What Happened to POD’s Virtual Conference?
The POD Network refuses to host a virtual conference. That’s harming all educational developers, especially those who are disabled, vulnerable, or marginalized. But POD leaders don't seem to care.
The POD Network is failing its members by refusing to host a virtual conference. Over the past 18 months, POD leadership has resisted grassroots advocacy efforts from individual POD members, collective contributions from its Disabled Affinity Group and Accessibility and Disability Special Interest Group, as well as formal recommendations by its own Ad Hoc Committee on Virtual Programming to reinstate the virtual conference. By ignoring the call to provide accessible conferencing options for its most vulnerable members, POD reproduces existing inequalities within our community and actively harms the educational development profession it was created to serve.
For context, the POD Annual Conference was fully virtual in 2020 and 2021 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022 and 2023, both on-site and online conference options were offered in parallel. In 2024, the online conference was abolished, and limited, flawed hybrid elements were incorporated into the on-site conference. And in 2025, hybrid options are restricted even further, now limited to only two short session types that allow for minimal audience participation.
This post chronicles POD’s gradual elimination of virtual annual conference options, in direct opposition to the voices of its disabled and other non-traveling members.
In this post, we’ll explain how…
POD tried to quietly eliminate its virtual conference—effectively ending conference access for many educational developers—without any explicit communication to members or any consultation with disabled and other non-traveling members.
POD has consistently cited a lack of volunteer capacity as a key reason for not reinstating the virtual conference, yet has wasted and actively worked against the volunteer labor of its own Committees, SIGs, Affinity Groups, and members in support of virtual programming.
POD established a committee explicitly charged with designing a pilot virtual program in Spring 2025, and then rejected the very proposal they themselves had solicited.
POD uses budgetary constraints as an excuse for not supporting a virtual program that their own planning committee determined would cost essentially nothing, yet provides $40,000 in need-based financial aid for members to attend the on-site conference.
You can be an ally to disabled and other non-traveling members by advocating for a virtual conference.
Who’s No Longer At the Table?
POD’s decision not to provide a virtual conference restricts access for the following groups:
Educational developers whose institutions lack sufficient professional development funds or have issued travel restrictions.
Independent scholars and graduate students interested in educational development who do not have access to institutional professional development or travel funds.
Educational developers with disabilities that make traveling exceedingly difficult or impossible, which may or may not be visible/apparent to others.
Educational developers whose gender-aligned travel documents have been denied to them by the current administration or those who feel concerned about being discriminated against for their gender during travel screenings.
Educational developers with weakened immune systems or those concerned about the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and other highly transmissible illnesses that are increasing in prevalence.
Neurodivergent educational developers for whom on-site conferences can be overstimulating and not designed in an accessible way.
Educational developers who are parents with childcare responsibilities.
Educational developers who have elder care or other support duties.
Educational developers who are pregnant and cannot risk travel.
Educational developers whose immigration status in the US is especially tenuous.
Educational developers who work abroad and are worried about international travel and unstable immigration policies.
Educational developers concerned about being racially profiled during travel.
Educational developers concerned about the climate impacts of air and other travel.
POD leadership is not working in good faith to restore access to their signature program for these members of our community, and in some cases is actively working against a more accessible future. While POD maintains that it would be nice to have more members from these groups represented at conferences, disabled and other non-traveling members have been repeatedly told that they are too expensive, too burdensome, too disengaged, too difficult to accommodate, and too ungrateful to be included. Access to the POD Annual Conference is provided to these groups only when it is convenient and profitable to do so; otherwise, the organization has demonstrated that it is perfectly willing to leave them behind.
These actions run in direct conflict with POD’s stated values for diversity, equity, and inclusion1, as well as its strategic plan that aims to “increase year-round availability of opportunities for members to engage with and through the POD Network, including regional and online opportunities, thereby expanding access and inclusion.” POD leadership’s actions are also misaligned with the recently released, Affirmation of Care, Dialogue, and Accountability, which lists “ensuring meetings, programs, resources, and materials are accessible” as an example behavior to foster a healthy organization culture.
