2017 NASW-CA Annual Conference

October 20, 2017 - 7:00am - 5:45pm

Marriott Hotel, San Mateo, CA

Multiple Exhibitor, Advertiser, and Sponsorship Opportunities are available....

Market and Network with 500 Social Work and Mental Health Professionals
Annual Conference attendees include:

· 60% Licensed Clinical Social Workers and Marriage Family Therapists

· 30% Associate Social Workers and Marriage Family Interns

· 10% Non-licensed Social Workers, Social Work Students, and other Mental Health Professionals

Exhibit Hall - Reserve a table and present your services and products to social work students and professionals from throughout the State OR take this opportunity to recruit licensed and non-licensed social work professionals. Traffic builders include refreshments, networking reception and door prizes. See important exhibitor information section for complete details , including exhibit hall hours and floor plan.

Exhibit Fees:

$530/For-profit

$430/Non-profit

Optional Items:

$30/Electrical outlet
$17/Wireless internet access

$45/Friday lunch ticket

Sponsorship Opportunities - There are several exciting opportunities for your company to gain broad exposure throughout the conference. Receive generous recognition by sponsoring an activity or an item listed below.

Awards Ceremony - Exclusive opportunity!
$1,600 - Benefits:

· One Exhibit Table and Two complimentary lunch tickets

· Electronic ad space, for display during awards ceremony and lunch

· Acknowledgement in the onsite program and on the event registration web site

General Session Program - Exclusive opportunity!

$1,500 - Benefits:

· Electronic ad space, for display during the general session

· Acknowledgement in the onsite program and on the event registration web site

 Exhibit Hall Reception - Two opportunities!

$1,200 - Benefits:

· Signage at the reception food station

· Acknowledgement in the onsite program and on the event registration web site

 Exhibit Hall Breaks - Four opportunities!

$1,200 - Benefits:

· Signage at the food and beverage stations

· Acknowledgement in the onsite program and on the event registration web site

 Program Advertisements - Place your name in the hands of key decision makers in the human services field by advertising in the annual conference on-site program. The program contains complete conference schedules and event information which will serve as a resource to the 500 attendees during the conference as well as months to come.  Advertising options are listed below.

$835/Full page - 7 ½" x 10" h

$435/Half page - 7 ½" x 4 ½" h

$235/Quarter page - 3 ½" x 4 ½" h

 Register now! The most popular items sell out quickly.

The registration deadline for all opportunities is September 20, 2017.

Apply for a new private hire or taxicab license

A new applicant is someone who has never been granted a licence by Liverpool City Council or whose licence has expired.

Before you apply

Take your original passport and/or right to work documents to: Venture Place, Sir Thomas Street, L1 6BW between 9.30am and 12pm, Monday to Wednesday only.

Please ring the number for Licensing at the reception desk so an officer can inspect and scan your original documents. We will then write to you to let you know if they have been accepted and tell you to apply for your licence online, as set out below.

If you fail to bring your original documents you will not be able to apply for your licence.

• View a list of original documents that are accepted as proof.

How to apply

If you have held a full valid driving licence for 12 months which has your current address on it, you can:

• Apply for your Certificate of Disclosure from the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) and a DVLA Mandate.

Personnel Checks, who will process your application on our behalf, will then let you know when to apply for the following:

• Liverpool Standard Part 1 Certificate.
• Medical certificate.

Please note: If you have lived overseas for three months or more since the age of 18, you will also need a Certificate of Good Conduct.

Collecting your licence

Personnel Checks will contact you when your licence is ready to collect, tell you how to book an appointment to pick it up and give you a list of the documents you will need to bring with you. You will not be issued with a licence if you fail to bring these documents with you.

How much will a new licence cost me?

* We are currently applying a £30 discount to the issue fee (pending a review). This means that the total you pay for a three-year licence (excluding any charges made for Liverpool Part 1 Certificate and your medical certificate) will be £208.57.

We cannot refund fees if you withdraw your application at any point, or if your application is unsuccessful.

Constructive Criticism

If you learn to really listen to constructive criticism, interpret it correctly, and act on the feedback, you’ll come out of a bad review, or even just an uncomfortable conversation, ahead of the game, no matter what stage of your career you’re at.

