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• Hold a “Five Wishes” Signing
  Asking your coalition members to complete the Five Wishes document is a great way to provoke thought and conversation among your members. We suggest that you provide the coalition members with the pamphlets and ask them to take them home, fill them out, and then return to the next meeting ready to discuss what they discovered during the experience. Using Five Wishes, you can refocus yourselves on the issues that you are encouraging others to examine through your coalition work. You may obtain copies of Five Wishes by visiting www.agingwithdignity.org. Even if all of your members have advanced directives in place, the conversation about the decision-making process and how they communicated their desires to their families will benefit everyone.
• Talk to your doctor about end-of-life issues and what you are doing within your coalition.
  Ask your doctor for input regarding your activities and what his or her views are about them. You may also want to ask your doctor about pertinent end-of-life laws in your state and how they affect you. Become clear about your doctor’s positions about end-of-life issues that are important to you.
• Visit a funeral home. 
  Talk to your funeral home directors. Ask them about what they do and why. How do they feel about their work? What have they learned? What wisdom can they share about coping with grief? …and funeral directors are a great source of information on end-of-life and cultural and religious diversity!

3. COALITION WEBSITES – THE EXAMPLE OF CHICAGO
Are you looking for ideas for starting a website for your coalition? If so, check out the Chicago End-of-Life Care Coalition’s site (www.globalchicago.net/onestarfish). The site offers up-to-date information on end-of-life news, coalition events, and provides an email listserv for discussion. The Coalition’s site also hosts sections on resources, providing tips and ideas for community action, engagement, and education. Additionally, the site contains descriptions and information about projects being implemented and supported by the Coalition. One such initiative is the Picturing Death Project, an art installation created by visual artist Deborah Boardman. To find out more about this project visit the coalition’s website (www.globalchicago.net/onestarfish/boardman.html)
or visit the website of the artist (www.deborahboardman.com). Great job Chicago!

4. NEED SOME IDEAS? CHECK OUT THE FLORIDA PARTNERSHIP WEBSITE
The Florida Partnership for end-of-life care contains a list of 19 community coalitions around the state and descriptions of the kinds of activities that they have and are planning to organize. You can find them at www.floridapartnership.org/.

5. SPEAKING OF WEBSITES - THE BENTON FOUNDATION’S COMMUNITY TOOLKIT
The Benton Foundation has developed a toolkit which seeks to help community leaders gauge nonprofit technology needs, identify available resources, and design a community action plan to coordinate existing services or create new ones. This toolkit consists of stories, practical steps, and worksheets for the consultant or community leader who is charged with carrying out the assessment process and action-plan design. The toolkit may also be useful to funders and other leaders who are considering jumpstarting such a process. Thinking about getting a website for your coalition? You’ve got to read this. Go to www.benton.org/Practice/TA/communitytoolkit.html.

6. THE FINDING OUR WAY WEBSITE IS UP! MATERIALS ARE AVAILABLE!
For information about the series, resources, tips, and action ideas, visit the Finding Our Way website at www.findingourway.net. The website is your one-stop source for all kinds of information and materials surrounding the series. The first-of-three radio pitch and national news releases can be found at www.findingourway.net/downloads.htm. The articles are also available for viewing in their entirety on the website. Scroll down the front page and you’ll find links to them on the left-hand side. Just remember that you can’t print them out until after they’ve been run in the papers!

In addition to the website, we now have materials available. These materials include informational fliers for your newspaper editors, a Community Action Guide, the Finding Our Way logo and community action brochures. The Community Action brochure is available in larger quantities. To request these materials, email us at steeringcommittees@bballard.com with “material request” in the subject line. Please include a list of the materials you would like, your mailing address (no P.O. Boxes please!), and a description of how you plan to use the materials. All these materials are available for immediate downloading at www.findingourway.net/downloads. 

7. ACTION GUIDE IDEAS
The Finding Our Way Action Guide contains a number of great ideas for community action surrounding the series. Here are some examples:

• Organize a community-hospital summit where leaders from your local hospital and your end-of-life community can address issues of concern to the community.
• Develop a radio campaign with local end-of-life leaders and experts.
• Organize a Spirituality-in-Dying event and include leaders from a number of faith communities.
• Coordinate a Public Forum within your community. You can title it “Finding Our Way: Living with Dying in (your community name).”
• Work with your bookstores and libraries to become centers for learning about and contemplating end-of-live issues. Perhaps you can include the community resource directories that many of you created during the On Our Own Terms campaign. You can also display posters for the series. For copies, email findingourway123@aol.com.
• Come up with creative ways to introduce the topic of end-of-life into your local schools. Talk with school administrators and offer them your suggestions and resources.

8. TALK TO US!
Do you feel like part of a national movement to improve care near the end of life? If you do, we think it’s in part because we try to discover what coalitions around the country are doing and then share than information with you. We can’t provide that sense of national momentum if you don’t tell us what you’re doing. Please keep us posted on the activities of your coalition! We’re pulling together a calendar of YOUR events and only you can help us fill it out. Have you had successes in securing commitments from your local newspapers to run the Finding Our Way series? What barriers have you faced and how have you overcome them? We would like to share your stories with the other coalitions so that they may learn from your experiences. The series is only a few weeks away. What plans for action do you have in place? What are you hoping to do? If you have some stories, wisdom, or tips to share, email them to us at steeringcommittees@bballard.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

9. ON OUR OWN TERMS IS BACK!
Bill Moyers’ Public Affairs Television and Thirteen/WNET in New York have joined forces to encourage public televisions around the country to re-air On Our Own Terms: Moyers on Dying. They are attempting to do this in conjunction with Finding Our Way. Thirteen is making outreach grants available to local Public Television stations so contact your station to see if they’re planning to air the series and apply for a grant. This is a great opportunity to enhance your outreach efforts surrounding Finding Our Way. Public Television stations can contact Mari Cossaboom about applying for a grant at cossaboo@thirteen.org

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