Tag Archives: You Are The Union

Another Amazing You Are The Union Livestream (or Learning So Much About Being A Better Ally)

Posted on July 23, 2020 | Comments Off on Another Amazing You Are The Union Livestream (or Learning So Much About Being A Better Ally)

Every one of the You Are The Union livestreams that we have done so far has been incredible. I am so proud of what we have accomplished with them so far and the engagement we have been getting from people who are watching them. I’m so lucky that Amir and I were able to figure out how to make these happen and I think both of us are so excited to see what we can do in the future with it.

One thing that we have focused on is bringing attention to different parts of our industry. We did that with the BLM livestream that we did. And we did it again a week ago when we had a livestream about performers with disabilities.

Even though I have an invisible disability with my hip issues, I wouldn’t call myself a performer with a disability. I don’t know much about that world and the challenges that PWDs (performers with disabilities) face. So when Amir and I discussed doing this topic for our livestream, I was excited to do it but also nervous because I didn’t want to accidentally offend someone.

Fortunately, the panelists that we got for this livestream, Anita and Christine, were amazing! While we were getting everything set up and ready, we explained that we didn’t have a lot of knowledge about this part of the industry and we apologized in advance if we said the wrong thing. They both said that they appreciated us giving them a space to have an open chat with all members on how to be better allies for PWDs because many are afraid to ask the questions that might not be the most appropriate thing to ask.

The other thing that I’m so proud of with this livestream is that we were able to make it accessible for anyone hard of hearing. We would love to have live captions for our livestreams, but right now that isn’t feasible due to the cost (but if anyone knows of pro-bono organizations that do that, please let me know!). But we reached out to some of our friends who have studied ASL and they were able to connect us to interpreters who were able to do live ASL interpreting throughout the entire thing! We knew if we wanted to do a livestream about PWDs, we couldn’t leave out an entire community of performers. We didn’t know how we were going to accomplish this, but we were so lucky to have Elizabeth and Diana be our ASL interpreters and they did an amazing job.

Whenever we have these livestreams, I don’t get to fully pay attention because I am running all the behind the scenes stuff. But I always do get to watch a little bit. And every time I watched this one, I was just in awe. The conversation was incredible, we got some really good questions from the people watching, and seeing the live ASL interpreting happening made me so happy. Amir and I had a goal to make this livestream fully accessible, and through connections we had and the generosity of several people, we were able to do just that. Sometimes I’m just amazed at what we can get done considering we are just 2 members doing a livestream.

Since I can’t always focus on the livestream completely when it happens, I always watch it after (I also have to do some editing to add cards to the beginning and end for the replays). And this one I made sure that when I watched it after, I gave it my full attention. I wanted to make sure I heard all the lessons and advice that was shared. We did this livestream to not only educate other members but to educate ourselves. And I didn’t want to miss out on that opportunity. I learned so much and I can’t wait until we can have another livestream on PWDs because I know there is so much more for me to learn.

If you have not had a chance to watch this livestream, please watch the replay. You can learn so much about how we all can help our fellow members. And helping each other succeed is so important.

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Another Successful Livestream (or Fixing Issues And Working On A System)

Posted on June 25, 2020 | Comments Off on Another Successful Livestream (or Fixing Issues And Working On A System)

After the first You Are The Union livestream, Amir and I knew we had room to improve. It went really well, but not everything that we were hoping for happened. Mainly, we had technical issues with trying to get the livestream up on YouTube at the same time. And then after we were not able to save it so we could have a replay. We want these livestreams to be available at any time, so we knew we had to work on fixing it.

Once we had our next one scheduled, we took extra time to make sure we were clear on the process of how to make the livestream work. We did multiple test runs and made a checklist of every step that we have to take each time to make sure that it works. It’s not the easiest process, but it’s worth it to make it happen so we are willing to do the work. Plus, I have a feeling that as we do these more often, they will get easier and easier for us to set up.

We also wanted to make sure that things just ran smoothly and easily once the livestream was started. This mainly was stuff I needed to be able to do. Since Amir is hosting live, I want to run all the behind the scenes stuff so he doesn’t have to think about it. We tried a system of me texting him the questions from the guests the first time, and that didn’t exactly work. This time, we decided on a Google Doc where I could change the list of questions if we were getting a lot about the same topic or if something needed to be next instead of another question. So on my end, I needed to have a lot of windows open to keep it all together. I had the Google Doc with our questions, the Zoom window with the Zoom chat and participant lists popped out, the YouTube page to make sure the video was still streaming there, and the YouTube chat popped out. This is what my screen ended up looking like while we ran the second livestream.

It was a bit crazy, but it really worked for me in the end. I did switch between windows a lot, but it was easy enough to monitor everything at once. I monitored the chats on Zoom and YouTube to pull questions, looked at the participant list to see our Waiting Room, and tracked any raised hands in Zoom if someone wanted to ask a question on video. The first livestream, we didn’t have many people interested in asking questions on video so we debated removing that option. But this time, more people wanted to do that so I’m glad we allowed for both video and text questions.

Our second livestream was about diversity, inclusion, and Black Lives Matter. We had Tiffany Yvonne Cox and Michelle Hurd as our guests and it was so incredible. I was thrilled that the livestream went so much better than the first one did, but I was even more thrilled about the conversation that happened during it. This was exactly what we hoped would happen and I’m so glad that our audience seemed to feel the same way.