All POD members have a stake in convening a virtual conference, whether or not they plan to attend the on-site conference. When you sit down at a table, it’s important to know who wasn’t given a seat. Even if you are able to attend the on-site conference one year, you might still appreciate a more accessible alternative in the future. For example, most educational developers needed a virtual option in 2020 and 2021, but the ones who still depend on these remote-friendly sources of learning and connection are now getting left behind. In a classic case of “interest convergence,” the needs of marginalized groups within POD were only met when they aligned with the needs of the majority. This is not what it means to be committed to accessibility. If you enjoy the POD Annual Conference—seeing your colleagues, learning new things, sharing ideas—shouldn’t you want that to be accessible to as many of your colleagues as possible?
Why can’t non-traveling educational developers simply attend other virtual conferences not hosted by POD? Well, they can, and they do. Any given conference cannot possibly be everything to everyone. But the outsized implications of attending and presenting at conferences hosted by large professional organizations like POD makes it critical for these organizations to ensure that their offerings are as accessible as possible. Attending the POD Annual Conference offers unique, tangible benefits in terms of personal learning and growth, as well as visibility within the profession, networking with diverse colleagues across campuses and borders, and advancing one’s career through job fairs, CV lines, and building one’s professional reputation or brand. Many centers for teaching and learning in the U.S. even require or expect attendance at the POD Conference as a condition of employment. These benefits ought to be distributed equitably among all POD members, but this cannot happen without accessible virtual options. Scaling back virtual options that arose during the height of the pandemic was not inevitable; it was an intentional decision with significant exclusionary consequences.
What follows is a detailed explanation of the various attempts POD members have made to convene a virtual conference program, as well as the ways POD leadership has consistently thwarted and undermined those efforts. As you read, consider asking yourself: Is this an organization whose values still align with my own? What role can I play in ensuring that all of my educational development colleagues have meaningful avenues for professional learning and growth? The post concludes with a list of tangible actions you can take to support disabled and other non-traveling educational developers.
POD Requests a Petition to Create a Virtual Program, then Backtracks
In late 2023—before the 2024 POD Conference Call for Proposals was published—a group of disabled educational developers in POD’s Disabled Affinity Group (DAG) expressed concern about the possible lack of virtual options at the 2024 Conference. Members of the DAG were invited to a meeting with POD’s new Executive Director on February 29, 2024. At that meeting, the DAG members were informed that collecting 25 signatures from POD members to create a virtual conference program was sufficient to form a committee that could host a POD-sanctioned event. The requested petition went out to POD members the very next day. It envisioned a virtual program held in the summer in order to complement, not compete with, the on-site POD conference held in November. The petition reads:
[T]his petition seeks to create a Committee for Virtual Gatherings. In the short term, this Committee will work to plan a gathering in 2024, to ameliorate the impact of a lack of a fully virtual annual POD conference in 2024. In the long term, this Committee will work to plan an annual virtual POD conference, distinct from (yet perhaps thematically or otherwise connected to) the annual POD on-site conference, in addition to coordinating other virtual offerings throughout the year (in alignment with, for example, PODLive, SIG programming, etc.).
Days later, on March 4, 2024, the petition had already reached the required 25 signatures, and was forwarded to the POD Office. The petition ultimately generated 106 signatures before it was closed.
After the signatures were submitted, the DAG immediately got started working on the virtual gathering as planned. On April 2, 2024, the DAG sent out their Call for Proposals for the first annual virtual gathering with the theme, “Making Change, Taking Space.” By the end of the month, the DAG had already set up a website, collected over 30 high-quality proposals to present, and formed an extensive volunteer network of over 20 POD members assigned to various gathering subcommittees. All of this was completed with volunteer labor, free online platforms, and no additional resources from POD.
However, on April 17, 2024, the DAG met again with the Executive Director as well as other members of POD leadership. At that meeting, POD leadership informed the DAG that their previous instruction to gather signatures to create an event was mistaken and that, in fact, they would not be able to sanction a virtual event. Only the first recommendation of the petition was to move forward, namely, the Ad Hoc Committee for Virtual Programming would be created, but the committee would not be allowed to pursue an actual virtual program until 2025.
In a May 6 email to petition signatories, Stacy Grooters, then POD President, wrote that POD would not be able to proceed with the petition’s call for a virtual program because of the lack of volunteer capacity on behalf of the Conference Committee. Instead, they would pursue limited hybrid options for the upcoming on-site conference. The email states, “The Conference Committee recognizes that these expanded, but still limited, hybrid opportunities are not enough to replace what the fully-online conference enabled in recent years, but they see this as an important step in building POD’s ability to leverage hybrid modalities to allow for greater accessibility in the future.” Conveniently, this email failed to mention that an entire virtual conference had already been planned by the virtual gathering team, made up substantially of DAG members, and required no further volunteer capacity from POD. Rather than amplifying the work of their disabled colleagues to support more accessible programming, POD instead sought to distance themselves from the planned virtual gathering.
