree. And that’s the direction Special Olympics wants to take. And we for years have been a storytelling organization. We have collected evidence based, but we haven’t curated it in a way in which it properly tells our story to individuals that have influence, that are able to bring legitimacy to our work. And that’s really what we are focused on. As Jackie mentioned, with launching this global thought leadership campaign, is ensuring that our athletes, when they tell their story, when they articulate the impact that Special Olympics has on their lives, that they also have this surround surrounding them. They have individuals with legitimacy that can support, advocate and be able to endorse what we are doing as well through the stories and through the evidence base. And so it’s our role to curate that knowledge, share it with the right individuals and have them join our platform to promote and be a speaker for inclusion.

Jacqueline Joel I think that one of the you know, one of the most important points that you’re making is really thought leadership is so much more authentic when we give. Voice to those that it’s intended to impact. And the history of Special Olympics. Is Eunice Kennedy Shriver really giving voice to this marginalized population, you know, starting with her backyard and then expanding to a global organization. And so we really took that to heart when we were developing this idea for the global thought leadership campaign for inclusion. And so Tim Shriver, our chairman, is going to lead that, but he’s really going to lead it from behind. What he’s absolutely going to do, the way the campaign is structured is to really give voice to give a platform to those athletes, to those families that are really and to those schools and to those teachers, those coaches, those volunteers that are really bringing this program to life in our really developing more inclusive families, schools, communities and societies.

Bill Sherman One of the things that I want to explore with you is the concept of. The journey of taking an idea to scale, right? And so if we look back to the backyard story that we’ve touched on right to where we are today, and you said our mission is not done, we are still trying to reach more children, more athletes and students. Talk to me about the challenges of scaling an idea globally. Because I think many people would lean in and say, okay, this is a good idea. Maybe it’s an important idea. But how do you get attention for it and how do you get people to take action?

Jacqueline Joel So it’s you know, it’s a monumental undertaking. It’s a it’s an undertaking that is not going to happen overnight. I mean, you know, Special Olympics has been around for 50 years now. And we have a global footprint that is, you know, clearly has a lot of opportunity to scale relative to the U.S. footprint. So what I would say the first thing is that context is king or queen. Context is absolutely essential. I mean, you know, whether you’re talking about education policy or health policy, it really is absolutely critical that we understand that you can create frameworks. But the frameworks for our programing that are essentially that’s what policy is. It’s a framework. It has to be adaptable to each context, each country, whether we’re going into Kenya, whether we’re going into Morocco, whether we’re going into Argentina. These are all places, you know, where we have programs that are that are bringing Special Olympics to life. So how do you do that? I mean, that’s that it’s hard work. It’s hard work. So, you know, we have two apps. There are a couple of things that you do. You absolutely have to have an infrastructure, a global infrastructure that is, as you said, it starts from the ground up. It starts from the ground up. And it’s very much, you know, infusing that infrastructure on the ground with best practices that we curate. Let’s use the word curate again from around the world with the understanding that we have to adapt and apply those best practices, given the differences that we see in the local communities and cultures. And the best, you know, the best organizations. You know, I came from the private sector and a multinational corporation, and that’s absolutely what we did with our with the different products that we were selling around the world. And it’s very similar exercise when you’re talking about delivering, you know, programing or services to those with and without intellectual disabilities.

Bill Sherman Haley, anything that you would add about either the contextualization or the challenges of reaching scale community by community?

Haley Rubel Yeah. I think that at the core of your question is at the core of what Special Olympics has both struggled and succeeded with over the past 50 plus years. The unique part of Special Olympics is that in each country that we work in, we have our own country office. So we have our own staff and volunteers who are a part of the community, who understand the context and who have the relationships on the ground. It’s not essentially a bunch of Americans that are going in and trying to learn all of those things and then get programing started. So that’s one unique opportunity that Special Olympics has, is that we truly have on the ground staff that are moving this forward. One other thing that is important and this is really the job and the goal of Special Olympics International is we have to understand that each country has different contexts that they’re working with policy, cultural context, linguistic differences. We have to recognize these are the differences that we’re dealing with, but our job is to find the similarities. And we hear it a lot in popular culture. We’re more alike than we are different. And that’s truly the case globally, is that there are very different circumstances that our countries are dealing with. But there’s a lot of similarities. There’s a lot of ways that we can, as Jackie mentioned, pick a best practice from one part of the world, mold it slightly and have it fit within the context that we’re meeting in a different country. And so that is Jackie and I’s role at the global level, amongst other on our team, is to recognize what the cultural contexts are that we’re working with and then find an example from another part of the world that gives the best practice, gives us the tools that we need and successful in this context. So that’s really our key to scale is building a global team that has similarities that we can leverage while respecting understanding and celebrating our differences.

