Speaker: Lisa Conradi, PsyD, Executive Director, Chadwick Center for Children & Families, RCHSD
Please introduce yourself by telling us about your current role and a little about the work you’ve done with CalTrin.
Lisa Conradi, PsyD: Hi there, my name is Lisa Conradi and I'm the Executive Director at the Chadwick Center for Children and Families, part of Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego. I'm here to talk to you a little bit about the California Training Institute (CalTrin), as I've done a couple of trainings for CalTrin. The first was focused on trauma-informed leadership. I did a webinar for them, as well as some follow-up, more in-depth consultation calls with selected leaders. And I also did a training on your role in creating a trauma-informed organization.
Is there any part of the training preparation process that stood out to you? Why?
Lisa Conradi, PsyD: There were a couple of parts of the CalTrin training process that really stood out to me as a presenter. The first was that everything was very well organized. Long in advance of the training, the organizers reached out. They sent me a very clear list of what needed to be accomplished and the deadlines. They really helped hold my hand throughout the process. They were also very willing to meet with me in advance to maybe brainstorm creative ways that we could provide the training, as well as to review the technology right before the training to make sure that everything was set up and ready to go. Whether that was through doing surveys with the group or showing videos, they made sure everything was in line and ready to go in advance so that the training could go off seamlessly.
Please tell us about your overall experience as a presenter for CalTrin.
Lisa Conradi, PsyD: Overall, my experience as a presenter for CalTrin was very positive. They were incredibly organized, really willing to reach out and provide whatever assistance and help they could to make sure that the process ran smoothly. And they also really worked on engaging our participants. That meant by reaching out to participants in advance to gather information that was helpful to me as a presenter, such as the demographics or the types of groups that were going to be attending my training. But they also followed up, followed up with participants afterwards to make sure that they got access to all of the resources that were mentioned in the training. So overall, I felt as a presenter, I had a lot of support to make sure that the presentations that I put out were seamless, organized, and really professional.
Tell us about your experience with audience engagement while presenting for CalTrin.
Lisa Conradi, PsyD: Strong audience engagement is clearly a priority for the CalTrin team, so they start by really marketing to the audience long in advance of the training. This means by promoting it through social media, their websites, their list serves; so that the audience knows what trainings are coming up and they can select and sign up for the ones that they're most interested in. They also were willing to send out questions to the audience members in advance, so that could help me as a presenter but also begin to engage the participants long before the actual training began. They followed up with participants afterwards to make sure that they got all of the materials that they needed. And they really supported me as a trainer to make sure that during the training, I was able to use technology as a way to engage my participants. So this might have occurred through use of polling questions, breakout rooms, gathering information that could be shared at a later time. I've done both webinars and ongoing consultation calls through the CalTrin training forum, and each one of those really engaged audiences in different ways. But I had a great, a great turnout. A lot of folks participated in both the webinar and in the monthly consultation calls, which you would expect people might actually fall off. But the audience is very engaged and I think they've come to expect high-quality content from CalTrin and that it's going to be delivered in a pretty seamless manner, and that's what they did.
Would you recommend working with CalTrin to other subject matter experts? Tell us why.
Lisa Conradi, PsyD: I would absolutely recommend that other subject matter experts use CalTrin to promote some of the work that they're doing. One, you have a really great audience. Folks come to expect high-quality presentations from CalTrin and they get a lot of participants who join each and every one of the webinars. So that I think is great because not only did I have the opportunity to present to a wide range of people, but I also had a lot of folks reach out afterwards; ask questions, asked to be connected for maybe follow-up trainings. So as somebody who likes to put trainings out there and was really excited about the content that I developed, I had a great audience to really present it to who were engaged in the work and wanted to bring it back to their organizations. So I would definitely recommend CalTrin as a great forum for that. On top of just getting access to a great number of participants, it's also just a seamless, well-planned process. I found it pretty easy to engage as a presenter; to make sure that all my bases were covered and that all I needed to do on the day of was show up and deliver the content that we had planned. So overall, I would absolutely recommend that other experts engage with CalTrin trainings.
