>> JANET:  I have an announcement to make.  Okay.  I forgot to put in the reminder e-mail about our UNT students bringing their tools to make three minor hearing aid repairs.  They did it anyway.  Tara, you might have them look at yours.  Anyway, I wanted to let you know.  We won't start the meeting yet.  We'll wait another 15 minutes, but I wanted to let you know that Chris is here with his tools in case you wanted to have anything looked at.  Is everybody about ready?  Okay.  We'll get started.  Let me make several announcements.  First of all, I wanted to thank Frank and Yvonne Brower for bringing wonderful refreshments this week.  Yvonne has offered to help as a greeter each month in getting people signed in and signed up for refreshments.  I wanted to thank her very much.  I get nervous and the more nervous -- I wanted to tell you, we received our funds for the Walk for Hearing last October and we made $150, which is really good.  The expenses get taken out of the money that's donated on behalf of our chapter, and we split that money half and half with national.  So the fact that only a few of us were around, but the fact that we brought in $150 was really good.  I wanted to remind you of the state convention that's coming up in October.  These happen every two years, I believe, and they're in different cities each time.  So we're very fortunate that there's going to be one here in fall.  Forms to register and sign up and find out more about it are over on that table.  Kim Brownen, who's our speaker today is the director for the convention and main person planning it.  I know that she needs help during the planning stages and working the convention when it's here.  So, you know, Jerry and I are going to help.  You might want to join in, too.  I'm sure it's going to be a lot of fun.  It's a wonderful opportunity for people.  There are donation cans over in the refreshment area.  There's one for HLAA chapter and another to help with cost of coffee so feel free to drop in some change to help those two worthy causes.  Tamara, do you mind -- Tamara has been checking into an organization called Hands and Voices.  And it's for parents -- nationwide nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting families and their children who are deaf or hard of hearing as well as professions serving them.  So her thought is they could be kind of a sister organization to us.  We meet here the first Saturday of every month.  I think they're thinking of meeting here the third Saturday.  Some of you experience hearing loss yourselves, but you also have children or other family members who experience hearing loss as well.  She's thinking about starting that in the fall, and I'm sure she could use help as well.  So see her if you'd like to help.  With that, I'm going to introduce Kim.  Many of you know her.  She's been active in the Fort Worth program for many months.  Now she's our state coordinator -- is that the right title?  And she's going to tell us a little about the national organization.  I think a lot of us don't have a real clear idea of what exactly they do.  They do a lot, much of which people don't even know about and also how they work with the local chapter.  So Kim.
      >> KIM:  Is this the best location for me to stand for everybody or would you like me to be somewhere else?  If you don't mind, I'm going to turn this projector off.  I wanted to let you know why HLAA came about and a little bit about how your involvement in HLAA helps the organization as a whole, and then tell you a little bit more about what things are going on in the group.  Some of us had the opportunity through the years to know Rocky Stone, who was the founder of HLAA.  Through my journey of hearing loss as a young child from going through issues with the hearing aids and refusing to wear them through going deaf overnight and getting a cochlear implant.  Now I have a hearing impaired child and growing more and more of all that HLAA and other organizations can do to help people with the hearing loss.  That being said, I was implanted in 1994, and in 1996, I came to Dallas for a Cochlear Implant Association meeting, and it was a nationwide meeting for people with cochlear implants.  And it was there that I met Rocky Stone.  And I learned more about him and his great works about helping people with hearing loss.  Rocky founded HLAA in 1979.  Rocky Stone had worked in the CIA for 25 years and served in the military.  Whether the military or his genetics are what caused his hearing loss, he began to find that hearing loss was a struggle with him.  Dealing with that was becoming more difficult.  HLAA is the nation's foremost consumer organization representing us with a hearing loss.  They work on accessibility, public policy, research, public awareness and service delivery related hearing loss on the national level, but also on the global level.  The mission of HLAA deals with education.  And HLAA first started with the name Self-help for the Hard of Hearing.  Rocky's vision was to get people to help themselves.  I can fish with people forever, but if I help other people learn how to help themselves, it'll help us grow.  And so they dealt with education educating ourselves, our family, our friends, our coworkers, teachers, healthcare providers about our hearing loss.  Educate those in regard to how to communicate with us.  Looking forward, access to CART services, closed caption on TV, written communication.  We need to educate others on how to work with us.  HLAA provides adults and children with schools for self-help and help people promote the understanding of the nature, cause, complications and remedies for hearing loss.  We help become informed consumers by helping each other.  So that's the education that HLAA works on.  