2023 National Leadership Conference Celebration

As an organization, we look forward to our National Conference each year because it means we have the opportunity to network with the other incredible Playhouses and national staff, learn by attending important discussions and share our local Madison best practices.

Our local Playhouse collaborates with all the Wisconsin Playhouses because we are truly better together!

The three Wisconsin Playhouses meet monthly throughout the year to share our wins and struggles and best practices. We look forward to theses discussions because we always learn something.

We even had Wisconsin shirts made with a play on the UW-Madison chant, ‘When you say Wisconsin, You’ve said it all”

We visited three Playhouses during our time at conference!

On our way down to Illinois we were able to tour the Rockford Playhouse and the Tinley Park Playhouse! It is so fun to see the interesting and different ways each Playhouse is set up and to learn more about the ways they are serving their local families. There is always a reception at the National Playhouse too. It’s where it all began!

Our local Playhouse was celebrated for the robust behind the scenes work of our staff and volunteers!

The National Office has created 8 different Standards of Execution (SOE) which guide local Playhouses do to our very best in serving our families. There is a robust list of work needed to complete these standards and there are 3 levels of achievement; baseline, strong and center of excellence.  Our team has worked incredibly hard this year and received awards for 7 of the SOE’s! In order to receive the SOE Champion award you need to have 5 or more SOE’s that achieve Strong or Center of Excellence. The next time you’re in the Playhouse be sure to check out our award wall!

• Strong:
  • Board Health and Strategy
  • Development and Fundraising
• Center of Excellence:
  • Programs
  • Marketing
  • Operations and Facility
  • Volunteer Management and HR
  • Financial Health

Our local Playhouse was well represented!

We were honored to contribute on 4 different topics throughout the week.

• On Thursday both Anne, operations and one-on-one coordinator, and Courtney, programs and volunteer manager, helped present topics on group programs and one-on-one programs.
• On Friday our Site Director, Kelly , presented on the impact of Playhouse tours, and we are happy to share that we are the top Playhouse for Playhouse tours throughout the network! She also participated in the Marketing Roundtable because she is part of the National Marketing Committee. Anne, brought her expertise to a math tutoring topic.

We had a large group of staff and dedicated volunteers attend this year and each person came away with awesome learnings, which we are sharing below.

The driving force behind all the work we do behind the scenes is our families.

Every decision made, every action took and everything we implement starts with the question – ‘how will this benefit our families?’. We are incredibly proud of the work done here in Madison because we are incredibly proud to have the chance to serve the Down syndrome community.