Why are NAI funds expended for international programs and staff travel to exotic places?
We have a thriving international program at NAI that continues to expand. The good news is that it is costing virtually nothing in terms of membership dollars from the U.S. The office maintains a database of people who are interested in doing volunteer work abroad and when someone from another country calls us to see if we’d be interested in helping them do training, planning, or designing/building projects, we go through the database to see who has the appropriate skills and availability to get the job done. The projects are few and far between, and we don’t spend any NAI money on them. They are totally supported by grants from third parties. We don’t seek out these opportunities largely because staff time is limited, but when someone calls on us with money to support a project, we have volunteers ready to go. We’ve sent several people to China and Korea and have had interest from a number of other countries that are struggling to get interpretation projects up and running. Another ac
