Members of the Ottumwa Leadership Academy learned about the more than 20 different service organizations on Thursday
/ KTVO's Tess Hedrick
OTTUMWA, IOWA -- Would you know where to go or who to contact if you or someone else needed some type of social service?
On Thursday, more than 20 service organizations around Wapello County held panel discussions to the Ottumwa Leadership Academy.
The academy focuses on bringing in effective leaders to our community and getting them prepared for leadership roles.
Once a month, the academy meets to focus on a different topic; and this month’s topic was human and community services.
The group did something called a ‘Poverty Experience’ to get them familiar with the different organizations such as Seneca, United Way and The Salvation Army.
“What they are going to do is to break into pairs and they'll each get a scenario of a real life type of situation. Perhaps it's a husband who just lost their job, his wife is now unemployed and they have three children, they lost their house because they couldn't make a mortgage and now what? What do they do in that situation? So we brought in 20 organizations today and our folks are going to work their scenarios -- figure out what resource would help them in that situation,” said Hollie Tometich, Executive Director of Ottumwa Leadership Academy.
Tometich said her hope is to open the eyes of the academy members to organizations they are not familiar with.
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