And because we were able to run everything smoothly this time, we also were able to create a replay of the livestream. The replay is pretty much the entire livestream, we just edited 1 minute at the beginning and 1 minute in the end when we were still getting things set up. But all of the discussion, questions, and conversation was kept in. We didn’t want to censor or edit our guests in any way, and I’m glad we were able to keep the full thing up for anyone to watch at any time.

I’m so proud of this livestream. I was crying at times while it happened because this is exactly what Amir and I dreamed of creating. And we never thought we would have exactly what we wanted by the second livestream. We thought we might have some more things to work through. But I think all of our practice runs and preparation paid off and helped us make all the improvements we were looking to make.

We are working on planning our next one. We have had a bit of a delay due to some timing issues, but we are hopeful we will have another one happening in a week. And we have a few topics in our lineup that we are considering, so we should be creating a nice schedule over the next few months. And we do want to do another one on diversity because we know this is not a one and done topic. This is an evolving discussion and we want to create a space for people to discuss it and get answers. That is so important and being able to provide it makes me so happy.

I’m still so excited that I have helped to create this livestream and how quickly it has been embraced by so many people. So many of the viewers were people who are not currently involved in union service and it was a great way to get to meet new people and to hear what they are hoping to see from the union. And we have a few people who have expressed interest in union service and asking what steps they can do. That is amazing and not something I expected. But like I’ve always said, all I want to do is to educate other union members and to make sure they understand what is going on. And maybe that does mean getting more people involved in union service so they are an active participant and able to help educate others in their social circles.

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You Are The Union (or Finding More Ways To Educate Other Union Members)

Posted on June 11, 2020 | Comments Off on You Are The Union (or Finding More Ways To Educate Other Union Members)

I’ve been passionate about union service since I started being involved in it. I might not have had all the right things to do when I was first elected as a delegate, but I have always wanted to be more involved. Before the pandemic, I was getting more and more involved in things. One of the things that I had been enjoying a lot was being an observer at the local board meetings. As soon as those are back, I will be continuing to be an observer because it’s such a great way to see my union at work. And of course, I’m also pretty involved now in the Union Working group and all the action that they have been taking.

But I am always looking for more ways to be involved in union service. And the thing within union service that I am most passionate about is union education. I want the members of the union to understand what is going on and to not feel as powerless as some of them do. Some members feel like the union is a separate entity and they have no voice, which is very far from the truth. This union is run by the members. We do have staff, but they work for us. We are in charge of the path that the union takes.

I was talking with some of my friends who are also passionate about union service, and my friend Amir and I started talking about doing some type of livestream event to answer questions that members might have. We started running with that idea and after about a week of brainstorming, we had a real plan for what we wanted to do. And while we weren’t looking to make this political or just about our slate, we knew we needed our slate’s help with a few things so we brought the plan to some of the leaders. They understood that we were looking to make a non-partisan event and really encouraged us to go with it. So we did.

And a week ago, we had our first livestream event! We are calling these You Are The Union because that is the big idea we want anyone watching to take away from these events.

We want members to be able to join the livestream and ask questions, give feedback, and have a clear understanding of what is going on. While we know we can’t answer every question that members might ask, we know we can explain to them why we might not have the answer or what is in the works. For example, I know some people have had questions about healthcare eligibility since we aren’t working right now. We don’t have the answer to that, but we can tell people that the healthcare trustees (who are in charge of our healthcare plan) are meeting and discussing this. And when they can say what the plan will be, they will tell us. We just want to make sure that people who watch our livestream don’t feel confused about what is going on if they ask us about it.

Our first livestream had some really great things about it. We had a good turnout, especially considering we didn’t have as much time to promote it as we would have liked to (this was partially my fault as we were trying to get things set up before promoting it). The questions we were asked were good and nobody was being negative or accusing anyone of things. And we were able to cover a wide variety of topics. We did have some technical glitches that caused us to not be able to run the livestream the way we were hoping and made it start late, but people understood why this happened and they were patient with us.

Amir was hosting it along with 2 guests, and I was working the behind the scenes stuff with managing the questions that came in and making sure everyone was able to access the livestream after the glitch. I was kept pretty busy doing that, but I was so glad I could help. I’m not sure if I want to be on-camera for these, just because I don’t feel like I have enough information to comfortably host. But that is now a goal of mine and something that is pushing me to continue to educate myself so I can feel like I could be a good host in the future.

This is not just a one-off event. We are already planning our next ones and we are hoping to be able to have them on a regular basis. We are still working on improving upon the first one, so hopefully, we continue to just get better and more efficient. We may start focusing our livestreams on specific topics, while still allowing any questions about other topics. But from the feedback we got, having a bit of a focus would be helpful for the audience. And having topics is also helping us plan, so I’m glad we were told that it could be a good thing.

If we weren’t in isolation during this pandemic, I don’t know if we would have created this livestream. I want to think that we would have, but I think being forced to have virtual meetings as a regular part of life really made us see what we could do. Even when we could have in-person meetings again, I think this is going to stay as a livestream as it allows so many people around the country to join in. And it gives us a bit more flexibility with getting guests because people don’t need to be local to do it.

It’s been a while since I’ve helped to create something I’m this excited about. And it’s a great feeling. I am doing this to continue my union service and help other members, but selfishly it has also helped me find a bit of purpose in a weird time and I’m so grateful for that.

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