 Thank you, everyone, for supporting and showing up to Orca Media's 2022 annual meeting. So we look back on 2022, and this is our annual meeting and open studio. So there's food, drinks, and all kinds of treats and games and stuff that I'll get to in a minute. So I'm just going to read a couple of notes. We've got our financials up for display, so everyone can take a look. 2022 financials, our numbers. Yeah, so I'm Christopher Viersama. I'm one of the co-directors here, along with Jin Ann and Zach Zorn. So 2022 at Orca Media, we took on a lot. So in addition to our regular coverage throughout the year, so if you don't know, we cover government meetings, school board meetings, event coverage for local nonprofits. We have a TV studio that you're in right now that's available to community producers, community members. All is free, and it's a super exciting place to connect to and engage with. So in 2022, we also took over the management of the 23-year-old Green Mountain Film Festival. And yeah, it's exciting. We formed a local advisory board of Vermont filmmakers, Vermont festival programmers, nonprofit professionals, and film enthusiasts. So yeah, you're going to see that coming back to the community hopefully in March of 2024. Sean Temple is here, local filmmaker, and one of our advisory board members, also Orca Media staff. Let's see, so another exciting thing was that the Vermont Youth documentary lab won first place for the history and contemporary issues at the 2023 Freedom and Unity Young Filmmakers Contest down at White River Junction. Thank you, thank you. So I'll show you, or I'll mention the screens here in a second. Let's see, and in 2022, we also partnered with the bridge on a series of local election forums, live election forums. You may have seen those. Super exciting. We launched some new youth media programs such as the Orca Media Make TV Camp in the summer, and the homeschooler video jam in the fall. We have some folks that attended that in 2022. We hosted the Vermont Access Network, which is an organization that represents all 24 community media centers in the state of Vermont. We hosted their annual meeting in Montpelier here in 2022. And that was awesome. We had everybody come here, and that was great. We said goodbye to our longtime executive director, Rob Chapman. Many of you know that he moved over to Bev Cam in Beverly, Massachusetts. And then finally, one of the other highlights was we, as an organization, adopted a co-director model. So that's why, as I mentioned in the beginning, I am one of three co-directors. So we took on a more democratic leadership approach, and it's been really great. And yeah, so today, in addition to the great food out there from Taiano Kitchen, there's some desserts from Hunger Mountain. We have raffles for our new Orca Media Chino bags and some Orca Media T-shirts. So make sure to put your name and email on the raffle. We're going to draw some stuff at six o'clock. So if you got to take off, that's fine. Just put your email address on there, and we'll let you know you won. On the screens, you'll see all of our youth media programming happening on a loop in here in this room. And then you'll see our community producers, all of their programs that were submitted to the National Hometown Media Awards over on the, in the common room there. So you'll see that. Some of whom are here today, we have all things LGBTQ, the three producers here. We have Larry from Ableton On Air. Yeah, so we've got some people here. And let's see. Oh, we've got dot voting. So you can take a look at the poster boards, scattered throughout the some surveys that you can vote on. Let's see. That's about it. We're going to hear from our board chair in a minute, Michael Abadi. But first, we're going to hear from our special guest, Peter Hirschfeld of Vermont Public. All right, come on down. Thank you. Christopher is much better at this than I am. So I wish I'd gone first. So a little over six weeks ago now, I left our Vermont public office in the Capitol Plaza, which is on the second floor, carried as much equipment as I could, could hold and walked out of the front, front floor into hip, deep water and waited up State Street and up Main Street to where I'd thankfully had the foresight to park my car on the hill before, before the floods came in earnest. And this was like this moment where I knew like, this is going to be a really important few weeks in my professional life. But there was a real big problem. And that problem was that I didn't have anywhere to work. Internet was down at my house and my ability to report was, was seriously compromised. And the next morning, the folks at Orca had found out the situation that me and my colleague Bob Kinzel were in. And they invite us into their offices and they didn't just let us be there. They made us feel like we were at home, gave us our own office. We had everything we needed to do and I wouldn't have been able to work and do the work that I needed to do but for their generosity. So I'm incredibly grateful to you all for that. But what they did for me is not what defines their organization and to me what defines it is a commitment to service that is as pure and ego-less as anything I've encountered in my 25 or so years in the Vermont media landscape. One of the things that our audience at Vermont Public was most grateful for in the last few years and this slightly predates 2022. But it was our live broadcast of the COVID briefings that the governor was giving three times a week for close to 18 months. And we had so many people reach out to us and tell us how grateful they were that we were doing that. And what they probably didn't know is that wasn't us providing that feed. That was Orca that was there every day. It was Orca that we relied on to get that to the 60 or 1,000 so people that were listening in at any given moment. When the Green Mountain Care Board is meeting, a lot of people in Vermont don't even know what that is. The fact of the matter is that it's probably the most important regulatory body in the state. They're making incredibly important decisions, about a $6 billion healthcare industry