I’VE GOT A SECRET GAME INSTRUCTIONS GAME CARDS Game Instructions This game is modeled after the 1960’s classic game show “I’ve Got a Secret.” The purpose of the game is to have fun! And to practice techniques for talking to your collaboration partners about budgets, programs, money and other resources. There are eight players in the game. One person is the contestant, three people are “Panelists” and three people serve on the “Remedy Team”. The Project Director plays “Emcee”. The Contestant is an actor, playing the role of a collaboration partner. The Contestant draws a card to see what role he or she is playing. The Contestant’s job is to give clues about her identity – and her attitude about talking about budgets. Panelists start the game. They ask the Contestant questions. They try to guess the secret identity of the Contestant and name that secret in five minutes or less. Panelists might ask questions such as “Do you know a lot about your agency’s budget?” “Are you the person in charge of planning?” “Are you interested in changing the way your organization spends money if it helps deaf women?” The Remedy Team suggests how this character might be helped to have useful discussions about resources, budgets and money. The Emcee reads these rules out loud and helps get players assigned to parts. The Emcee starts the game by asking the Contestant to draw a card. The Emcee times the game; each Contestant has five minutes to act out her part. The game requires Secret Description Cards. The contestant draws a Card. Only the contestant sees the Card. The card tells the Contestant what his/her secret identify is, and gives some hints about how to describe this secret identity. The Contestant uses the hints on the card to pretend to be someone in your collaboration. The Contestant begins the game by talking about him/herself to the Panelists. The Panelists try to guess who the Contestant is pretending to be. Panelists can ask questions, but only one question per person at a time. The Contestant may need to make up some answers; be sure to keep playing the part of the secret identity at all times. The Remedy Team is observing. The game is over when the Panelists guess who the Contestant is, or when the Emcee calls time at 5 minutes, whichever comes first. The Emcee then asks the Remedy Team to brainstorm out loud all the ways this kind of person could be successfully engaged in a discussion about resource allocations and future budgets. GAME CARDS [Each of the following paragraphs is typed on a different card. There is a minimum of seven cards per game envelope. Nine cards is best.] YOUR SECRET IDENTITY IS: Executive Director of the local domestic violence shelter. You want to serve women with disabilities and deaf women. There’s never enough money, and you feel frustrated because you know you can’t afford to do all the things that should be done. When you’re in a collaboration meeting discussing how to spend money, you say things like: * I believe in serving women with disabilities. * My budget is completely committed for the next three years. * Every woman at risk needs help; what about my commitment to serve American Indian women? * If I try to push my Board, they’ll try to prioritize needs. They might decide the needs of the American Indians are more important than the needs of deaf women. After all, American Indians are 3.8% of our total population of women, but deaf women are only 1.3% of our total population. * It’s always like this. Somebody always gets left out of being served. * It isn’t my fault. * We’ve got this grant money for three years. That’ll do for now. YOUR SECRET IDENTITY IS: Director of County Social Services. * I want to serve women with disabilities and deaf women. * I tried to get funding to help this population about 4 years ago, but nobody would help me write the grant. * It seems to me that I’ve always seen this population as a priority, but now that the OVW grant has come through everybody is jumping on the bandwagon. They probably just want access to the grant money. * My boss, the County Administrator, has set strict guidelines for serving women at risk of violence. I feel bound by these limitations, and I believe that trying to get more money from the County is an impossible task. * County bureaucracy is frustrating. I’m jealous of how quickly decisions get made by the Domestic Violence Shelter staff and executive director. * My boss doesn’t want to hear about our collaboration meetings and the progress we’re making. He’s told me to just tell him if I need some help. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- YOUR SECRET IDENTITY IS: Volunteer Coordinator for a nonprofit agency called “Helping Hands”. This agency has a wide variety of programs to help women in transition in their lives. * I want to serve women with disabilities and deaf women. * My boss assigned me to go to these meetings because our agency director wants us to be part of this collaboration. I’ve never spoken to our agency director about what she wants from the collaboration. Actually, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be doing at these collaboration meetings. * My boss handles all the budget stuff. He might include me in meetings to plan new budgets, but I’ve got all I can handle with my duties as volunteer coordinator. * I don’t like talking about money. All day I work with volunteers who work for nothing. I’d love to be able to hire them all and pay them for their valuable work, but that’s never going to happen. * If I wanted to talk about resource allocation and budgets, I’d try to be an assistant to the executive director. * People need help right now. I get calls from women with disabilities every day. Talking about how to change budgets in the future doesn’t help these women! * We should just focus on what we can get done right now with the money in the grant. Even though there are all kinds of restrictions on how to spend the grant money, we should get busy and do what ever it is we can do right now. YOUR SECRET IDENTITY IS: Program Manager for a State Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Your organization primarily works on serving your constituent domestic violence programs and lobbying for legislative change. * I believe that our constituent programs work very hard to be as inclusive as possible. * As the lead agency for the grant project, my organization is responsible for the administration of the grant and its budget. I want to be as fair as possible, but ultimately my Executive Director will make the decisions about the budget. * My Executive Director is juggling multiple priorities and I only get a meeting with her once a month. When I bring up changing the budget in our monthly meetings, she tends to table it because she has to consider how it fits into the larger organizational budget. * I’m nervous about approaching my Executive Director with the changes that the collaboration is suggesting making to the budget. YOUR SECRET IDENTITY IS: Program Director for a statewide disability advocacy organization. Your organization provides education on disabilities and assistance to people with disabilities. You support your member programs by lobbying for legislative change and working to change the mindset of the state around people with disabilities. * I currently serve women with disabilities and Deaf women. * My organization is a partner in the grant project but we are not the lead agency. The lead agency is receiving funds from the grant to offset administrative costs but my organization is having to absorb those costs with our own budget. * While I manage my own program’s budget, the larger organization’s budget is out of my hands. I can make recommendations but ultimately it is not my decision. * It seems that the budget discussions revolve around my organization donating time and resources that the lead agency receives funding for. * Sometimes I think that the lead agency has only gotten involved in this grant program for the funding. YOUR SECRET IDENTITY IS: Mid-level administrator at a state agency. Your agency administers the majority of the social services in your state. You work with both disability providers and violence against women providers regularly. * We do not provide any direct services to people with disabilities but I am strongly committed to ensuring that they receive appropriate services. * My agency is very large and we are responsible for overseeing a number of programs throughout the state. This grant program is a relatively small part of our budget. * I deal with programs throughout the state that are operating on shoestring budgets. They seem to make it work with very little, why can’t we make it work with such a large grant? * I am frustrated that we have this grant money and we are still being asked to think about our larger agency’s budget. We should just use the funds we have from the grant to make the changes.