Enough Cheerleading – Time To Get To Work.

On behalf of everyone here at the Global Alliance, we hope you had a happy Thanksgiving with family and friends. We are thankful for you, our members and supporters, and your commitment to the Global Alliance’s vision and mission. Our Board has been busy these last few weeks. Here are a few updates.

Our Founding Members Campaign ended on October 31. We have 26 Founding Members — individuals; individuals on behalf of companies; and corporate — who have contributed at varying levels to help us achieve our vision of universal accessibility to the spoken word via all forms of captioning. Thank you to our Founding Members!

Our general membership opened on November 1. New members who have joined us are steno and voice captioners as well as developers of ASR; caption consumers; and representatives from industry. We are continuing to reach out — sometimes one-on-one, if that’s what it takes — to remind folks that general membership is open. If you know someone who hasn’t joined, give them a nudge and direct them to our website to learn more about the benefits of membership and the important work the Global Alliance is doing!

Last week, we began interviewing members who are interested in serving on our Board. We intend on filling four of our five open Board seats with two caption consumers who have hearing loss and two representatives from industry or academia.  All Global Alliance members will receive an email notice of our first Annual Meeting once it has been scheduled.

Our additional open Board seat is due to the recent resignation of our Treasurer, Caryn Broome. Caryn is a voice captioner, and we feel it is important to fill her open Board seat with another voice captioner to maintain the strength of our diverse Board. Caryn reluctantly informed us that, due to family obligations and a very busy work schedule, she doesn’t feel she can fulfill her duties as Treasurer or as a Board member. We are delighted to have Caryn as a Founding Member, and she assured us she will be actively involved as a member of the Global Alliance. We thank Caryn for her early involvement and hard work in helping us launch the Global Alliance!

Once all Board seats are filled, we will begin reaching out to general members to ask if you are interested in serving on our Testing and Certification Committee. We are excited to start creating testing for all methods of captioning. We know this won’t be a quick or easy task, but with the strength of our diverse membership and its commitment to high-quality captioning, the result will be real-world testing that is the gold standard. If you are interested in serving on this committee, please let us know. We need you!

Recently, we conducted a live, online meet-and-greet with one of our Board members, Gael Hannan. See the link to the captioned video further in the newsletter. Gael lives in Canada, and she is also a caption user who has hearing loss. Her insights remind us why we all work so hard to ensure high-quality captioning for universal accessibility to the spoken word. We will be doing more of these interviews with our members to spotlight our supporters and their stories.

Thank you all, once again, for your support of the Global Alliance. If you aren’t yet a member, now is the time. Click here to join. We can’t do this without you!

Thank you to the following supporters who contributed to the Global Alliance on Giving Tuesday. We appreciate your help in support of our commitment to high-quality captioning!

Anissa Nierenberger
Darlene Rodella
Jennifer Schuck
Jill Driscoll
Karyn Menck
Kim Lavender
Leverage Consulting
Steve Clark
Tammy Milcowitz