that represents 20% of the Vermont economy. And there's one media organization, exactly one media organization at all those public hearings and it's Orca. And the only reason anybody can access that is because they're there for all of those. When the Vermont Center for Independent Living wanted to host a Democratic primary candidates forum last year, I was lucky enough to moderate that. So I got to watch in real time. Orca didn't just agree to cover that event. I watched Zach work with the team of people at VCIL, put in enormous time and energy to make sure that they could configure a broadcast that was going to allow for a split screen so that people could see the sign language interpreters as they watched that debate. And Orca and VCIL put on what I believe is hands down the most accessible political debate that Vermont has ever seen. And I think it could be a really great model going forward. So just like the breadth of stuff that Orca is doing is phenomenal. My time here coincided with the Vermont Youth Documentary Lab. The hive of activity in here is just breathtaking. I mean, the amount of creativity and innovation and energy was, it was energizing just for me to be around. And if you walked by this building and didn't come in, you would never know what's going on in here. And it's just, it's remarkable and it's magical. A lot of folks have sort of lamented the deterioration of local journalism. And as somebody who worked at the Times-Argus and Rutland-Herald 20 years ago, it's something that's particularly saddening for me. But as that local reporting diminishes, organizations like Orca are just more essential than they've ever been to having an informed citizenry. And local democracy, it's a living organism. And Orca is one of its vital organs. So thank you on behalf of Vermont Public for everything you do and for the community. And we're just really grateful you're here. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. So Michael Abadi, everybody. I got it. Peter, you set expectations really low. That was brilliant. I was very moved. That was really eloquent. I just capturing what the state's been through lately and then the reminder of the COVID era as well is just a really helpful context for us to remember that we're an essential service. We really, we really are. And, you know, a lot of it's not terribly sexy with the, you know, the select board meetings in our 13 towns. But that is a historical record. And, you know, it is, it's gavel to gavel. So it is, it's there for the digesting. And I'm just, I'm at a loss to just say thank you for how you captured all that. And then just the lifeblood of us is participation. So thank you producers, all things LGBT and also Abledon Air. And then all our make TV campers and our youth documentary. All of your efforts just enhance what we do. And it's powerful. So if you, anyone, if you have a thought, if you have an idea, someone who would want to interview businesses as they try to figure out the next months and years, that would be, you know, powerful. I mean, there's just, there's so many ideas cooking out there with the two forums on the resiliency of the town. And one more to come on next Thursday. And that's at the high school, which is opening on time somehow with six feet of water in the basement. They're opening on time for the school year. So, and finally, Chris touched on the, it's called sociocracy. We had an executive director. He was great, hard to replace. And as we were going through the hiring process, we realized, wow, the expertise is already here. And we moved to, you know, when you have an executive director, Molly, you have a bit of a pyramid. So this is a less hierarchical look. And Jin, Zach, and Chris, just they work it out on a colleague level really, really well. And I remember when the board passed that, let's do this co-director thing. Let's make the world less hierarchical. I felt really good going home, driving home. But then I was like, man, does that actually work? And they, like, it's just, we're, I think we had the one year anniversary in June. And it's just humming along. I just want to thank you all and also the staff as well. But I think I've said enough. Oh, welcome, Jessica, new board member. Dave, thank you for your tenure on the board as well. I would like to, the topic at hand. You got it. You want to do. You're called. I call. Just introduce yourself in. Of course. No problem. So Zach, can we get you on the phone? Yeah. Yeah, we have. All right. Well, my name is, my name is Lawrence Seiler. My wife couldn't be here today because she is getting better at rehab for physical therapy. However, we host Abel Denane, which is a television program for people with special needs. First of all, a lot of people with special needs don't get a chance to do community media, let alone media itself. Because Hollywood right now, if you've been reading the papers, Hollywood right now is first really hiring producers, directors, and other actors who are special needs and are, as I would like to say, people with many abilities. So for 30 years, I've been in community media first in New York and now in Vermont since 2015. And if it wasn't for Orca, Abel Denane wouldn't exist. So on behalf of the Abel Denane and Ornair team, we would like to thank Orca Media for giving us a chance and we would like to thank the board for letting Abel Denane exist. Thank you very much. Keith. Yeah, getting everyone to, many years ago, 2016, Linda Quinlan had an idea. Her idea was to do a show along with Anne, an idea of nobody covered queer news, the issues that were important to our community, our perspective on things. So they approached Orca Media and said, what would you think about? There was no resistance. What we got back was, how soon can you start? And since then, Zach has continued to make us look better than we are. We thank you for it. We thank Orca for providing us with our home. And we're going to be here for a while. Thanks, everyone. Thanks so much. Yeah, so help yourself to some food and some desserts and thank you for coming. Thanks so much. Yeah, we've got activities we've got to get to, yeah.