President-Elect Keith Lemons, FAPR, RPR, CRR (Ret.), and the NCRA Board of Directors would like to share with you, our members, what we envision for NCRA’s advocacy efforts this coming year. Lemons has decided to create a new broadly focused Government Relations Team (GRT) which will act as a multi-focused, fast response team that will focus on a wide variety of issues of critical importance to the membership. This is not being done to detract from the years of work and current focus of STRONG on AI. Rather, it recognizes the breadth of issues confronting NCRA’s members and the current needs of NCRA’s Government Relations staff which are much broader. We also would like to explain how NCRA’s governance process works and how this new initiative fully complies with NCRA’s Constitution and Bylaws in order to counter the unfortunate rumors and disinformation that have been spread.
Before we get into the details, the NCRA Board wants you, our members, to know that we take our advocacy efforts very seriously. We also take the process of governance of the Association, legal liabilities, and the best practices for managing the business of the Association equally seriously. NCRA can and will proceed with our established procedures and best practices in how we operate and communicate with our members. NCRA does not conduct official business on social media platforms (hence the term social, not business) or allow back-and-forth discussions that include personal attacks, slander, defamation, or criticism of specific companies or their products that could cause legal liability for NCRA. We need to be above that and also cannot allow NCRA to be exposed to potential liability for such improper communications.
We are a professional association that has been around for 125 years because NCRA works in a deliberate and effective manner. While it may not be popular in a “I want it now” way and in the combative and destructive mentality that seems to permeate our societal discussions today, NCRA will take its time to try to get our decisions correct to make sure they benefit the membership as a whole. It is not a matter of hiding something but trying to get it right. While we may not accomplish it 100 percent of the time, please remember the VOLUNTEER Board and committee members are donating their valuable time to make all our lives better.
It is also important to remember that this year NCRA has more than 25 committees and more than 150 volunteers working on various critical projects. ALL of these committees are important, and all believe that their specific charges and tasks are vital to the future of the Association. No one committee’s work is more important than others as that would diminish the vision of the leadership (who have a global understanding of how all the pieces of all the committees fit together) and devalue the efforts of other volunteers doing good work on other committees. All committees are valuable, and more importantly, all the volunteers’ work on every committee is important and deserves equal credit in moving NCRA forward.
Here is a short version of how committees work within the governance of a professional association.
- Committees are established to handle specific tasks deemed critical for the success of the organization and membership, meaning the committees work FOR the parent organization, not the other way around.
- Most committees are only constituted on a year-to-year basis (in 2023-2024 NCRA had 28 committees). There are only a very few standing committees, meaning they are essential to the ongoing operations and are specifically identified in NCRA’s Constitution and Bylaws (C&B). These standing committees are the Executive Committee, the Council of the Academy of Professional Reporters, the Council on Approved Student Education, the Committee on Professional Ethics, the Constitution and Bylaws Committee, and the Distinguished Service Award Committee.
- Every year the incoming president meets with staff and other industry colleagues to review the charges of the current committees, discuss the successes and opportunities of the committees, and review if committees have met their charges and whether they need to continue as-is, or with amended charges or evolve into another iteration or not be continued. Committees are always evolving. Just because there was a committee the year before does not mean it continues ad infinitum.
- The incoming president also solicits input from other Board members, staff members, and other sources to seat the best people who they feel can accomplish the charges and help the committee be successful.
- At this point under the C&B, the incoming president then has the sole and exclusive authority to decide what non-standing committees to create for the president’s upcoming term, the charges for those committees, and who will be the members and serve as chairs. Under the C&B, the Board of Directors then is responsible for approving the committees, charges, members, and chairs of the non-standing committees created by the incoming president (as well as for the standing committees). The Board of Directors, however, may not create other committees on its own initiative.
- This process starts in the spring and is ultimately voted on before the summer conference. In many cases the charges for the committees being put forth and the selection of the candidates for said committees are not finalized until after the conference due to the sheer number of volunteers needed to fill the committees and the extensive planning for the annual conference.
- The committees then begin their assigned tasks and report back to the Board on their progress throughout the year.
This is the established and accepted process adopted by most professional associations.
