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The Story of the Clearinghouse . . .

 

Once upon a time, a Region III Leadership Development Chair by the name of Michael Leahy collected a, "humble pile of paper". That pile was made up of lecture notes, handouts, and a variety of other information from the workshops given at various Alpha Phi Omega conferences. It was intended as a reference source for future presenters, but the problem was access to the pile. The problem remained and life moved Michael to Michigan. The pile was passed to Steven R. Crawford, the next Region III Leadership Development (LD) Chair. He continued to add to the pile, and so did Michael when he came back for visits. Steven got the rest of the Region III volunteer staff pretty well-trained to give him a copy of any of their presentations. Well, again life intervened and it was once again time for the the pile to be passed to a new LD Chair. This time the recipient was Chris Rock. The summer that Chris got the pile was one where there was no life intervening at all. With too much time on her hands, a scanner, and a brand new copy of Adobe Acrobat, Chris set to work to resolve the problem of accessibility to future presenters. Michael and Steve helped with tracking down some electronic copies of the workshops and provided presenter information on the hard copies. In about two weeks the pile had been digitized. A website called, "Region III Leadership Resources," was born. Since Michael was in a different region now and none of the people involved in this story are shy, word of the website spread. Soon people from all over APO were using and even occasionally submitting things to the site.

 

At the end of that summer, 1999, the Sectional Resource Weekend (SRW) took place as usual. Dave Emery, at the time, the National Leadership Development Program Director, and Dr. Lisa Covi, Vice Chair of the National Leadership Development Committee, asked about this new leadership resource. Lisa had a vision for it to become a national clearinghouse for workshop material. By the end of the weekend it was decided that the LD committee would support the site as a program. The National Leadership Resources Clearinghouse of Alpha Phi Omega was born. The LD Committee began to include information about the Clearinghouse in its publications. In the next two years, the site underwent many revisions and continued to grow. More people became familiar with it and became active participants in the program by submitting copies of every workshop they gave. These are the people whose names appear most often across the pages of this site. Many thanks to all of them! Thanks also goes to anyone who has ever submitted a workshop to the site. Whether repeat submitters or one-hit wonders, every bit of information is valuable. In January 2003, the Clearinghouse was given over to a new caretaker. Pam Decker worked to promote the Clearinghouse and kept its files up to date. The site remained in use until July 2004, when it was reorganized again and transferred to the official National Leadership Development website. Then-LD Webmaster, Dr. Derek Cashman, re-coded the site using a PHP/MySQL interface, allowing for easier maintenance and search capabilities. Today, there are more than 400 documents in the Clearinghouse! Some day ten years or more from now, the material in this site will not only serve as a reference for workshops, but also as a historical record of how things were once done in the fraternity. Perhaps even those many years from now, the old ideas may provide a spark and become new again.
Hope you enjoyed the story! :-)