Call to Order
The American Council of the Blind (ACB) Board of Directors met virtually via zoom on Wednesday, August 31, 2022. President Dan Spoone called the meeting to order at 8:00 PM Eastern Time.
Roll Call and Introduction of Staff and Guests: Denise Colley, ACB Secretary
At the call of the roll, the following Board members were present: Dan Spoone, Deb Cook Lewis, Ray Campbell, Denise Colley, David Trott, Kim Charlson, Chris Bell, Jeff Bishop, Donna Brown, Gabriel Lopez Kafati, Terry Pacheco, Doug Powell, Rachel Schroeder, Kenneth Semien, Koni Sims, and Jeff Thom. Board of Publications Member Penny Reeder was present representing that body.
Staff present: Eric Bridges, ACB Executive Director, Clark Rachfal, ACB Director of Advocacy and Governmental Affairs, Nancy Marks-Becker, ACB Chief Financial Officer and Rick Morin, Technical Director of ACB Media.
Guests: Janet Dickelman, ACB Convention Steering Committee Chair.
Approval of Agenda: Dan Spoone President
President Spoone welcomed the three new Board members. He then reviewed the agenda.
Powell asked about the carryover of the agenda item from the July Board meeting related to a discussion of the length of the convention for input from the Board. Spoone responded that in the Executive Directors report, Eric would be having Rick Morin and Janet Dickelman provide high level summary information on what came out of the convention survey, to inform that discussion. Janet and Rick will be compiling all the information from the written responses, as well as the follow-up from the Community Calls, the Affiliate Presidents meetings, and the Special Interest Affiliates Circle.
It was moved by Bell and seconded by Powell to approve the agenda. The motion carried.
Review and Approval of July Board Meeting Minutes - July 1, 2022: Denise Colley
It was moved by Bell and seconded by Charlson to approve the July 1, 2022, Board Meeting minutes. The motion carried.
Mission Moment: Dan Spoone and Eric Bridges
Dan began the discussion by acknowledging all the work of the Voting Task Force and the successful voting process at the 2022 hybrid annual business meeting. He also congratulated our organization for full inclusion for all in our 2022 candidate elections, resolution decisions and constitution and bylaw amendment votes.
Eric seconded Dan’s remarks, and specifically thanked Nancy Becker for all the hard work and late hours she put in coordinating with the Voting Task Force and Vote Now, as well as serving as our Elections Supervisor.
Nancy was asked to share the expense for the voting process. Vote Now costs were $12,600. This included $5200 for setting up the unique voter codes and the three elections/business areas, $1,000 for sending out the email reminders to those we had email addresses for in our database, and $6,400 to mail out voter information to those we didn’t have email addresses for. There were about 2,450 paper documents that were mailed out. In checking things out with Vote Now after we had completed all voting, only 13 of those individuals actually voted. We need to reach out to the affiliates to see if they have more accurate email address information.
President’s Report: Dan Spoone
Fundraiser thank you’s: Dan thanked ACB members, the Board and staff for their participation in the summer auction, both as contributors and bidders, and reminded everyone that the ACB Media Holiday Auction will be on November 27. He also thanked everyone who supported the ACB Braille Forum raffle, all of those who were individual sponsors for this year’s hybrid Conference and Convention, those who participated as in-person or virtual walkers in the Brenda Dillon Memorial Walk, and the MMS Program.
Mental Health and Wellness Committee: Dan reported that this committee has been established with Pam Shaw as chair. She has already begun developing a formalized process for identifying interested members to serve on the committee.
ACB Media Support Committee: Dan and Rick Morin have been working on the development of this Committee and Dan is about ready to finalize Committee appointments. Once the Committee is in place the plan is to begin working on methods for socializing ACB Board generated policies. (See document entitled “Socialization of ACB Board Generated Policy”). The hope is to begin this process through the ACB Media Support Committee.
It was moved by Campbell and seconded by Powell to approve the President’s report. The motion carried.
Executive Director’s Report: Eric Bridges
Audio Description Awards Gala: The inaugural event was held last November, and highlighted the entertainment industry that is utilizing description, be it cable, network and/or streaming services. The event was an absolute success, and we were able to raise some money for ACB, and highlight and raise the visibility of audio description with the entertainment industry.
This year’s Gala will be held on November 29th at 7:30PM Eastern time. Some of the organizations that are represented on the Gala Planning Committee include Paramount Global, NBC Universal, Vispero, Dicapta (a company that provides captioning and audio description in Spanish), the Audio Description Steering Committee, the ACB president, ACB staff and Bridge Multimedia (a company that does captioning and audio description for children’s education content.) Doug Roland, who produced the inaugural event will be doing so again this year.