POD leadership now claimed that the organization’s Governance Manual prohibited Affinity Groups from hosting POD-sponsored programming2, and that if the DAG wanted to host the event under the Accessibility and Disability SIG, they would need to submit a separate proposal to the Core Committee. Because this new request was not communicated until April 19 for a gathering that was planning to happen in June, the Core Committee would not have had time to review the SIG’s proposal before the gathering was set to happen. As such, the DAG members opted to make the event an independent offering and communicated this decision to POD leadership.
The DAG then received a message from Stacy Grooters requesting that all materials be scrubbed in order to distance POD from the event:
Remove “pod” from the current email address: virtualgatheringspod@gmail.com (since it implies that it is a POD Network-affiliated account)
References as POD Disabled Affinity Group (instead use “members of the POD Network’s Disabled Affinity Group” or “members of the Disabled Affinity Group within the POD Network” if you are sharing/describing your personal affiliation to POD Network).
Remove references to POD Network entities and structures e.g., from session types, call for proposals, call for volunteers, and the website.
Remove declarative statements representing POD Network’s mission, vision, values, and commitments outside of quoted text from the POD Network website; specifically, representations of POD Network listed on the website for the program’s “About this gathering” page.
To avoid confusion among participants and others interested in your program, please also include explicit language in all future messaging and resources that the POD Network is not an affiliated program organizer or sponsor. This will minimize interested parties from reaching out to the POD Network for information about a program we are not involved in supporting. Sample language: This program has been independently developed by members of the POD Network’s Disabled Affinity Group, but is not an affiliated, governed, or sponsored program of the POD Network. If you have any questions about the program please contact [Contact Name] at [Contact Email].
The DAG never claimed that the virtual gathering was an official POD-sponsored event, though they did indicate that the event was being organized by the DAG. Their Call for Proposals email sent to the POD Google Group indicated that this was a program put together by “a group of DAG members and others.” Nevertheless, the DAG complied with POD’s request to minimize ambiguity and to emphasize POD’s organizational distance from the event, acting in good faith to allow the Ad Hoc Committee to be formed and conduct their work.
An Accessibility-First Virtual Gathering Succeeds, Without POD
In Stacy Grooters’ email to petition signatories, she claimed that “we [the Core Committee] had also been considering member feedback that showed, while the majority of online conference goers rated their experience positively, those ratings were significantly lower than those for the on-site conference — with some describing the online conference as making them feel like ‘second class citizens’ in the organization.” Rather than using these comments to improve the online offering, or sharing the ratings data in order to increase transparency and engage in honest conversations, she writes that “Core decided to discontinue the concurrent online conference and instead pursue new avenues for creating meaningful, virtual access for members.” In doing so, POD reinforced the practice of making disabled people’s access contingent on their gratitude. The moment we express criticism, our access is taken away. When we express that we’re treated as second-class citizens, our citizenship is simply revoked. If we ever express a feeling of not belonging, we aren’t invited to the next party. This has already led several disabled POD members to leave the organization altogether.3
Instead of listening to the voices of their own Disabled Affinity Group and Accessibility and Disability SIG, POD leadership made the paternalistic decision to dictate what “would enable greater access to and belonging in the POD Network” for their disabled and other non-traveling members—namely, by excluding them completely. Meanwhile, the independent virtual gathering was paving the way in showing what accessible virtual programming could look like. The organizers implemented practices like longer breaks between sessions, accessible presentation guides, placing a volunteer moderator in every session, enabling collective notetaking documents and asynchronous session materials, posting session recordings, creating accessible websites and navigation menus to easily keep track of the conference schedule, and many others.
Over 400 registrants signed up to attend the inaugural accessibility-first virtual gathering from June 26-28, 2024. At the event, attendees did not report feeling like “second-class citizens.” Instead, the virtual gathering generated the following feedback:
I had never been to a conference/gathering where access was the explicit focus, and I can't say enough good things about this. I felt so included, safe, and welcomed in every session I attended. I made connections with new people, reconnected with others, and left with my cup feeling full (I usually leave conferences/gatherings drained beyond recognition, and now with COVID, I can't even attend most conferences). Thank you for all of your hard work, time, and effort put into this event—I would love to join the next one, and will continue sharing what I learned from this one with my colleagues until then!
