A Connected Planet

“Sheila hearne, phd greg hearne president coo married”

“The coo is responsible for collecting all required materials needed by the accountants to prepare the federal form 990. Once the form is completed, the accountants provide a draft of the return to the coo for review, and any updates or corrections are submitted to the accountants for review. A revised draft is then submitted to the coo for review. Once the revised draft has been reviewed and is satisfactory, the revised draft is then submitted to the full board of directors for their review prior to being filed with the internal revenue service.”

“All board of directors are required to have executed a written acknowledgement that they have (a) received a copy of acp's bylaws, which contain the conflicts of interest policy; (b) read and understood the policy; (c) agree to comply with the policy; and (d) understand that acp is charitable and in order to maintain its federal tax exemption, it must be engaged primarily in activities which accomplish one or more of its tax exempt purposes.”

“Salaries were initially set based on industry standards for the type of work being done with adjustments with consideration of being a non-profit organization. Both the ceo and coo took significant pay cuts in comparison to their previous positions with similar responsibilities. The salaries were reviewed and approved by the board. It is now our standard process to review and vote on salaries at our annual board meeting where the results are recorded in our minutes.”

“Salaries were initially set based on industry standards for the type of work being done with adjustments with consideration of being a non-profit organization.”

“Acp makes its governing documants, conflict of interest policy, and other organizing documents available to the public upon request.”

“The mission of a connected planet (acp) is to provide telecommunications and technical assistance to enable information sharing and to improve the education & healthcare services provided to children in the developing world.”

“Acp works in the open education resource this year focused on a cooperative partnership with the university of notre dame (und) alliance for catholic education (ace) to develop a prototype application for their ana ak tiga book series. The books are a series of children's books contextualized for haiti which incorporate social emotional learning (sel) principals. The books are written and illustrated by haitian authors and artists, the books pull on haiti's rich culture while integrating key elements of social and emotional learning. They also include helpful activities for parents and teachers to do with learners at the end of the stories. The beta application is based on the first book in the series called "identify your emotions". The prototype application includes an audiobook, discussion questions and children's games. Acp continued work maintaining its library of free applications in the google play and apple itunes stores. Acp maintains two types of education- related mobile applications. The first type of applications is general education apps which are used to teach basic letter, word and number recognition. The second type of application are digital book apps based on hard copy books produced by the mother tongue books (mtb) program started by the matnwa community learning center on the island of la gonve, haiti. The applications support the haitian creole, french, and english languages. During this year acp maintained the "education de qualit pour tous" (eduquat) series of mathematics applications developed in previous years an inter-american development bank (idb) is initiative led by les frres de l'instruction chrtienne (fic) in port-au-prince, haiti.”

“Acp continued its initiative to develop an open-source text-to-speech (tts) capability for under resourced languages working in cooperation with carnegie mellon university (cmu) language technology institute (lti). We are developing the capability for the android operating system using a suite of open-source development tools from cmu. During this period set up an oracle cloud platform which contains the tools and a database to contain utterances (phrases) which are recorded and processed to create the synthetic voices. After creating the core infrastructure platform, the team worked on defining 2000+ utterances for the basic creole vocabulary and utterances specific to the primary grade education sector. The plan had been to record the utterances in haiti at a local university. Due to the ongoing violence, the covid-19 pandemic, and us department of state travel restrictions we decided to have the utterances professionally recorded in haiti. That work will be done in the next year. Acp still plans document the methodology used to develop the haitian creole tts capability and create a multilingual video program of instruction which could be used in other areas of the world where the need exists to create tts capabilities for local languages.”