Lessons From Leaders

Lessons from Leaders was a speaking series put on by Five Points Washington aimed to be a diverse collection of speakers who could share the secrets of their success and speak on leadership. While the series started with a bang, raising a significant amount of money for needed facility improvements and even scholarships for local youth, the series unfortunately faded quickly.

It all started in January 2010, when the series was first announced. It was announced that the inaugural speaker of the series would be former Alaskan governor and Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who in 2010 was a successful political commentator and television personality. Her television show “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” premiered in March 2010, and she was a regular contributor to Fox News. She was set to give a speech April 17, 2010, entitled “You Don’t Need A Title to Make A Difference.” Participants had several ticket options, from just the keynote speech, to attending a more intimate banquet and the speech, to a “private” meeting with the speaker.

500 tickets for only the keynote address ran from $75-$100, which sold out within hours. 400 banquet tickets were sold in groups of eight for $1500 and were snatched up in the first 24 hours. 100 private reception tickets went for $2,500 each and all of them sold as well. It could not have started off better for Five Points, and this was not just a local event. Tickets were sold to people from across the Midwest, even though no advertising outside of Central Illinois was done.

Palin’s appearance also attracted a group of protesters who made a public showing the day of Palin’s speech on Washington Square.

Palin, along with all of the other speakers in the series, were booked through a speakers bureau, to which you must give all the details of the day’s events. When Five Points described the logistics of the banquet and how they wanted Governor Palin to walk through the crowd to the dais when introduced, bureau representatives responded that would never work, because Palin would stop and greet everyone on the way and the time schedule would get off. Five Points officials designed a new route taking her through the kitchen straight to the dais. When Palin was announced to the banquet attendees, the door swung open to reveal no one. The Governor was busy greeting the people in the kitchen and missed her cue.

The Five Points hospitality got rave reviews from a now-defunct Chicago blog called Hillbuzz:

A Special Thank You to Sherril West at Five Points Washington

Posted on April 20, 2010 by HillBuzz

We just can’t stop talking about how well we were treated on Saturday when we attended the Sarah Palin speech at Five Points Washington, in Washington, IL.

Please take a look at the website for this facility – it’s just marvelous.

This is a community center that’s already managed the impossible: building such a remarkable facility during an economic downturn, so that families in the community have something affordable and fun to do together. Under West’s leadership, they can not only put on a world-class event like the Palin speech they hosted on Saturday, but they are forward-thinking and finding ways to keep the center funded and prosperous on the road ahead.

Let that sink in for a minute, because it’s sadly a novel approach in this country today: West, and the others at Five Points, didn’t just build something without a plan for keeping it solvent and strong moving forward. They did not issue an unfunded mandate, throw a big party, then wander off to something else. They made a sharp investment in their community, honored their commitments, reached out for support and advice from others, listened to people, and crafted an informed plan to keep their project on track, and on budget, so that future generations aren’t stuck with a bill, but instead inherit a treasure.

If you enjoyed our write-up of the Palin speech, we hope you know it would not have been possible without West’s help, so if you feel like doing something nice today, maybe you could send West a postcard thanking her for being so kind to us. We’ve sent a thank you card ourselves, but we’re sure she’d be delighted to receive compliments from all over the country for working so hard to put together such a great speech for Palin…and for being the driving force behind a facility as remarkable as Five Points.

Palin’s appearance raised more than $65,000 for Five Points. With that money, the organization took $15,000 and created a scholarship program for students attending ICC and Eureka College. The first two recipients were Brandi Davis and Andrew Jarrett from Washington, then students at ICC. The remaining $50,000 went toward the purchase of property east of the building for the construction of a new parking lot, which was open by December of 2010. The construction added the drive-up lane on the south side of the building.

Repeating the Palin success was going to be difficult for Five Points. It was also a question if they wanted to. Having a guest speaker of that visibility was an incredible amount of work. For 2011, the Five Points Board decided to go for a more regional speaker rather than a national name, and they also chose to move to a speaker who would reflect on a history that the community had an interest in: sports. The board chose former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka. Tickets for the evening followed the same options as the Palin event, and followed the same basic pricing tier: $50 or $75 for the keynote speech, $175 for a banquet ticket.

By the middle of June, Five Points had dropped ticket prices, a sign of slow ticket sales for Ditka. Speech-only tickets were now $50 for all seats and banquet seats were running around $125. Five Points officials pointed to the summer timing of the event as well as the perception of Ditka giving a “football speech” as reasons for the slow ticket sales. As the event got closer Five Points added a student ticket pricing option for the keynote speech at $15 per ticket, of which the Washington 12^th Man Club bought 40 for Panther football players to use.

Those 40 players comprised almost 15% of the audience, as only about 300 tickets were sold for the keynote speech. As a result, Ditka’s speech was moved to one of the banquet halls instead of the main performing arts stage. Much of Ditka’s hour-long talk consisted of a question/answer session and included some cringe-worthy moments.

In January 2012 it was announced that the third speaker in the Lessons from Leaders series would speak in April. Five Points organizers were optimistic that the Ditka mis-step was due to poor timing, the speech occurring the same summer weekend as the St. Jude run/telethon, and that this year was going to be a rebound for the speaker series. They also felt in retrospect that the choice of Ditka might have been a little antiquated, so they wanted to move to a younger choice for 2012

That year, they selected 2011 NCAA Wrestling Champion Anthony Robles. Robles was notable because he accomplished that feat with only one leg. Robles was also scheduled to hold a wrestling clinic at the high school the afternoon of his speech.

Pricing for Robles’ event was vastly different than for the previous two years. Packages for wrestlers including the clinic, banquet and speech, were only $40 with a cap on 150 wrestlers. For the general public, the banquet and speech were $35, while speech-only tickets were $10.

In the end, ticket sales did not live up to the rebound Five Points was expecting. Roughly 100 wrestlers signed up for the clinic package, but they only sold about 150 more tickets total for the banquet and/or speech. This was unfortunate because the speech given by Robles was very well accepted.

In November 2012 Five Points sponsored what would be the last in the series with a swim clinic and banquet/speech with Olympic swimmers Matt Grevers and Annie Chandler. It was in keeping with the current sports theme started by the Robles selection. Grevers had made headlines the previous spring by proposing to Chandler on the podium of an event after winning 1^st place. This event was not billed as part of the Lessons from Leaders series as under conditions of the negotiation it had to be under the umbrella of an aquatics organization, so it was billed as a Breakout Swim Clinic. Tickets for the banquet portion were only $20 with a meal designed for youth, called a “casual banquet.” Ticket sales for the clinic were adequate, but banquet sales were poor.

And with that, the Lessons from Leaders series quietly ended. What had started with a Sarah Palin sellout and a monumental money maker for the Five Points facility had, in a matter of two years, completely faded away. Patrons of Five Points can still reap the benefits, however, with the use of the south-side parking lot and drive-up lane, which exist partially because of the successes of the series.

General information taken from articles in the Washington Reporter, Washington Courier, and Peoria Journal Star.

Special thanks to Sherril West for her contributions to the article.