ACB Conference and Convention Survey: Eric said there was over an 80% completion rate. Rick Morin provided a top line update on some initial findings. He and Janet will be providing a more in-depth analysis of the survey at the Fall Board meeting.
Rick began by reporting that 560 people responded to the survey, with an 80% completion rate, or 450 responses. Of those, about 82% provided demographic information. These top-level findings are across all demographic groups. Part of the deep-down analysis of this data will be to analyze certain responses based on demographics, because different demographic constituencies may look at some of these survey areas differently. Responders who were totally blind represented 60.5%, those with low vision represented 28.6%, and sighted respondents represented 8.4%. 59% of those responding said they attended the entire convention virtually, and of those who attended virtually, 89% attended via zoom. In terms of age demographics, those 44 years of age and younger represented 13.9% of responders, those between 45 and 64 years of age represented 33%, and those 65 years of age and older represented 49.1%. 62.5% of respondents said they were active in ACB Community. There were a whole series of questions that addressed the various motivating factors for physically going to the convention. In priority from most to least important were location and ease of getting there 75%, cost 62%, Special Interest Affiliate programs 60.5%, social activities 52%, exhibit hall 45.9%, tours 34.2%, banquet keynote speaker 25%. 72.7% of responders strongly agreed that their ACB Member Account provided them all the information they needed to get timely an accurate information about all aspects of the convention. 52.6% strongly agreed that the daily newspaper provided them all the information they needed to be able to keep up with schedule changes, and 19.1% neither agreed nor disagreed. 40.6% of those responding strongly agreed that the length of the convention was necessary, including the pre- and post-convention elements, and 43.6% strongly disagreed. 14.6% neither agreed nor disagreed. 62% of responders strongly agreed that the process to adopt Resolutions was democratic. 80.5% of responders strongly agreed that the voting process was democratic and worked well, given the nature of the convention being hybrid. 63% of responders agreed that the business meeting elements needed to be during general session. 71.5% of responders agreed that the use of prerecorded material helped move things along and was done professionally. 49.3% of responders agreed that the integration of in-person and virtual attendees was seamless, and everyone had an equal chance to participate and 18.6% neither agreed nor disagreed. 19.2% of responders agreed that sufficient COVID safeguards were in place, 35.5% disagreed, 18.3% neither agreed or disagreed, and 25% indicated it wasn’t applicable. 65.5% of responders agreed that sponsor presentations were appropriate. 55.9% agreed that the auction was best held as a virtual event, and 23.5% neither agreed nor disagreed. 57.9% agreed that audio quality met their needs.
Netflix: In July, ACB was invited to participate on a panel presentation dealing with accessible entertainment. Earlier this year, Netflix made a significant commitment to audio describing a large amount of their content as a part of Global Accessibility Awareness Day. As part of that commitment, they elected to host three accessibility panels at theaters around the world. They were held in London, Manhattan, and Los Angeles. They invited leaders from different organizations to speak about their particular community and why accessible entertainment was so important. Part of the reason ACB was invited to participate was because we had developed a stronger relationship with Netflix over the past year. Eric said he was able to talk about audio description, as well as authentic casting in representation on the screen of blind actors playing blind roles. He was also able to give a good assessment of where things are in relation to accessibility.
Website concerns: Pacheco had some website concerns she wanted to bring to Eric’s attention. Eric recommended that when Board members have concerns about operational issues, they should just reach out to him.
Bishop stated that one of the pieces that should be a rock, or part of our Strategic Plan for 2023, is working on infrastructure to get the members.acb.org accounts affiliated in some way so that they could be utilized for authentication across ACB related services. putting up an actual site that is rich in reference to taking payments and collecting information is simplistic in the grand scheme of things. Getting the schema set up for authentication and integrating it across Donor Perfect and our member databases, however, is more complicated. This has implications across all kinds of things in reference to ACB Media, membership, services and delivery strategy and being able to customize what kinds of services a person would like to obtain from the organization.
It was moved by Bell and seconded by Campbell to accept the Executive Director’s report. The motion carried.
Chief Financial Officer’s Report: Nancy Marks-Becker
As we are midway through our financial year, a projection has been completed as to where we anticipate ACB will be by the end of the year. Nancy began this process by using our actual financial information through June 2022, she started with the budgeted items from July through December, and where there was an anticipated difference for the budget, the information was adjusted accordingly.
