ALDA: My position on regions and Canadian ALDAns

ALDA’s regions a disservice to Canadians

You may use the Back button if you don’t (wisely) give a hoot for ALDA politics. However, for what it’s worth, this is my view on the subject. In the years that have passed, I have discovered that I can mitigate the disservice by having little to do with ALDA, but were I to pay attention again, I expect I would agree with myself.

  

History of the "regions" issue

  
  ALDA voted in 1995 to convert to regions in place of “members at large” on its Board. The resultion was passed in 1995, to take effect with the next election in 1996. Some people have said that the motion to convert to regions was sort of slipped in there, without broad public consultation and the resolution on the ballot was worded very generally, "do you want regions, yes or no". Even to someone as formerly involved in ALDA as me, it wasn't even apparent that there was any plans. Frankly, I voted against the resolution, because I believed that some means of implementation could be good and others could be bad, and the voters were not provided with the necessities for making an informed vote.
The "no" campaign began to surface after the vote, when people of like mind started to air similar concerns. This obliged the Board to place the issue back on the ballot in 1996. Although the election was structured to fill the regional director seats, there was also a resolution: "do you wish to rescind the regionalization, yes or no." Well in excess of half of the voters supported un-doing their earlier mistake, however by-law changes submitted to the membership need to have two thirds in favour.

The problem with the regions as established
  (Bear in mind I wrote this in February 1996, over a year before the 1997 federal election.)

Most Americans only know that Canada is divided on the linguistic and cultural issue with Québec. What you folks don't realize is this same little drama is being played out all over the country, from the Maritimes to British Columbia. Canada doesn't have the same obsession with its own greatness that the US has to keep it together in the face of contrasting and competing interests and values, but there is one thing that unites all Canadians and that is the certainty that no matter what, we are not Americans.
Appending contiguous provinces to the NAD-cum-ALDA regions might be administratively convenient, and recognize the geographical distance, that it's nearer to drive from Vancouver to Seattle to meet another deafened person than to drive from Vancouver to Fredricton. It is also respectful to concede that Canada is not one big entity. However, the contiguous state-province alignment guarantees Canadians will be disenfranchised in every region instead of just once at the Board level. This is just a numerical certainty. Canadian ALDAns' interests are not the same as American ALDAns' interests in the contiguous region. While it's possible that many who reside near the border might visit the contiguous state more often than the other end of Canada, from an advocacy point of view, there is nothing in common. Canadians have no ADA; in fact the Canadian legal measures that promote and provide access are in many ways opposite the type of legislation available to Americans. The economic considerations affecting the two nationalities are different. The relations with other deaf-interest groups are different. Canadian ALDAns don't give a hoot about representation on this President's Committee or that Blue Ribbon Panel or getting a seat on a statewide committion or writing letters of support for federal (US) research and training grants and all that political stuff that seems to consume the American ALDA Board. Canadian ALDAns are (or should be) more concerned with recognition by the Canadian Deaf and Hard of Hearing Forum and the various provincial health ministries and federal Health and Welfare Canada, for example. Recognition within interpreting and court reporting professions is important. So many other issues exist in Canada, at much more primitive levels of development. Welding the Canadian provinces to NAD-style regions just ensures that Canadian members will get the same recognition in ALDA that they get in Canada: none.
Ultimately, the interests of Canadians are better served by having a director who is wholly focussed on Canadian issues, with a high degree of resistance to the US agenda.
Besides, Ontario in the Midwest???? If that's the extent of the Board's insight into Canada, could they not just have mailed all Canadian members, and said, "these are the US regions. Where do you think your province should go?"

What I recommended
  The correct place for Canadian representation is at the Board table, with an elected governor (director, VP, whatever) elected from and by Canadian paid members. The secondary appeal of this model of governance is that it provides a method to represent Europe when European ALDA membership reaches the same proportion of ALDA that Canadians are. It would be difficult to fuse European states to contiguous American regions. Likewise other continents. Once the membership from Canada, Europe, etc. has further expanded to even larger proportions, then provide a mechanism for establishing two regional seats for Canada East and West, Europe East, Europe West, and so on.