Then they work on the advocacy, and they advocate communication access in workplace, hotels, schools, court systems, medical facilities and entertainment facilities.  Some of the ways HLAA has done that is through their members being educated on what needs to be done.  For example, the Walk of Hearing in 2006 in the New York area, they were able to raise enough money to provide captions to the broadway shows.  With money becoming a tight issue, being able to provide those services continued to allow us to enjoy them as people with a hearing loss.  So through the promotion of people helping others, we were able to do that with the walk.  So continue going forward with that.  HLAA helped individuals in New York City helped find the right CART system for the avenue, the right placement and working with the right companies to get it.  So it's a win-win situation.  Now, if I ever traveled to New York City and go to visit a show -- it's an opera, which I think is difficult to understand even as a hearing person, the words will be right there for us.  Now, am I as a hearing impaired user taking advantage, taking advantage of that?  People have a denial of having a hearing loss.  When they begin to see what they're missing, it becomes more evident.  So through the advocacy, HLAA promotes new technology, medical research and legislation.  They encourage and participate in research on improving hearing aids, assistive hearing devices and other technology.  Some of the ways they've done that is, if you go to the big conferences or conventions they have, in the past and in the future, they have market research that is taking place.  Trials of products, trials of telephones, they can find out what we as a hearing impaired population are looking for in the future, and it helps these companies grow as they reach out to us.  HLAA is located in the D.C. area, which makes it wonderful in helping the organization participate in federal, state, and local legislation bodies.  That's so critical when they decide to no longer require captioning on TV shows.  HLAA is able to be right there and discuss why captioning is so important.  So the location is so critical to us.  Each month there are over one million hits on the hearingloss.org website.  People seeking information in regards to deal with their hearing loss, connecting with people in the local area.  That's also important, and it's nice to know.  HLAA believes that people with hearing loss can help themselves and one another to participate fully and successfully in society.  HLAA promotes the self-confidence empowerment of individuals with skills to improve their lives.  So I went through the years to see what all HLAA has been involved with through the years ot make our lives easier.  Some of the things they've done since they started in 1979 is they started on hotel alerting equipment.  Took it to the top level of the hotel industry and stated there needs to be accessibility with people with a hearing loss to know when things take place in hotel.  In 1990, members made an impact on a newly created ADA law.  In 1991, they worked with President Bush in regards requiring all TVs 13-inches and greater to have the closed captioning decoder.  So you no longer had to buy a separate box to get the captioning.  It was now available to all.  In 1994, they teamed up with American Airlines to work on making improvements on communicating with people with a hearing loss.  In the early 2000, they were working with the other airlines of United, Delta to work on the same things.  Many times in the 1990s, they were working on making FM systems at the tables so when you would go up to the desk to talk about your ticket with a ticket agent, she would be able to communicate with you via an FM system.  I haven't seen that in awhile, but it's something HLAA worked highly on.  It used to be at the ticket booths, it was readily available right there.  In 1997, they helped create the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the IDEA.  And for those of us with kids in the school system, there's also something called the IEP, Individual Education Plan, which helps us help our kids with a hearing loss get what they need.  It's a written agreement with teachers and schools and myself as a parent in providing my child with speech classes, they sit in the front of the classroom, may have trouble understanding and be aware of that.  So it's a written understanding between us.  In 1997, HLAA joined up with Microsoft in working with captioning software.  And I have a whole list here that I'll make available for anybody that wants.  I have a lot of things that HLAA has done through the years to make our lives easier.  And some of the things that are even going on now are working on state mandates for hearing aid insurance.  Most of us will know that when you go to purchase insurance, it may not be covering hearing aids or even cochlear implants or even maybe an ear surgery.  So basically what HLAA is working on right now is making insurance companies help provide this coverage and making it more available to families.  For example, in the state of Kentucky, there was a bill that was passed in 2002 due to HLAAs work.  That children under 18 years of age would be able to buy -- there was a limit of $1,400 per aid every 36 months.  So the government was helping to provide those hearing aids for young children, which is so critical because it's so hard to find the money for that much in regards to hearing aids.  Another issue that's coming up that we're working on is a letter writing campaign in helping Medicaid be a better provider for cochlear implants, implantable hearing devices and other ear issues.  It's really sad right now because the cochlear implant surgery could cost up to $40,000 or more for an individual to have.  