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Five Reasons for Virtual GA 2024 Curious why GA 2024 is an online event? Here is a list of reasons collected by the GA Team. 1. It’s more accessible – physically, financially, conceptually – and therefore attracts a bigger and more diverse audience of participants. 2. It’s more sustainable – fewer planes, trains, and automobiles as well as less facility energy consumption. 3. One impact of the pandemic was folks feeling less safe about travelling. The uncertainty about when and how many UUs would be ready to resume travel contributed to our inability to guarantee attendance numbers for the destinations interested in our business for 2024. To avoid potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in attrition or cancellation fees, it was a strategic decision to wait until the odds of solid participation could be more favorable. 4. In the 2022 report from the Commission on Institutional Change, there was a suggestion for a more accessible General Assembly (GA), and possibly one that doesn’t happen every year. The idea of having a GA every two years has been discussed for a while. The Commission’s work was finished before our first all-virtual GA in the spring of 2020, so that option wasn’t included in the report. After successfully hosting a virtual GA in 2020, it strengthened the case for trying it again intentionally to see if participation remains strong, like in 2020 and 2021. 5. Having received feedback from first-time GA attendees who participated online, we learned that participating in this way offers an easier opportunity to ‘test the waters’ compared to being in-person. Almost all online participants said they would attend in person next time. It’s a win-win situation.