I really appreciate all the effort that the organizers have put into making this an inclusive event. I really appreciate the upfront descriptions of engagement options, particularly having the 'silent reflection' space. Looking forward to the remaining days!
Fewer people had cameras on than many virtual conferences, which just tells me that people felt comfortable caring for themselves.
I’m reflecting on the way that the intentional design of the sessions—especially the freedom to be, as someone put it below—actually motivated me to engage more, and to engage with curiosity and hope, and with space to breathe. Thank you, conference organizers!
I’ve been so appreciative of the conference organizers’ efforts to create a variety of sessions with different formats and genuine differing options to engage. I haven’t been able to attend much synchronously, but seeing the attention to asynchronous notes has made me feel like I haven’t missed out on much at all.
I am grateful for the presenters and the conference organizers who accomplished a herculean task and achieved what many thought wasn’t possible.
I am grateful for this gathering, the kind and compassionate space of sharing and caring and learning.
I loved how accessibility showed up in EVERY session, even if it wasn't the explicit focus.
Incredible focus on accessibility. Never experienced anything like it.
The organizers really went above and beyond to create a space that our—ahem—professional organizations have not been rising to the occasion to create.
Keep in mind that all of this was done with volunteer labor, no budget, and no external resources from POD. The model was so successful that participants requested the organizers speak out about how they had created a “radically accessible” space on such limited resources. This culminated in the podcast episode, “Virtual Gathering, Real Inclusion” on ThinkUDL.
POD Establishes a Committee to Develop a Virtual Program in Spring 2025
Auspiciously, in the middle of the 2024 independent virtual gathering, Stacy Grooters emailed all POD members her annual presidential message. The message concluded by announcing the establishment of the Spring 2025 Virtual Program Ad Hoc Committee, “charged with proposing a new virtual conference (or similar program) to be held early in 2025. The Ad hoc promises to play a key role in the POD Network’s commitment to expand access through greater online offerings.”
The Ad Hoc Committee Charter outlines in detail the deliverables requested, and the language assumes that some sort of virtual conference will happen. There is even a date by which the Spring 2025 event will be assessed: “Following the Spring 2025 event, the Virtual Program ad hoc and/or the program implementation team will need to submit a report to the Core Committee assessing the impact of the spring program and making recommendations for the future of the POD Network’s virtual offerings.”
The Ad Hoc Committee was formed primarily by self-nomination to the committee; however, a few members were explicitly emailed and invited to join the committee, a process POD often calls “tapping on the shoulder.” Only one member of the Disabled Affinity Group self-nominated and was appointed to the committee, and no one who had been heavily involved in the creation of the petition or in advocating for virtual programming over the previous year reported being “tapped on the shoulder.” While several members of the committee were invited to apply based on their intellectual commitments to accessibility, it’s important that these invitations did not reach DAG members who explicitly identify as being disabled and/or neurodivergent, in addition to having their own intellectual commitments to accessibility. An important refrain in the disability community is “Nothing about us without us.” Happily, it turned out that two-thirds of the committee members had never attended the on-site POD Conference and identified as being “remote-only” members of the organization, but it is telling that POD leadership did not prioritize reaching out to openly disabled advocates who had been involved in promoting virtual access to join the Ad Hoc Committee. Further, some disabled members did not self-nominate due to skepticism they had already developed about POD’s commitment to accessible programming, especially in light of their attempt to quietly discontinue the virtual conference after 2023, as well as negative individual and group interactions with POD leadership.
The Ad Hoc Committee submitted their proposal to POD leadership on October 15, 2024. Their very first recommendation, in bold, is to “Hold a pilot online conference on/near June 16 and 17, 2025. This will substantively and meaningfully respond to the petition previously submitted to the Core Committee from many POD members requesting an online conference in the spring.”
The Ad Hoc Committee acknowledged that the online conference would be a pilot “to determine if it is feasible and desirable for POD to begin offering an online flagship event each spring.” They noted that “it is not feasible at this point to hold an event in the spring or early summer of 2025 using the full planning schedule of a typical fall POD conference,” and recommended a sensible outline of sessions using a reduced number of session types. But the report makes clear that their overall recommendation is to develop a fully virtual conference to take place in Spring 2025. They included accompanying timelines and project management outlines in their proposal in order to realize this vision. The planning was to begin by January 1, 2025.