But if an individual has Medicaid, the state reimburses only 16,000 regardless to where you go, regardless to your bill, Medicaid only gives the doctor, the hospital, the staff, $16,000 in coverage.  That's a big difference in which the hospital has to eat in costs, and it's causing doctors to no longer accept Medicaid patients.  San Antonio and Austin area, there's very little coverage for people with hearing loss to have Medicaid.  So they now have to travel to Dallas or Houston.  I just came back three weeks ago from Austin from meeting with audiologists, ENT doctors and other people in the field in regards to this very issue.  And without some of the fundraising efforts that take place and nonprofit organizations that the CI centers or doctors start, they would not be able to make up the difference between this.  So for example, in Houston, there's a big golf match that takes place, and the golf match brings in anywhere from 90,000 to a hundred thousand a year.  And with that money, they're able to make up the difference of helping Medicaid patients get through the process.  It's really difficult because we talk about people being able to be educated, get a job, but without helping them with their hearing loss, that battle is hard to fight.  So it's important we get together to make this funding take place.  So why join the chapter of HLAA, why do we come in the morning?  When we come together, we learn from each other.  We support one another, and we show each other that it's important -- or you're important and you're able to help each other learn to cope.  I know, myself, by coming to meetings, I've learned about assistive hearing devices, jobs that may be available, FM systems, CART, so it's helped my life tremendously.  Many people, before they come to a chapter meeting, will say they didn't know where to turn, didn't know how to get help, didn't know what was available, they felt isolated.  They struggled with communication.  They were confused about technology.  And they had their hearing loss.  Afterwards most people feel after coming to an HLAA meeting, more educated under ADA rights, the experience and increase in independence.  They have an improved quality of life.  They know they are no longer alone.  They feel informed, and they can feel a part of the group.  So those are some of the things that take place.  And I also wanted to share with you that May is Better Speech and Hearing Month.  I'm sorry.  Better Hearing and Speech Month, BHSM is what some audiologists call it.  Actually, it really surprised me when I found out that that has been around since 1927.  Honestly, I only found out about May being Better Speech and Hearing Month I think a couple of years ago, and it's been around for over 80 years.  I thought it was really amazing.  It was founded by the American Speech, Language and Hearing Association.  It's known at ASHA.  ASHA is the educating body for the professional that we see when we have a hearing loss.  Speech language pathologists and our audiologists.  ASHA is an incredible organization that I've come in touch with through being married to an audiologist.  Their conferences are huge with a tremendous amount of information that is provided.  Two audiologists to help educate them on dealing with people with hearing loss.  In the past few years, HLAA has been teaming up with them so audiologists are better and able to understand our lives.  There's an estimated one in every ten Americans that have a hearing loss.  500 million people worldwide.  There are a lot of people that need our help.  There's a growing concern and a growing number of hearing loss issues occurring due to iPODs now, the way we live our lifestyle, due to cell phones, putting input directly in people's ears.  All of that is making hearing loss a greater issue.  And with that, I wanted to see just a show of hands of how many people are a member of HLAA?  And what I wanted to do, I was going to give away three -- I'm sorry, two memberships to the national organization.  It's something that I like to do to help pay it forward because HLAA provides you awesome resources, and one of those resources is their publication hearing loss magazine, which will keep you informed of state mandate issues.  It will keep you informed of letter writing campaigns, let you know of conferences that are taking place at a local level.  One of the great things about the HLAA Texas conference is that it will give you an opportunity to meet people in the State of Texas that can help people going through issues with their hearing loss.  It's a great way to come together to meet professionals that are doing research in the field.  It's a great way to test out new products that are being exhibited.  And it's a great way to learn from others that have gone through the process.  So anyway, I wanted to offer the memberships.  So if you would like to put your name and address on a sheet of paper if you are not currently a member of HLAA.  I think there are only four.  So I'll give away four so give me your name and address.  I wanted to open it up for thoughts and questions in regards to questions.  I also really wanted to give a lot of congratulations and praise to Janet for all her hard work.  Starting a chapter and hosting a chapter and finding people to speak, putting out the literature, all of that takes a lot of time.  And it's not a paid position by any means.  It's really encouraging when people show up to the meetings because it shows you appreciate the work that's gone forward.  So it's a lot of work behind the scenes to make it a success.  It's very easy to get busy in your daily life and schedule.  So thank you very much, Janet.  Now, any questions or concerns that I can help with?  Thoughts?
