Outreach Organizations

Click here to access your organization’s paperwork for establishing a cohort.

Train the Facilitators is a workshop in which administrators and instructors learn how to prepare, teach, and facilitate PAL via cohorts and PAL Independent. If you have not participated in Train the Facilitators but would like to learn to administer or teach PAL, please reach out here.

Please note: If you’ve been through the training and would like a refresher, you are more than welcome to join a future session.

Check here for upcoming Train the Facilitators Dates and email us here to let us know you’d like to join.

Click here to access your Train the Facilitators portal.

PAL can be done remotely/virtually, in-person or as a hybrid. This Guide focuses on a fully remote model.

The breakdown below uses The Fund’s 2-5p ET class structure as an example so you may see how class is specifically broken down. Feel free to tailor the times to your specific cohort.

We strongly 3 hours of class time per week and 1 one-hour  consultation outside of class for each Professionals and Fellows pairing each week. Depending on the number of overall participants, these sessions can be broken into segments with smaller cohorts.

When there is no class session, we recommend the Fellow and Professional spend 2.5 hours together that week, at times according to their mutual schedules.

We strongly recommend matching Professionals with Fellows to assist them and/or ask Professionals if they have a working partner or assistant that they can help them build their site. 

Typically, Fellows are paid and provided by the organization while Working Partner (unpaid) or Assistant (paid) are provided by the Professional. However, given the budget of the host organization, Fellows can be volunteers or “paid” via class credit. Given the scope of the Fellow’s work, we highly recommend compensating them in some way, even if not monetarily.

In many cases, equipment Professionals and you already own—such as computers, smartphones and tablets—can be used for PAL, particularly for the audio and video recording section of the site.

For recording, we recommend a USB microphone, which plugs directly into a computer’s USB port.  For editing, use a low-cost or free recording program like Reaper, Audacity, and Garage Band for Audio and iMovie for video and Zoom. Other filming and editing recommendation can be found in the Audio and Video section of the Contributor Manual.

PAL operates to create a safe space during all of our sessions and interactions. This includes during class, with Professional & Fellow/Working Partner/Assistant work, and all other PAL groups and personal interactions. It is through creating this safe space, that we can dare to share through expression, information, stories, essays, blogs, and more. 

We acknowledge that everyone comes to PAL with their own lived experiences, visible and unseen. Creating a safe space is a community effort and as such we strongly suggest sharing Community Agreements the first time Professionals and their Fellows/Assistants/Working Partners are gathered (Session 1), you meet with Legal Interns for the first time, and when meeting with the students from the school what will be part of the multi-generational interviews. By bringing these Community Agreements, reading them out loud, and offering folks to add to them if they see something missing, we are creating a common set of expectations about how we, as a community, create and maintain a safe space for PAL.

Click here to download the Community Agreements.

For more on the Community Agreements, please reach out to us.

We recommend matching each Professional with a high school or college student (we call them Legacy Seekers) who will conduct one 1.5 hour interview by phone/Skype/Facetime/Zoom, etc. based on questions the students create with their teacher. This partnership is most efficiently done by creating a relationship with a local school that focuses on the performing arts or that has a club or department focusing on the performing arts. These sessions are not recorded and are confidential. The students and their teacher then select salient moments from the interviews and create a script with their teacher, culminating in a panel with the PAL Professionals and their student Legacy Seekers, either live or remotely, at the end of the term.

Download the Word Doc of the Outreach Organization Facilitators’ Guide here.

Edit as your program sees fit, which includes adding your own dates. We acknowledge that your organization might not be able to accommodate 14 weeks of class. Our breakdown of sessions is a recommendation that we’ve found works for our Professionals and Fellows.

We suggest using the document of the Facilitators’ Guide like syllabus for a general overview and to have your Teachers, Professionals, and Fellows more regularly use the Session Links below to directly access updated tutorials and class videos.

Part of the Train the Facilitators program is reading the Community Engagement Guide. It might be a good idea before leading a group, to review the guide once again, especially if it is your first group.

Click here for the Community Engagement Guide

**Note: Click on an underlined phrase to connect to more information.

• For help with Zoom, consult Senior Planet’s online guide. For general tech and other questions, see Senior Planet’s Coronavirus Resource Guide.
• Instructions, tools and tips for creating Oral Histories and Curated Life Reviews can be found in the PAL Contributor Manual.
• StoryCorps offers outstanding guidance on interview techniques and technologies:
  • best practices for conducting an interview
  • tips for an effective interview
  • technology recommendations for recording an interview

If you need refreshers, written and/or video tutorials, or answers to common questions and troubleshooting, check the Contributor Manual which serves as a companion “How To” resource for you as you take the class and build your site.  For access, go to “Contributor Manual” under the dropdown menu labeled “Resources.

Have a question that isn’t answered? Let us know here.

Below you will find the Session Guide which breaks down each session and is an interactive, online version of the downloadable Facilitator’s Guide found above.

Many sessions have video tutorials and links to other resources listed and linked under “Text and Video Resources” in addition to “Prep Work” (i.e. homework) and “Session Breakdown.” When you register alone or with a group and go to the Facilitators’ Guide, you will see a class plan by session, suggested homework, and other suggested steps. 

Feel free to copy and paste these pages for your own portals and rearrange as desired, within your own portals, to reflect your class structure and schedule.