Jacqueline Joel And one of the easy things about that is that about scaling is that we’re a sports organization fundamentally. Right? And the universality of sport, that’s what makes that’s the easy part about scale. You know, whether it’s you can.

Bill Sherman Put a soccer ball down somewhere and everybody knows what it is, right?

Jacqueline Joel Absolutely.

Bill Sherman Star playing? Yeah.

Jacqueline Joel Yeah, absolutely. Whether, you know, the only translation on that is, you know, it’s football. You know, it’s football around the world. It’s soccer in the U.S. Otherwise it’s a very short conversation. Right. So the power of sport is our unique selling proposition as an organization. And that’s what makes scale easy. The translation, you know, on the ground is, is what the other thing that Special Olympics has figured out is that the translation on the ground has to be led and has to be by those in local communities. Local communities have to drive it and have to have to build up the programing for athletes in those communities. So those are the two things that we have figured out in the most macro sense.

Bill Sherman If you are enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about the podcast. Please leave a five-star review and share it with your friends. We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major platforms as well as at LeveragingThoughtLeadership.com.

Bill Sherman Well, and finding space where the athletes of Special Olympics will be welcome and invited to participate. Right. So if we exclude and if we say, you can’t use those ball fields or you can’t use that soccer fields, this is for this group or that group, then we’re drawing lines rather than opening up a space, which we’re recording this by Zoom. And so I’m seeing the photo of Eunice Kennedy Shriver in her backyard with the children and saying, no, no, no, here’s a space. Come play. That language alone. That invitation is infectious and has sort of a universal appeal to it. Right?

Jacqueline Joel No, absolutely. And the invitation, you know, which creates connectedness and a sense of belonging among our athletes is just it’s transformative to their lives. And when we get back to the storytelling, when we can bring those stories to light, it’s amazing. From a thought leadership perspective, how it can move decision makers. You know, one of our best examples is in the UAE, United Arab Emirates, and we have had phenomenal success partnering with the policy makers in that country where they saw the stories, they saw it coming to life, and they made a policy decision to move toward, you know, inclusive education in all of their what they call government schools. So it it’s been it’s been transformative to what they refer to as people, you know, individuals of determination that use different language, which language actually which I absolutely actually prefer, but beautiful language.

Haley Rubel And I thought of something.

Bill Sherman Go ahead, Haley. Sorry.

Haley Rubel Sorry. And I think something that’s really important to note, too, is everyone craves inclusion. Inclusion is not just for people of differing abilities. Inclusion is for everyone. And so, yes, in many ways, Special Olympics is an organization for people with intellectual disabilities. But it’s an organization by people with intellectual disabilities from people with intellectual disabilities. It is people with intellectual disabilities inviting everyone to play. Inviting everyone to feel included. Inviting everyone to feel a part of something. And at our core, human beings want to feel included. They want to be invited. They want to be a part of something. And so something that is seen time and time again around the world is that governments and policymakers work with Special Olympics with the intent of bettering the lives of people with intellectual disabilities. But what they find is that it betters the lives of everyone and that all students are impacted regardless of their ability level. And that truly is Special Olympics selling point is that we are an organization by and for people with intellectual disabilities, but it impacts all.

Bill Sherman And that’s, I think, a wonderfully put point.