     >> I have a question -- I think sometimes people wonder how the national organization is supported, where they get their money, what kind of financial -- whether they give money to the chapters, which they don't, but some explanation on how that kind of works.
      >> KIM:  HLAA money comes in through the purchase of your membership, which is $35 a year, which isn't a whole lot of money.  You're probably better at answering that question.
      >> I'm getting old.  We get about a third of our budget, which is something like $1.25 million.  We get about a third of that from the individual memberships.  We get another third from the convention, and that's not just the people that pay to go to the convention.  It's from the exhibitors, from sponsorships, from the vendors, from the various organizations.  But the convention brings in about a third of our budget.  The other third comes from individual donations, which is people like us that say, well, it's Christmas.  Why not give a check to HLAA.  So we write a check for a hundred dollars, 50, whatever we can afford.  It's individual donations.  So those are the three main sources of income.  There are sometimes windfalls.  Like last year we got a settlement from class action suit.  I don't even know what it was about, but I was glad to have the money.  Sometimes we have people that die and leave money to us because the organization has helped them or it's helped some family member, and they feel some obligation so they bequeath some money to us.  It's a very chancey thing.  Sometimes we don't have enough to cover expenses, we have to dip into reserves.  It's like any organization.  If you want it, you have to help support it.  So if you join yourself, that's great.  If you can get a friend to join, that's another big plus.  There's also the fact that we're heard better in the legislatures if we have bigger numbers of members, and we've never broke 10,000 in years.  It's been years since we've had 10,000 members.  So the more members we have, the more money we have.  We even get grants and things like that if we have a larger membership.  The advertisers would pay more.  It's very important to have a barge membership and to support the organization any way you can.  And attending the convention helps too.
      >> What does the money cover?
      >> TOMMIE:  Well, you know, we have the office there in D.C., and it's not cheap.  Just the rent on the office is $9,700 a month.  That's a pretty good chunk of money.  We have to pay the people that work there.  We run that big national organization with 9 FTEs.  Those of you who are in business, you know what FTEs are.  That's full-time employee equivalent.  That means 40 hour workweek.  We have about 15 people on the staff, but only about three of our staff members are full-time.  The others all work part-time.  But all the hours combined come to 9 FTEs, which is a very small staff for a national organization.  Those people do a lot of work.  None of them get away with doing just one job.  Even the executive director wears many hats and none of them are overpaid.  I promise you.  We are probably at the very bottom ten percent of the national nonprofits that have offices there in the D.C. area.  We don't waste your money.  We work very hard for it.  People like me that serve on the board is entirely voluntary.  I pay my own way to anything that has to do with HLAA.  I don't get your money.  I give my money.  It's just that you have office rent, bills to pay, you have to pay for copiers and stuff, you have mailing, phones, you have salaries you have to pay for insurance for those people and benefits and stuff.  It's like any business.  You have overhead, and we have no product to sell.  We provide services, but we do not sell a product.  So mainly our income is from donations, people that feel like what we're doing is worthwhile so they want to help support it.