Why I favour a Big Board/Executive Council Model
  ALDA has long had a problem with inclusion, or rather exclusion. It is impossible to represent every interest in a 9-member board, and it is evident that there is a need for mechanisms to allow people to get involved. In its earliest years, ALDA recognized those people who seemed to have energy to burn and gave them things to coordinate. This kept them from feeling excluded and also kept them out of the hair of the Board. In recent years, there has been a swing to committees. Committees also satisfy peoples' need to be involved, and accommodate more people in the process.
Unfortunately, committees also impede progress and/or chill capable potential volunteers who dread the interference in what would otherwise be simple tasks. I couldn't bear the idea that half a dozen people, none elected and half not even chosen by me, would sit in judgment of my editorial discretion and whether the page number should be centered at the bottom or in the top left corner. Some people think this is helpful, and your mileage may vary, but for me, it's the main reason my latest writings are on the web and not in the ALDA Reader.
I am not entirely anti-committee. Aside from the age-old use of committee appointments to co-opt critics, I see the value if assembling work teams to divide a large task into smaller chores. If you want to call that a committee, fine. Committees are valuable where it is irresponsible to give certain "abusable" power to a sole individual. Clearly, there is a need for a Finance Committee to prevent Treasurers from absconding to Argentina with our wealth. (ALDA's wealth being what it is, of course, they would likely get as far as Argentina, Tennessee, if there is such a place.) There is a need for a Publications Committee to ensure that ALDA's mission and values are not contradicted by what the Publication says. (Contrary to some understandings, the Publications Committee was not created to be a copy-writing bee.)
In ALDA's unavoidable cyberspace meeting environment, committees often falter at actually doing tasks. A task that was initially shared out not because one person couldn't do it, but because we wanted participation, ends up dragging on for weeks and months. The engineering principle of Pareto's Law applies: 80% of the quality comes with 20% of the effort, and the remaining 20% of quality will take 80% of the effort. The relevance here is that committee participation may increase quality from 80 to 85%, but at the cost of three times the effort.
The majority of people who want to participate want to hear the issues, weigh alternatives, and express their views. They don't usually have the time, energy, interest, or talent to do hands-on work. If the people involved were geographically close together, it would be practical to have frequent meetings where hands-on tasks could be done together. People with a history of hands-on group work can often collaborate electronically. It makes more sense to me to structure opportunities for participation that work with human nature rather than against it.
The Big Board/Executive Council vision provides for economical governance and diverse representation and would relieve the pressure on the committee system, allowing them only to be used when really needed to avoid individuals working in the group sizes they prefer.
The Executive Council members are also members of the (Big) Board, and these are ex officio the Presidents, Past, Current and Elect, and the Secretary and Treasurer. The other members of the Board would elect representatives to the Executive Council (let's call it EC).
Members fall into two categories: those who live in an area served by chartered chapters, and those who don't. The elected chapter presidents would automatically be members of the Board, and would elect amongst themselves a representative to the EC. This representative would be there to advocate for the needs of chapters, not the different regions. Chapter interests include support for outreach activities, perhaps a common need for exhibit materials for Health Fairs, or help with collecting dues, etc. Members who live in areas not served by chapters, including those where there are groups, have different needs: how to get more organized so that a chapter could be formed and sustained, how to maintain communication among people residing in remote areas, perhaps. Since there are no groups by definition, there needs to be a special election for members who live in areas not served by a chartered chapter, to elect a person to advocate for their special needs on the Board and EC.
Under this plan, obviously there would be one Canadian Board member for each chapter sustained in Canada.
Members also fall into many other categories, such as etiologies of deafness. An all-progressive/medical Board perhaps will not fully provide for the needs of people who became deaf suddenly through injury or surgery. Any etiology group that wished to form should be entitled to elect a representative to the Board.
Other special interest groups have already formed, indicated an interest in doing so, or in practice begun to meet informally at events such as ALDAcon. These groups include people in recovery, gays/lesbians, single parents, deaf/hearing couples, retired people, young people, people working in health care or education, people who love hearing dogs or cochlear implants, people interested in political advocacy, and so on. Any special interest group that wished to form should be entitled to do so and elect a member to the Board. This process or "forming" would entail some formalization of these interests, including having people propose the groups and others to self-identify as interested in that group, in order that the members elect their representative. As complex as it sounds, social groups such as Mensa and many professional associations do exactly this. SIGs have the potential to make the entire organization stronger by permitting people to express these facets of themselves within the organization.
The Board members representing the special interest groups (SIGs) would elect a representative to the EC, to support the interests of the SIG structure, as well as the various lifestyle interests they represent, for instance, providing for interested SIGs to control the program of one workshop at ALDAcon or to have ALDA collect dues on its behalf to support a SIG's newsletter.
Although the Big Board would meet entirely through electronic media other than in a session at ALDAcon, this structure can involve many people in the deliberations of the association at a more meaningful policy and outreach level than occupying them with the minutiae of administrative business. The representatives of the chapters, the non-chapter areas, and special interest groups combine with the officers to make up an 8-member EC, comparable to the size of the present Board. (If desired, a distinction can be drawn between groups based on different forms of deafness and lifestyle/coping technique groups, and one EC representative elected from each to make a 9-member Board.)
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