Jacqueline Joel Hayley as I was listening to that, so a couple of and first of all, so, so beautifully articulated, Hayley. I remember being in a room with our chairman, Tim Shriver, who was describing a situation where someone would say, my gosh, I so admire you, Dr. Shriver. You do such great work. You help, you know, all these people who really need help. And he said, you know, it’s not hard work. It’s joyful work. You know, he said, of all the work that I do, it’s joyful work because you’re bringing together people that that think they don’t have any, you know, similarities. All they see is difference. And then you bring them together and you create these shared experiences where all that comes out of it is this sense of belonging and sense of inclusion. And it’s really ultimately a sense of joy. So, you know, he obviously articulated and he just articulated it better than I did. But I think that’s so critical to understand about the organization. You know, I was thinking about, you know, this conversation that we were going to have in the context of just in industry thought leadership as an industry bill. Right? I feel as someone who is having a really hard time, like so many others, just picking up the news, like reading the news because it’s so divisive right now. I really feel like there’s almost like a moral obligation or a need for thought leadership right now more than any time in my life. And I think that Special Olympics really has a role to play in this conversation, whether, you know, it’s more of a domestic conversation about DIY or, you know, the cultural wars that are going on in in education policy that, of course, I pay lots of attention to or even, you know, some of the conversations that are going on globally. And, you know, we can analyze the reasons why I feel like most of us feel that we’re more divisive, you know, in the U.S. and just certainly globally. But at the end of the day, I think that what I’m hungry for is thought leadership campaign that brings leaders to us, that invites lead and invites leadership to start to bring us together, to create, you know, solutions and to, you know, as Hayley said, to really strive for identifying similarities as opposed to differences.

Bill Sherman One of the things that I think about with thought leadership is when it’s done well, it makes the invisible visible. It makes problems which, because they’re overlooked, never get addressed. Okay. And then the second thing is figuring out if there is a solution. How do you take that to scale and how do you take a good, necessary idea so that you create more impact? And one of the things I want to touch on here is the concept of allies and ambassadors. And I think your work becomes very closely related to that. And from the lexicon that I use, an ally will open a door for you. They will get you into a room or a conversation that you might not get to on your own. An ambassador makes a deeper level of commitment. They say, I believe in this idea. I will speak on your behalf. I will join the movement. And I am here with you. And so I want to ask both of you. How were you cultivating allies and ambassadors?

Jacqueline Joel Hayley, do you want to start?

Haley Rubel And I think there was a brilliant way to articulate it. And Bill, we will credit you when we use that language moving forward. But I think you you really nailed exactly what we’re trying to do with our thought leadership campaign, something that we constantly talk about within Special Olympics. And a lot of this is credited to our chairman, Dr. Tim Shriver is for 53 years, Special Olympics has been a nice to do. That’s so sweet. You work for Special Olympics. So sweet. Those kids. That’s the terminology used pretty frequently. Those kids are so sweet. We need to take Special Olympics from a nice to do to a need to do to an urgent, life changing, life altering message. And we need to do that through masters and through our enablers and through this thought leadership campaign. Our idea and our goal and our strategy is to work alongside key thought leaders within the education, within the inclusion space, and not only thought leaders that are individuals, but organizations that act as thought leaders and to sell them essentially on our message of inclusion, say this is what we’re trying to do. We think it aligns with your message. And really, to use the terminology we were using earlier, invite them, invite them in, invite them to be a part of the message. Once they’re in, once they’ve got their invite to the party, we’re going to co-create deliverables that we can use to open the doors to provide the legitimacy for our work and have those ambassadors, have those key individuals, a part of our team that continues to push this message forward. And through having those code joint deliverables, as well as having some key speaking opportunities, key additional opportunities. That is what we’re going to use to leverage us moving forward. Jackie What?