The 2024 Conference Builds a Solid Foundation for Destroying What Was Already Built
While the Ad Hoc’s proposal was being considered, the 2024 Annual POD Conference was taking place in Chicago from November 11-14, 2024. The conference theme was “Relationships at the Core of Educational Development,” and the Call for Proposals espoused that “Relationship-rich environments are flexible and allow us to expand beyond our fiscal constraints, which opens access to the transformative potential of higher education…” Notably, however, only relationships among educational developers able to attend the on-site conference were fostered.
Virtual participation at this conference was limited and peripheral from the very beginning. The initial Call for Proposals sent on March 1, 2024, completely neglected to mention that the online conference of the four years before it was to be eliminated. Instead, a short note at the end of the email read, in part: “The Conference Team is exploring opportunities for those who are not able to travel to Chicago,” without clarifying what those “opportunities” would look like.
This terse language about virtual programming prompted frustration and confusion among members. The Executive Director responded in a subsequent email to all members on March 17, which contained an FAQ section about virtual programming at the 2024 conference. Rather than clarifying what options were available, however, the email stated only that presenters should express their needs and that “the Conference Committee will assess the capacity for hybrid presentations and attempt to make arrangements for as many hybrid presentations as we are able.” The email goes on to state: “We kindly ask for your patience while we navigate this new hybrid option.”
Virtual options were treated by the Conference Committee as an afterthought. This dissuaded a number of POD members from even submitting a proposal. During the conference itself, technical issues plagued virtual sessions, which resulted in several virtual presenters getting booted from their own sessions. Unclear and untimely communications about session recording also confused many presenters, who did not know if they were able to opt-out of having their session recorded. Earlier that year, POD leadership had suggested that a hybrid conference would be one way to “create greater accessibility for members,” and yet, the actual implementation of hybrid options was, by many accounts, a step backwards from a concurrent virtual offering.
Over five months after the Ad Hoc Committee submitted its report, and many weeks after project implementation for the virtual program was supposed to begin, POD announced its Call for Proposals on March 24, 2025, for the 50th Annual Conference on-site in San Diego. The Ad Hoc Committee members themselves had not heard the results of their proposal to create an online program until after the on-site event had already been announced.
The 2025 Call for Proposals contained a note about “virtual participation.” It reads, in part, “The POD Network is committed to lowering barriers to access and providing opportunities for virtual engagement with the Annual Conference. Due to budget limitations, this year, we are focusing our resources on supporting a high-quality and consistent [on-site] conference experience. While we explored a hybrid format at last year’s 49th Annual Conference, we are prioritizing approaches that best support engagement and sustainability.”
While in 2024 the DAG was told that the hybrid options, while insufficient, were “an important step in building POD’s ability to leverage hybrid modalities to allow for greater accessibility in the future,” the actual future curtailed virtual options even further. POD leadership used negative feedback gathered from the poorly planned 2024 hybrid options to justify a course reversal. This led some members to suspect that POD was setting virtual options up to fail–intentionally sabotaging the quality of virtual elements in order to generate evidence that they should be eliminated.
Of the eight session types offered in the upcoming 2025 conference, only two (POD Talks and Research sessions) allow for virtual presenters and attendees. Importantly, these are the two shortest session types available (8-10 and 30 minutes, respectively) and the only two session types listed in the CFP as having a “Low” audience interaction. Limiting virtually-compatible session types to the ones with the least engagement positions disabled and other non-traveling members as labor to be extracted without the ability to learn or build community with other members.
While the Ad Hoc had initially recommended that a Spring 2025 offering limit their session types, they recommended POD Perspectives, longer and more engaging sessions, as opposed to Research sessions. Further, this recommendation was intended as a stop-gap measure for a first iteration. It was only put forward by the Ad Hoc due to the shortened proposal review timeline required by starting to plan a Spring conference in January, and it would not apply to a November on-site conference that is already reviewing proposals for all session types. In this context, the session restrictions are not necessary to expedite the review process but rather imposed artificially in a way that simplifies logistics for the on-site conference organizers. Rather than centering the needs and voices of disabled and other non-traveling members, POD cherry-picked and distorted ideas from the Ad Hoc Committee to legitimize doing what was easiest for them.