Put yourself in your boss’s shoes

It’s easy to see things from your side, but if you can shift your perspective to your manager’s point of view, the feedback will be easier to swallow. For instance, your opinion may be that you’re missing deadlines because they’re unrealistic and you’re multitasking multiple projects. Your boss’s opinion may be that you’re missing deadlines because you don’t think they are important or because you have lousy time-management skills. The key is to have an honest and respectful conversation and consider each other’s perspectives.

“If you can see things from their point of view, you can better understand that person, which is invaluable when it comes to working relationships,” says Dr. Leah Weiss, a researcher and professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Reflect before you react

Your first instinct might be to get defensive, explain your actions, or shut down—instead of evaluating whether there is any validity to the critique.

Weiss recommends taking a day or two to reflect on the criticism. Think about whether the other person might have a point. Maybe you could be more vocal when you think you’ll miss a deadline, say “no” to projects if you’re swamped, or find ways to increase your productivity. “It’s hard to do this if you reply right away, so it’s best to take a few moments or longer,” she says.

Ask how you can improve

As much as you want to run out of the conference room, and as humbling as this may feel, don’t leave the conversation without getting clarity on how you can improve. Nothing pleases a boss more than the sense that her feedback is being heard—and that an employee has a genuine willingness to improve.

Turn the negative into a positive

Now that you know where you have room to improve and you’ve created an action plan, it’s time to make some changes. (Nothing changes if nothing changes, right?)

Based on the “goals’ conversation you had, write up an “action plan” and put it on your desk so that it’s top of mind. Try to hit one small goal each day and one big goal each week, then follow up with your boss once you feel like you’ve improved and met (or exceeded) your goals.

Society for Human Resource Management

Employee turnover rate can greatly impact the success of a company, especially with a smaller team. For businesses that operate with hourly staff members, the blow can be particularly hard: In 2015, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) reported that the annual turnover rate for hourly employees is a whopping 49 per cent, costing an average of nearly $5,000 per employee.

The good news is, there are ways employers can attract and retain the right hourly workers to reduce high employee turnover. John Waldmann, CEO of employee scheduling software company Homebase, offered four tips for businesses with an hourly workforce.

1. Start during the hiring process.

The hiring process is when you should be looking for candidates who can not only do the job well but will stick around for a long time. The most common frustration from managers, according to Waldmann, is how hard it is to find quality employees. With the unemployment rate below 5 per cent, this is particularly hard right now. Finding an applicant who is available, falls within the desired wage range, can commute to work and has relevant experience can feel impossible.

Make sure you're aware of exactly what a successful employee will do: What are the job duties they will be expected to perform, what are the behaviours that are required to be effective at completing the tasks, and what are the minimum requirements an applicant must have to even be taken into consideration for the role

To ensure your business gets the right employees, Waldmann suggests doing the following:

•          Write job descriptions that attract the right candidates.

•          Use low cost technology to reduce the time it takes to review resumes

•          Conduct a reference check.

2. Get scheduling right.

Allowing your employees to balance their work with their personal lives is a big factor in whether or not an employee wants to stay at a given job. If an employee seems to always be scheduled when they've said they aren't free, your scheduling process clearly needs an overhaul, said, Waldmann.

"Your employees are the heartbeat of your business, interacting with customers and making sales that keep the doors open," Waldmann added. "You need their hard work each day, and that means matching up your business needs as closely as possible with the schedule they want."

3. Honour time off requests.

In the same vein as making sure your scheduling lines up with employee availability, giving employees the time off that they request can make them feel valued and want to stick around to see the business succeed.

On the flip side, a business also needs to make sure it is adequately staffed, added Waldmann. Not granting time off requests to keep the business fully staffed may lead to disgruntled employees. But if the pendulum swings too far in the other direction and you grant time-off requests too liberally, you'll wind up understaffed.

This can all be avoided if you improve your time off request process. Having a deadline in place – for example, at least two weeks' notice – will keep your business running smoothly. There will always be last-minute calls due to illness or emergencies, but managing the planned days off will set you up for success."

4. Communicate. 

Communication comes first. Your employees want to know what's going on with the business as it relates to them. When you share more with your employees, they will be much more likely to stick around. Make sure they feel comfortable making suggestions for improving sales and efficiency, just as you give them pointers on how to improve their performance. Communication needs to flow in both directions. Over communicate the value that every role and every employee has on the team. When an employee is reminded how the work they do helps the business succeed, they'll be more motivated by the tasks at hand. Over time, without reminders of the contribution the employee has on the business's success, employees can lose their pride and connection to what they're doing.