Now on to the specifics of the NCRA STRONG committeeF which is not continuing in its current form. On February 19, 2019, NCRA’s Executive Director suggested to then NCRA President Sue Terry FAPR, RPR, CRR, CRC, that NCRA create a rapid response task force to combat electronic recording in the states. Terry embraced the idea, on March 5, 2019, the task force presented the fleshed-out concept along with suggested charges to leadership. The new proposed committee was to be called the Members Electronic Recording Rapid Response Committee (MERRRC). It would be comprised of a group of member advocates solely dedicated to combating the dangerous use of electronic recording in the public and private sectors. A wise decision was made to rename the committee, and that is the genesis of STRONG.
The STRONG committee (past and present) has been recreated and approved each year by the Presidents and Boards that followed. It has been blessed with dedicated members for the past five years who have donated their time and expertise to that committee and have created tools that states and individuals can use for advocacy of the stenographic profession. Recently the committee has been focused primarily on artificial intelligence (AI) and have become subject matter experts in AI as it relates to speech-to-text in the court reporting and captioning industry. The committee has put together various content-heavy presentations and, with the help of an NCRA-hired consultant, assembled an excellent white paper on the dangers of AI in legal settings. NCRA has continually and publicly thanked the committee for its work on AI. That appreciation has been continuous and carries on to this day.
As with every professional endeavor, we must evolve and so will the mission of the committee. Incoming President Keith Lemons’ vision of advocacy is all-inclusive and means that NCRA will focus on all issues affecting our members. The Board recognizes that AI is an important issue, but it is not the ONLY issue that affects our members. To that end, incoming President Lemons wants to utilize the good work that STRONG has developed and go back to the concept of a rapid response team called the Government Relations Team (GRT). This new year-to-year committee will be designed after a very successful quick response task force NCRA had in the past and sunsetted due to budget issues. To some extent it will be patterned after NCRA’s former Reporting Advocacy and Information Network (RAIN) program which was a network of experienced reporters and captioners that reviewed legislation and rules pertaining to ALL legislative, regulatory, and judicial matters affecting the profession.
We will be securing members for the new GRT committee who have decades of experience in advocating for the profession, and we are actively seeking individuals in different states who excel in this legislative and regulatory acumen to review all the issues facing the profession and who will offer their expertise to assist the states and NCRA with formulating responses to protect our members. While AI is one issue, many reporters across the country are facing losing their CSR licensure language (IL and TN to name just two), official salary adjustments that have not kept up with other members of the court family, official page rate issues, contracting and other unethical issues, Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) overtime rules, employee vs. independent contractor classification, digital recording threats, and many more issues. The new GRT team will assist the Government Relations staff in reviewing state and federal legislative and regulatory actions and suggest grassroots efforts to help our members out in the states.
NCRA, once again, commends the STRONG committee for their work and hopes that members of that committee will want to be part of this next evolution of our advocacy efforts if they are interested. NCRA strongly believes that we are better when we work together.
It is important to reiterate, however, that NCRA will not engage in social media and will not tolerate personal attacks, abuse, or defamation of members, staff, or Board members or possibly actionable comments about particular companies or their products on the organization’s platforms. While constructive discussion is welcomed, anarchy, chaos, and exposing NCRA to possible liability are not, and individuals inciting that type of behavior will be removed. Being part of the NCRA social world or listservs is a privilege, and there are rules to that access. NCRA will not allow people to be bullied, shamed, called out, or trashed on our platforms because a small group of dissatisfied people on a single issue do not like the direction or a specific stance.
Finally, it is important to remember that what you read on social media or through some hearsay discussion is not the only side of the discussion or even accurate at times. Unfortunately, we live in a society where the loudest voices demand attention, but that is not always the best course of action or, once again, the full story. NCRA will continue to accept suggestions and respectful, constructive debate in our formal channels of communication. NCRA has had hundreds of committees over the century we have been in existence. Committees are created, complete their charges, and are sunsetted. In the past five years alone, nearly 13 percent of committees have evolved or been sunsetted. Please remember that just because you do not see a response from NCRA immediately, it does not mean NCRA is not being transparent or is hiding something. Many times the organization is simply getting everything together so as not to roll out something that is incomplete or challenging to administer with limited resources and volunteer time.
We hope that our explanation alleviates some of the miscommunication pertaining to this issue and also provides a better understanding of our advocacy outlook and general plan as we move forward in accomplishing all our strategic plan goals.
2023-2024 NCRA Board of Directors