      >> I'm sorry, I have lots of questions.  I feel like one of the big benefits is a subscription to Hearing Loss Magazine.  Is there a cost for that?
      >> TOMMIE:  You better believe it.  The $25 that we were paying was -- I mean, it was just barely covering the cost of producing the magazine itself.  So the membership in the organization was actually costing us money.  And remember it was costing us a few dollars because we weren't recovering the amount that we spent on the vendors.  So that's why we had to go up on the dues.  We hated it because we know times are hard.  If they had trouble finding $25, they're going to have a harder time finding $35.  But if you want the organization to be there, you have to support it.  I mean, nonprofits are going down the tube every day.  I don't know how many of you are familiar with Goodrich in Fort Worth, they had to lay off.  I'm afraid they're going to have to close.  They've been there since back in the '60s.  It's just if you don't support these organizations, they're going to disappear.  So I hate to keep asking people for money, but that's the only way it's going to survive.  It's something you have to think about.
      >> The Walk for Hearing, has that helped a lot?
      >> TOMMIE:  I'm telling you, it's really helped.  If we had not had the Walk for Hearing, the organization would probably already have to shut their doors.  It has given us a big boost of money.  But you realize, say we raised $600,000 last year in the walk, but only half of that went to the national organization, the rest went to local chapters.  A lot of these chapters wouldn't be surviving if they weren't getting their money from the Walk for Hearing.  So it's a little bit iffy.  A lot of the people are working with the Walk for Hearing, and they give you their money from the Walk for Hearing, so the individual donations are down.  It's kind of balancing out.  So while we're getting a lot of money through the Walk for Hearing, a lot of it stays locally, and the rest of it, we're just staying in place.  We're replacing individual donations since that money is being given from the Walk for Hearing so.
      >> KIM:  Having a large membership base helps HLAA in many ways.  When they go to fight the hearing aid bills, when they go to talk to the legislative staff to say they have 20, 30, 50,000 people behind them is something that helps.  With the number of people that have a hearing loss in the United States, more need to be standing up together to fight this.  Fight the issues that take place of funding, lack of resources.  With the closing of the Goodrich Center, there will not be a place for my children to turn for telephone issues, having a place for people to get together for meetings at no cost.  It's very hard to find space.  The Goodrich Center has always provided that for free.  When you start losing that ability, it hurts.  It's not hurting me or Tommie as much as it's going to hurt our kids and future generations.  We can sit around as much as we want, but until we grow, we won't make an impact.  That's why HLAA is so important.  So as hard as it is, it's so important to do our part.  It may not mean that I can contribute this month in some way, that someone can't.  We made it work.  That's why it's important.  I think we should introduce to you Tommie because she is a great individual.  I don't know if any of you attended the Goodrich Center's 18th anniversary that took place a few months ago.  I learned a lot about Tommie at that meeting.  I don't know if you know her well, but she's an incredible individual who has helped change the way hearing loss has been viewed.  Tommie was one of the first people to get CART in the court system in Fort Worth.  What that means is if I have to have to go to court for some reason now, CART is a known word for them.  But CART as learning to report legal information hasn't been available for Tommie or I or others with a hearing loss to read what is being said.  They always provided sign interpreters.  But being a late deaf adult, I wouldn't understand a sign interpreter.  So having that ability to read what the CART interpreter is there writing will make my ability to go to court much easier.  I can only say that that's available now because Tommie fought that.