Beyond The Germ Theory

A.

When Captain Cook arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in the late 1770s, he was received as Lono, the local god of peace and agricultural blessings. The natives welcomed him with gifts of various meats and tropical fruits. In return, Cook and his crew gave the Hawaiians mirrors and cloth. They also opened the door to syphilis, gonorrhoea, tuberculosis and influenza. For the native population, who had no innate immunity to these novel germs, this contact proved apocalyptic. The epidemics that followed Cook’s visits and those of others reduced the indigenous population from more than half a million to less than 90,000 by the 1850s.

B.

There is no doubt that infectious disease has been a great mystery for most of history. Although the Hebrew Scriptures give directions for quarantine and sanitation, it is only relatively recently that basic techniques of hygiene were scientifically identified and promoted. It was in the late 1800s, for example, that our earliest and most common instruction—“Wash your hands!”—came to make scientific sense. Before Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur, and Robert Koch developed the germ theory of infection, much disease was believed to be spontaneous. To wash hands, surfaces or surgical tools seemed until that time superfluous. The spread of disease was common, in some ways a foregone conclusion; when everyone in a hospital died, the solution was to raze it and build again once the miasma or bad vapours had cleared. From those times, it was a long and miserable road to Listerine antiseptics, pasteurization, and Koch’s identification of germs with specific diseases. Prior to this, all was a mystery.

C.

It’s easy, then, to understand that for both individuals and populations, the sporadic nature of disease and epidemics was a confusing challenge. Why do some get sick and not others? Where does plague come from? What have we done to deserve this? Due to a vacuum created by a lack of information, religion and imagination were tasked to find these answers. Many even speculated that, It was something “in the stars” that drove plagues? This was because of imagery from Genesis to Revelation (in the Bible) often refers to heavenly bodies as markers or signs. It was tempting for some to misinterpret them as heralds of terrestrial disturbances. Astrologers sought out repeating patterns, and, conflating them with odd events such as eclipses and comets, jiggered together a message foretelling a tenuous future. In the end, however, most agreed that God was the First Cause and concluded that whatever came was divine judgment.

D.

Late in the first century, the apostle John saw a vision of four horsemen, each riding a different-coloured horse. The meaning of that vision that has been dubbed "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" has been debated ever since, but it can be understood—and two thousand years later, it’s more relevant than ever. Although we now understand the biological causes of infectious disease in great detail, many even today perceive the pandemic potential of microbes as God’s latent wrath awaiting sinful man. What does the continuing cycle of plague really tell us about the human condition? Just as in the heyday of such fervour, it remains easy to get caught up in believing that modern plagues are a sign of the end, a kind of canary in the coal mine of human morality. After all, it was not long ago that HIV/AIDS was used as a proxy for sin, a marker of moral decay.

E.

Yet a pestilence is not a spirit; nor is it a vapour, a miasma or any mysterious force. There has been a radical shift in understanding diseases moving from theology to ecology. It is a biological entity—a bacterium, a spore, a virus. And like anything biological, it has a rationale and specific strategies through which it interacts with other living things, such as infecting a human being. As Jared Diamond explains in Guns, Germs, and Steel, a disease needs new people to infect. But once that strategy has been found out, who is responsible for the spread of disease—the microbe or the man? In this struggle between microbe and human host, there has certainly been a great and tragic loss. “The so-called Black Death erupted in Europe in 1347and within a decade wiped out a quarter to a third of the population. Once introduced, it could even spread without rats, as infected fleas hopped from person to person, and people with plague pneumonia coughed on others.”

F.

The real culprit was not the bacterium, however, but the size, squalor and crowding of the human population; that was the trigger point for the pandemic. Infectious disease is not God’s wrath; AIDS, for example, is a basic biological consequence of contact with or consumption of primates as bush meat, viral mutation, and the stubborn continuance of harmful actions. Human behaviour is the culprit, the real first cause of this modern plague. The same can be said of most of the potentially infectious diseases we fear. Cholera is another well-studied disease. Caused by a bacterium, the infection brings on vomiting and diarrhoea leading to death by dehydration. That this plague is associated with contaminated water was well-known when the Manhattan Company supplied New York City with water drawn from a sewage runoff site in the infamous Five-Points slum. The resulting epidemics that began in 1832 were completely predictable, the real cause was economic: it was more profitable to take water from the sump than to pipe it from the river.