Over the past couple of years, I got drawn into various leadership and governance activities. I got sucked into the vice-presidency of the Esperanto League for North America and of my local union (in addition to being the president of the regional Esperanto organization and chairing a couple of faculty senate committees, etc). The result has been that I've gotten stretched too thin. In July, I will rotate of the board of the MSP. When the "kandidatiga komitato had asked me about Esperanto-USA, I had originally agreed to continue to serve -- assuming no-one else wanted to do it. (When they had initially asked me, it was pretty clear they were scraping the bottom of the barrel). I was suprised when the ballot arrived and they had found someone to run against me! After being initially dismayed -- since they had clearly violated the spirit of my agreement to be a candidate -- I was relieved to know I wasn't going to have to do it anymore and I withdrew as a candidate. I'm free!
Esperanto-USA has serious problems. The main problem is that it doesn't really do anything. It's a placeholder for Esperanto activity in the US, but the real activity has largely routed around it by setting up the Esperanto Studies Foundation. ESF runs NASK (the summer Esperanto course) and is about the only thing that does any research or advocacy. Esperanto-USA does do some stuff. They have a membership (declining). They run a catalog bookstore. And there's a newsletter. It's an old-style social organization, like the kinds that have been dying out all over the country. Indeed all over the world. No-one really knows how organizations like these can survive.
It used to be that to participate in the Esperanto community, you needed to have some kind of guide or entr
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