Speaker: Maureen R. Durning, Owner/Director, Butterfly Trainings that Transform LLC
Please introduce yourself by telling us about your current role and a little about the work you’ve done with CalTrin.
Maureen R. Durning: Hello there. My name is Maureen Durning. I'm the owner and director of Butterfly Trainings that Transform. We are a Strengthening Families training and consulting firm in Boise, Idaho. A few years ago, I was contacted by Jessica Mattly to offer webinars about strengthening families, as we're one of the resources that's listed on the national Strengthening Families website. Strengthening Families is a strength- based set of core values designed to help families recognize and build on their protective factors. These are attributes that protect families from being overwhelmed by stress and at the same time, they promote healthy outcomes for children. So my training partner, Jane Zink and I, we created a series of interactive webinars designed to give the participants knowledge of these protective factors and also action steps so that they can incorporate this framework into their day to day work.
Is there any part of the training preparation process that stood out to you? Why?
Maureen R. Durning: You know, what really stood out to me the most was how helpful and how reliable Jess and Dana were every step of the way. As with any project of this sort, you know there's contracts and invoices and there's handouts for participants and there's other paperwork that's involved and everything was handled so efficiently. We had practiced technical sessions to make sure the technology ran smoothly and we felt prepared and ready for for each session that we did. And that was all thanks to Jess and Jess and Dana.
Please tell us about your overall experience as a presenter for CalTrin.
Maureen R. Durning: Well, overall, I really can't sing their praises too highly. We really enjoyed creating the content for the webinars and our sessions were very well advertised. They were very well received. Jess has such a welcoming, warm voice. She was there welcoming the participants for each session. And she ran the sessions in both a professional and very friendly way. We were really happy with how everything worked.
Tell us about your experience with audience engagement while presenting for CalTrin.
Maureen R. Durning: OK, audience engagement. Our sessions were in the webinar format because we had very large groups of participants, sometimes several 100, and so most sharing was done in the chat. But there was consistent, consistent audience engagement throughout. We also provided our STRONG, Strengthening Families training manual as door prizes. Jess and Dana took care of sending out a book to the winner of each week. I did hear from some of these folks who contacted me about our services. We made new friends across the country because of because of our engagement with CalTrin. It was a great experience.
Would you recommend working with CalTrin to other subject matter experts? Tell us why.
Maureen R. Durning: Well, I love this question. I would highly recommend working with CalTrin to any other subject matter experts. I love the mission of CalTrin. I love how they offer quality, free web-based trainings on a wide variety of topics to California and the nation. We had quite a few Idaho people who joined in on some of our sessions. As trainers, we all have so much good information to share, and CalTrin gives us a fun and efficient way to share it. My personal vision is a world where all children thrive and working with CalTrin, I believe can help us make that come true. I would highly recommend that you work with them. Thank you!
