Nancy Boyette

Mike Donohoe

Will Dunn

Kathie Seeley

 

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank the outgoing Board members for their service to this Community for the past three years:

 

Dale Cherry

Susan deLarios

Pat Gafford

Bridgit O'Rourke

On a cool fall day last year, some musicians and the friends that make up the Music Committee got together.  It was agreed that Music is such an important part of The Walk that it should be treated accordingly.  Most of us probably feel the songbooks are good. but not great, since many of the new songs that have been added that aren't in them.  Passing them out and getting everyone on the same page takes time and can slow down the praise and worship experience to a crawl.  Computers have been used selectively but not universally on Walks.  The only way we have had the benefit of technology so far is when a team member was able to share their personal laptops.

It has been a real help to musicians and everyone on Walks when those laptops were available. According to Susan Crowell, "once music is queued up, it takes less time to go from one song to another and theoretically should allow that more songs can be sung between talks in the conference room.  For too many years, we have used overheads on many Walks to add new music and the result were transparencies that were sometimes fuzzy and hard to read."  Jay Counts, who is the Board Music Committee Chair, added that "more and more of us are now using PowerPoint for talks and music, so it simply made sense to provide our community, team members, music leaders, etc. with the necessary resources.  The ability to project lyrics for the songs we sing on Walks, during Candlelight and at Ggatherings should ultimately eliminate the need for songbooks."

After a recommendation was made to the Dallas Emmaus Board recently, it was decided that a good way to get the words up for everyone to see was using projectors attached to computers loaded with all the songs from old to new that we all love to sing.  We have purchased 3 new projectors and 3 new laptops.  These will allow us to set up two screens at Candlelight and one in the Conference Room during a Walk weekend. A computer will be available to the Men and Women's teams as they prepare for the next walk.  It is important to have all the music at our fingertips, and with the Song Select software we can download all the words to our favorite music easily. Our annual CCLI license allows us to do that and avoid copyright infringement. We have also added Microsoft Office Home and Student to give the team the PowerPoint templates to use when building slide shows for each talk to use in previews and eventually on the weekends.

With change comes a requirement that we adapt. We will need to make the system readily available and user friendly. We are currently working on a practical policy for storing and distributing these resources as quickly and fairly as possible to get the most use and preserve the equipment at the same time. Training will also be made available at some gatherings to demonstrate the new software and how easy it can be to use.

Scott Andrews