Jacqueline Joel That’s I think that’s I think that’s great. And I love the language of allies and ambassadors. So the way we think about that is we think about it in terms of a continuum. So let’s say that allies are on the left and let’s say ambassadors on the right. I think that what we recognize, the first key is that when you’re starting to identify allies and I think this is the mistake that many of some of the other thought leadership campaigns where they’ve gone wrong is they’re identifying allies very narrowly, narrowly. We need to identify allies broadly, like where do we have a shared agenda? You know, does this resonate with you? Can this can we find some resonance, you know, in your agenda to support our work? And then it you began the process of, you know, through our work, through sharing our impact by shifting those allies down the continuum to to move into the Ambassador Lane And that is we have a whole you know, we have a whole collection of social, political and cultural ambassadors that are actually called Special Olympics ambassadors, and those are the ones that are willing to go on the front lines and really storytell for us going back to the storytelling thing, but understanding that the connection that allies and ambassadors are, are there different strategies to, you know, to recruit them? But ultimately, we want those strategies to come together and to in that we want many of our allies to shift into becoming ambassadors for the for the movement. We call it the Special Olympics movement. If you’re sitting in any Special Olympics room, whether it’s in any part of the world, you’ll hear everyone referring to it as a movement. And I think that it’s absolutely captures what we’re attempting to do on a on a broad scale. You know, scale for us is a movement. I think that that really reflects of the passion that we all have for the work that we’re doing.

Bill Sherman So you mentioned passion. And as we wrap up here, I want to close on passion and movement. There are many people who practice thought leadership in for profit organizations and don’t have the opportunity to connect as clearly to the passion side and to see that joy of a result in the same way. So my question would be for you, the lessons that you’ve learned on building the movement about fueling that passion. What makes you offer to other thought leadership practitioners, whether they’re working in government not for profit or they’re working in the for profit sector? How do you connect to that passion? How do you spark a movement?

Jacqueline Joel Go ahead.

Haley Rubel I like. My personal engagement started with Special Olympics almost 15 years ago, and it started as a high school student who wanted to make a difference in the world but didn’t know how. And going to my first Special Olympics event, I felt the movement. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but I felt that I was coming into something different. And that love, that passion is what continues to drive me. And my advice for everyone else is understand the purpose, Understand what you’re driving towards. I said Special Olympics. This may seem too optimistic and to rose colored glasses, but I believe we can make a more inclusive world. I believe that we can change society for the positive, and that’s our goal and that’s our mission. And one of the ways that we’re going to get there is by building allies and ambassadors through our thought leadership campaign. And to do that, I’m sorry, and I should say. With that in mind, this is a pathway to create a more inclusive world. And so that’s what the end goal is, keeping in mind where you’re trying to go, fact you’re trying to make waste. Your thought leadership campaign is the passion and is the fuel to move forward.

Jacqueline Joel So if I can just build on what Hayley said, I think that there are three ways to really build passion for this movement. The first way is we’ve got to start young and we really believe you’ve got to start young. You got to you got to really engage young people in this movement because they, you know, just because young people are filled with passion and filled with, you know, optimism for our future, I think that that’s foundational. The second thing we have to do and we come back to this many times absolutely have to be evidence based, but the power of storytelling to build passion is cannot be overstated. And the third thing I would say is we got to make it real. And the best way to make it real is to bring those influencers, to bring those just decision makers and actual experiences with our athletes, with our unified peers, which are those with and without intellectual disabilities actually living these experiences together. We have to we have to, you know, bring people into those into those situations where they can see it themselves. You know, the power of actually watching a unified game at the World Games, you know, whether it was, you know, the derby or whatever, you know, coming up in Carcassonne or coming up in Berlin, you just can’t replace that with us. Storytelling helps. Absolutely. And youth advocating for our movement is those are critical elements of the whole plan. But you can’t replace actually having thought leaders in the room experiencing these experiences with their athletes.

Bill Sherman And I think that’s a wonderful place to wrap up, that the experience in the moment creates that spark individual to individual. And it’s not necessarily found in the white paper. It’s found in the heart. Hayley. Jackie, thank you very much for joining us today to talk about the work Special Olympics is doing and the work it’s doing to change the world through thought leadership.

Jacqueline Joel Thank you so much. And thank you for allowing us to share our passion.

Haley Rubel Thank you.

Bill Sherman If you’re interested in organizational thought leadership, then I invite you to subscribe to the OrgTL newsletter. Each month we talk about the people who create, curate and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organizations. Go to the website. OrgTL.com and choose join our newsletter. I’ll leave a link to the website as well as my LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Thanks for listening and I look forward to hearing what you thought of the show.