President Melissa shares updates about the NAD's ongoing commitment to anti-racism work, 2018-2020 and 2020-2022 Priorities, and the NAD Leadership Training Conference (www.nad.org/nltc-2021) to happen virtually during September 19-25, 2021.

[Transcript & DESC: NAD President Melissa S. Draganac-Hawk is standing in the middle of the screen with a blue backdrop.

MELISSA: Hello, I'm Melissa. This is a video update for the past few months. This month, July, takes me back to a year ago when the NAD Board met to discuss racism and the crisis America was going through at the time. This includes the Deaf community and other communities as well. Together, we agreed this required our commitment. Since then, each of us individually and as a group, started the work. That included reading books, watching movies and documentaries, group discussions with different people, attended workshops, participated in webinars, and more. The NAD does not tolerate any -isms such as linguisism where one criticizes how one signs, sexism where one puts a person down because of how they identify with either gender or as non-binary, audism where one puts a person down because of they're deaf, and other -isms. There have been many situations within our community where such -isms appear and we do not support those actions. We must continue our work, recognize and support other marginalized communities to reduce these -isms in different areas within our community. This includes the NAD.

The second thing I wanted to discuss was the NAD Board meeting last April when we discussed the 2020-2022 Priorities. We also discussed our remaining action items for the 2018-2020 Priorities. When the COVID-19 Pandemic happened, a lot of our tasks for 2018-2020 Priorities were put on hold. We switched gears to focus on developing different policies and share COVID-19 related information with the deaf and hard of hearing community. Now, we're shifting back to ensure our tasks for 2018-2020 Priorities are complete. The next NAD Board meeting will happen virtually July 30-August 1. We will stream live our meeting on Saturday, July 31st on Facebook. We'll share updates about this livestream soon.

The last update I have for you is regarding the NAD Leadership Training Conference (NLTC). We typically host NLTC in person but as I announced in an earlier video, we have decided to host NLTC virtually for people's safety. We're excited to plan behind the scenes for that event. We usually host it on a weekend but with our virtual approach, we decided to stretch it to a week long! We'll begin on Sunday, September 19th and end it Saturday, September 25th. We have a kick-off presentation planned for Sunday. We have different workshops planned for Monday-Friday. And then on Saturday, we will have longer training sessions. We will share NLTC details soon, be on the lookout for more information!

Thank you for watching!]