For 2022, the approved budget deficit from Operations was $232,700 and the projected deficit is anticipated to be $259,700, which is about $27,000 higher than was budgeted. The budgeted revenue was $1,681,500 and projected revenue is $1,476,900. Budgeted expenses were $2,352,300 and projected expenses are $2,152,000. The ACB Thrift Stores budgeted net contribution was $245,500, and projected is $328,300. The convention budgeted profit was $182,600, and the projected profit right now is approximately $87,000.
Nancy reminded the Board that in 2021, ACB and ACBES received almost $238,000 in Payment Protection Program (PPP) loans which provided the organization with cash to help meet operating expenses in 2021. Forgiveness for these loans was submitted in 2021. In the first quarter of 2022, loans were forgiven so that we didn’t need to pay the bank back for the money that we received. However, we needed to recognize this as revenue in 2022.
To date, the value of our ACB Investments is $4,575,000. Our Reserve Account balance is $1,532,600. Our legacy account balance is $1,687,200. The balance in the Endowed Account is $1,355,200.
It was moved by Trott and seconded by Sims that the Board authorize moving up to $250,000, if needed, to prevent any shortage in our cash flow. The motion carried.
Nancy reported that the thrift stores are now performing better than anticipated. Chris Sawyer is working closely with the store managers on merchandise presentation, staff engaging with customers, trying out new marketing strategies to draw in new customers, and ensuring that they are getting more merchandise on the sales floor. We are seeing positive results from having someone dedicated to managing the thrift stores.
It was moved by Bell and seconded by Campbell to approve the report from the Chief Financial Officer. The motion carried.
Review and Approval of the 2022 Resolution Priorities and Assignments: Gabriel Griffith, Jeff Thom, Clark Rachfal and Swatha Nandhakumar
(See the attached excel document report).
Clark stated that on the spreadsheet, each resolution is identified by its number, title, a quick summary of the Resolve clauses, how they were ranked by priority, immediate action items, the staff lead, the member or committee lead, and deadline dates. The intent in having all this information is for this to be more actionable and hold our organization more accountable to the status and implementation of the Resolutions.
There were five Resolutions rated as Priority level 1, nine rated Priority level 2, and three rated as Priority level 3. In determining the rankings of the resolutions, the committee looked at the urgency with which a resolution needed to be implemented, as well as the amount of work needed for its implementation.
It was moved by Charlson and seconded by Brown that the Board adopt this priority recommendation and schedule for implementation of our Resolutions for 2022. The motion carried.
It was recommended that the information from this document be made available to the membership and placed on the website in a narrative form.
Code of Conduct Approach Update Report: Chris Bell, Deb Cook Lewis and Mitch Pomerantz
Dan reported that he has appointed Mitch Pomerantz as chair of our Disciplinary Committee. Chris, Deb and Mitch have met several times since the July 1 Board meeting to put an approach together to gain feedback and input from the membership and develop a process document for sharing Board developed policies like the Code of Conduct, before final adoption by the Board. They also reported on where efforts are right now with our existing Code of Conduct Policy and the Code of Conduct Process document that the Board approved in July.
Mitch said that, with regard to both the Code of Conduct document and the proposed membership expectations and grievance process, it is very serious. We need to have buy-in by the membership, because this is going to address most of the conflicts that can arise between members in the foreseeable future.
After considerable discussion, it was moved by Powell and seconded by Sims to table the policy development process document until after the trial run of the Code of Conduct and Grievance Process Document has been communicated to the membership for review and feedback on a process that would be useful. The motion carried with two no votes by Bell and Pacheco.
It was then moved by Thom and seconded by Powell to rescind the motion pertaining to sending out the Process Document for action at the October Board meeting, and, instead, permit this Ad Hoc Committee to put together, in whatever format they determine is appropriate, the Process Document and the Grievance Document for discussion by the membership, if possible, by the October Board meeting. The motion carried. In the meantime, the procedure document that was passed in July remains in effect.
Dan asked Trott and Thom to be a part of this ad hoc committee since they were a part of the first committee that developed the Code of Conduct Process document that was approved on an interim basis.
Due to the lateness of the hour, the Board agreed to go into recess, and reconvene on September 13 at 8:00 PM Eastern time for the purpose of addressing the few agenda items we were unable to complete.
It was moved by Bell and seconded by Brown to adjourn. The motion carried and the meeting was recessed at 12:30 AM.