     >> TOMMIE:  I didn't have to fight very hard, I had a judge willing to accommodate me.  When you go to a courtroom, the judges have a tremendous amount of power.  It's unbelievable.  I just happened to get a judge willing to provide the CART.  And I was the first person in Texas to serve on a jury trial with CART.  It was an amazing experience.  But I didn't really -- I didn't really do a lot of fighting.  All I did was said, we can give you an exemption because I'm deaf.  I don't think I need an exemption.  I think I should be allowed to serve.  They didn't really argue.  It took them awhile to find someone.  That's just breaking new ground.  But that's something I would have never done had it not been for HLAA.  I was a timid type person, didn't do a lot of speaking for myself.  After I joined HLAA, it helped empower me and make me able to state what my needs were and that sort of thing.  It does a lot for you in that sort of way.  Gives you a feeling that there's others behind you.  As Kim said, you're not alone.  Until I joined HLAA, I had never known others that had hearing loss.  All my family, everyone I was around could hear.  So it made a lot of difference for me to be around other people with hearing loss.  It's a really wonderful organization.  Thank you guys.
     >> JANET:  I did think of a couple more things I needed to tell you.  First of all, I wanted to thank Kim and Tommie.  And my encouragement as serving the national organization is such an important thing to do.  One reason we don't charge dues here as a chapter is because I think sometimes people would feel, I have to pay dues for my local chapter, now you're asking me to join national.  Why should I pay twice?  If you have to choose, support the national organization.  We get by on whatever donations we take in.  Our costs are minimal.  Obviously the more money we can raise as a chapter, the more we can do.  Again, if you have to choose, support national first.  Next month's program is going to be Esther Kelly on psychological hearing loss.  She did a program on that subject a year ago.  It was one of the most heavily attended programs we've done yet.  I was even a little surprised on how much interest there was on that subject.  I think a lot of us suspect that our hearing loss is impacting us in a lot of ways we're not aware of.  And her program helped clarify that.  They're experienced by every person dealing with these challenges.  So she'll be speaking.  We'll advertise it in the papers.  I'm having a hard time getting and keeping speakers right now.  For about the first year, it was very easy, and now I'm still asking just as hard.  It seems like I'm finding fewer people willing to come talk to a chapter or I find people who are credible, they have the qualifications to be a good speaker but speaking on a Saturday is a problem.  So I want to ask for your help.  If you have an idea that you think is a good idea for a program, go ahead and prescreen them.  Talk to them about the program.  Tell them we meet on the first Saturday of every month and find out in advance if that's a problem with them.  I feel like one reason we've been successful is because we have compelling programs to bring people in.  Kim saved us this month.  Thank you so much.  She agreed to speak after something else fell threw.  Esther saved us for next month.  In July, we won't meet.  It's fourth of July weekend.  I have not scheduled programs for the rest of the year so August, September and October, we're looking for something.  And I'll keep working on my own, of course.  But I just wanted to mention to you that this is a need.  A lot of times people will say, I have a very good audiologists, how about if they come and talk to our group.  That's fine, but they need a specific topic.  To just say that we have an audiologists is not good enough.  So find out what their area of expertise is.  Are they pediatric, can they speak about hearing loss in children.  Are they good at building an especially good rapport, talk about building a good relationship with your audiologists.  Are they someone who knows a lot about assistive listening devices.  That would be good because many audiologists don't seem to deal with that side of it.  Hopefully this will give you some ideas.  Another thing I was going to mention to you, for the first year we basically had no funds at all.  We were basically existing, you know, only on what we could scrape up to get by.  Now thanks to donations, money you have put in our donation can and Walk for Hearing, we're starting to have a little bit of money.  We need to think about what we can do with that money to work towards the overall mission of HLAA which is to help improve the quality of life for people with hearing loss and their families through education and advocacy.  So in other words, throwing a big party and buying a keg is not an option.  But there are lots of worthy endeavors we can do with this money, whether it means having materials printed which we haven't been in a position to do except for very minimal.  Might mean hearing loss kits for hospitals, working with schools perhaps.  Lots of things we can do.  And it's not a lot of money yet, but be thinking about that.  We don't have a board of directors really yet to help us decide.  We don't have officers yet except for Cynthia is treasurer.  I'm an unofficial leader.  In the next few months, I'm going to start asking people, would you be interested in being an officer or on board of directors, obviously there's decisions that need to be made.  So that's it.  Thank you for coming today.  Any questions, anything anybody else needs to share?  Okay.  Thank you.