PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
By Lynn Osborne
Dear ALDA friends,
If anyone had told me a year ago that I
would be installed as the new President of ALDA-GS,
I would have laughed at them. Not
because I don’t believe in my
ability, but because I didn’t
know ALDA existed until last April.
Fast forward, April 12, 2008, I am sitting in an ALDA-GS board meeting being
installed as the new President.
That was the
culmination of a rocky year. From losing a good portion of my hearing to
going for months without hearing aids and then getting hearing aids to going
back to school and then getting rear-ended by a tractor trailer and the
injuries that came along with it. I managed to survive it all and to
encourage a few people I met along the way who have varying degrees of
hearing loss, and to find resources to help them. That is what ALDA, Inc.
and ALDA-GS are all about.
Helping spread the
word about our chapter was the focus of the board meeting. I am fortunate to
have a board with so much experience and enthusiasm to work with. The board
has some wonderful ideas and we need the help of each of you to make the
plans come to fruition.
We have formally named
our scholarship the Barnhart Memorial Scholarship and plan to host an annual
Spring Picnic as its fundraiser. We are asking for committee volunteers to
plan the picnic.
We will continue
selling Great Adventure tickets. If you haven’t contacted Tony Yuppa, please
do so to purchase or sell tickets.
yupyup4@juno.com
Contact your friends, family and associates and inform them of our efforts.
We are reviving the
members-at-large board positions, one for the north and one for the south.
As both of these positions are currently vacant, I will be appointing the
members for this term. Thereafter, they will be subject to nomination and
election as is the entire board. Tony Yuppa has accepted one of the
positions of member-at-large, south with the board’s confirmation. We are
now seeking names of a second member to fill the other member-at-large,
north position. The members-at-large will help with our outreach and
membership efforts.
I attended an
interesting meeting in March. It was called Emergency Responders and The
Deaf and Hard of Hearing: First Steps To Disaster Preparedness hosted by
NJDDHH.
It was a call to
action for us, as citizens who are deaf or hard of hearing, to get involved
with our town and county Office of Emergency Management. Some towns and
counties are formulating a special needs registry. It is important to make
sure you are on it so in case of emergency you will not be overlooked. The
purpose is to list all of those with needs above and beyond the other
citizens in a database so we are sure to be informed when an emergency
arises.
It is vitally
important that when programs are announced that involve hearing loss and/or
deafness that we all do our best to participate. We want to make the public
and the professionals that serve us aware that ALDA-GS members are the
experts in the experience of late-deafness. Who better to speak for what we
need than those who live it everyday?
If you haven’t
renewed your membership please do so today. If you have questions or
comments and you are not comfortable posting them on the listserv you can
contact me,
Lynn Osborne
Our Fall 2008
workshop will be on Court Access. This is in direct response to questions
and comments from the listserv.
The board is here
to serve you and we can only do that when you communicate your needs to us.
If you have ideas that you feel will help us serve you better or will
increase our membership, please let me know.
Blessings,
Lynn
