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Stay in the know with your fellow volunteers and learn about current events happening in the Volunteer Nation

 

    

 

 

 

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Stay in the know with your fellow volunteers, read the latest volunteer spotlight, and learn about current events happening in the Volunteer Nation.


Staff Spotlight: Stacie Court

Stacie Court facing the camera and smiling

What do you do at Learning Ally? I lead the Foreign Language Community, supervising the recording of all foreign language textbooks, and I lead the TOC Community, a group of organized, computer-savvy volunteers who help set up the textbooks so they are ready for the other volunteers to work on.  In non-COVID times, I also handle a lot of engagement and outreach initiatives in Georgia, mostly with the Lions Clubs and University of Georgia faculty and students.

 

How long have you worked at Learning Ally?  I became a volunteer almost as soon as I heard of it, in July 2007, and by the next summer I was on staff.

 

What made you want to work at Learning Ally? I can't imagine NOT wanting to work here.  Each day is different, so I don't have time to be bored, and all day, everyday, everything I am doing is helping someone in need.

 

What's something most people at LA don't know about you? What do you do during your free time? I grew up in a military family and have trouble sitting still. I'm 55, and have moved 32 times in my life, living in places as scattered as Maine and Florida, and California and Guam.  I love to travel, and am never happier than when I can get my husband and/or one of my children to go adventuring with me.  We are all hoping to go together to Norway for my 60th birthday, so I am (slowly, in my free time), studying Norwegian.

 

This is a newspaper article showing Stacie Court in high school, dressed in a traditional dirndl with her peers. Stacie is a brunette in the right foreground, holding up her dance partner, Bill, for the highpoint of the Mühlradl, where the guys swing their legs up and down to imitate the workings of a mill).

What is your favorite book? I don't really have a favorite but the two that probably had the most impact on my life were the unabridged versions of Johanna Spyri's Heidi  and Mary Mapes Dodge's Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates  which I received for my seventh birthday. They were the first "real" books I read, and at seven they were a bit of a challenge.  But, I read them, and I loved wrapping my head and tongue around the foreign words and cultural differences. I sometimes wonder if I joined the German folkdancing group at my high school so I could dress in a dirndl like Heidi and Gretel--?

 

H.G. Wells facing the camera and smiling kindly

If you could be any fictional character for a day, who would you be and why? H.G. Wells in the TV show Warehouse 13: she's absolutely brilliant, a good person deep down, and at about 140 years old she still looks stunning.

 

If you could write a book about your life, what would the title be and why? Say Yes to Adventure! I love a good adventure, and they usually happen when I take a chance and say yes.


Introducing Twist...a new way to communicate!

Let's Twist!

As you've probably heard, we’ve seen a lot of new volunteers since March and the limitations of Google Chat, our old messaging client, have become more apparent. We need a better way. We need to be able to keep all our volunteers and staff members connected in easy to manage groups, with a centralized interface, and easy to use tools.
 
So say hello to Twist!
 
Twist is a modern communication tool that provides us with a flexible and easy forum for community discussion. With apps for macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, Linux, and the web, our conversations will stay synced across all devices. Visit Twist's download center for details on the different versions available!
 
The roll-out for this new tool will be gradual, starting with the large Chat hangouts like the Virtual Water Cooler, Literary Salon, Listener Bureau, Training Hangouts, and QA Hangouts. When those groups have changed over, and everyone is comfortably using Twist, we can  move Project communication too. Starting with Literature projects, and then Textbooks. We’ll allow for a few months to complete this transition as we all get accustomed to this new tool! Once complete, we’ll have all volunteers working and chatting together in the same teams with the ability to join larger group conversations too!
 
We added a text Twist Reference Guide to our Resources page and we encourage you to watch this introductory video about Twist! 
 

 

The link to join Twist is here: https://twist.com/j/2abbc2863c6e85d3502548e77f1f59e0  Please join the conversation!