POD Rejects the Same Virtual Program They Asked For
On March 26, 2025—three months after planning for the Spring Virtual Program was supposed to begin—the Ad Hoc Committee finally received the verdict on the proposal they had spent months working on. Recall that the full name of the Ad Hoc Committee was the Spring 2025 Virtual Program Committee, specifically charged by POD leadership with designing a virtual event for 2025. And yet, the memo from the Executive Committee, penned by POD President Christine Rener, recommends to Core that “The POD Network infrastructure cannot support a Summer 2025 online conference.” POD leadership now claimed that they could not support the very program they had created a committee to organize.
The memo reads: “We recognize the benefits afforded by an online conference; however, there are insufficient resources and support to host such an event at this time.” This statement runs directly counter to POD’s charter for the Ad Hoc, which indicated that one of the key purposes of running a pilot in 2025 was to gather assessment data that “will be used to inform decision-making about…the infrastructure (labor and resources) needed to sustain regular and meaningful virtual programs.” Initially, POD leadership explicitly stated that “The ad hoc has been formed with the assumption that some kind of regular virtual programming is necessary to meet member needs and sustain the POD Network’s long-term growth, but that more information is needed to inform long-term planning in this area.” By the time the Committee’s recommendations were reviewed, however, POD leadership had already decided the outcome of the very thing they charged the Ad Hoc Committee with testing. Rather than running the very experiment they themselves had proposed months earlier and collecting data to make an informed decision, POD leadership simply answered their own question without appropriate supporting evidence and moved on.
While the Core Committee voted on February 25, 2025, to approve a memo which, in effect, rejected the Ad Hoc Committee’s proposal to plan a virtual conference, the Executive Committee waited over a month to share these conclusions with the members of the Ad Hoc, after the Call for Proposals for the on-site conference had already been released. To date, POD membership at large has not been informed by POD leadership about the results of the Ad Hoc Committee that was publicly charged with planning an online gathering in Spring 2025.
POD Explains To Its Volunteers That They Do Not Exist
POD consistently uses the “cost narrative” to defer the possibility of virtual programming, suggesting that they are, in theory, committed to accessibility, but in practice, do not have the resources to support it. This troublingly positions normative needs as invisible and free, while accessibility needs are framed as “special” and “burdensome.” Here are some examples from POD communications:
“I recognize that these actions don’t address every demand in the petition, and I hope you’ll recognize these as good faith efforts to act on the concerns raised given current capacity within the organization.” –Response to petition signatories by Stacy Grooters
“Several factors—including volunteer capacity, declining online conference participation, and survey feedback from members and online attendees citing a lack of equity and belonging—led to the decision to put a hold on the execution of a concurrent online conference for this year.” –Email from Executive Director on March 19, 2025
“The POD Network is committed to lowering barriers to access and providing opportunities for virtual engagement with the Annual Conference. Due to budget limitations, this year, we are focusing our resources on supporting a high-quality and consistent conference experience.” –2025 Call for Proposals
“We recognize the benefits afforded by an online conference; however, there are insufficient resources and support to host such an event at this time… The Executive Committee and the Core Committee discussed the financial risks associated with standing up such a significant new program, the limitations of POD office staff capacity to support such a program, and the uncertain sustainability of current and future member volunteer capacity. This type of program requires an intense engagement on the part of volunteers. There is already volunteer fatigue within POD, as evidenced by the same volunteers participating across multiple leadership spaces and volunteers exiting their leadership roles prematurely.” –Executive Committee memo to Ad Hoc Committee on March 25, 2025
While POD consistently bemoans their lack of capacity, they have not once publicly acknowledged that a virtual gathering was already hosted by POD members in 2024 and another virtual gathering has already been planned for 2025. Additionally, while POD cited “volunteer fatigue” as a key barrier, they did not acknowledge that six members of the Ad Hoc Committee had already volunteered to serve on the planning committee for a virtual offering, with an additional four members responding “maybe.” These Ad Hoc Committee members had already met twice per month to carry out the Committee’s charge: these volunteers were dedicated and willing to commit even more time. The truth is that POD doesn’t even need a pilot to show that the volunteer capacity they say they don’t have or might not have actually exists-–they can already demonstrably prove that it does!
It is ironic that the Executive Committee would tell the Ad Hoc Committee that POD could not act on the recommendations produced by the committee’s own volunteer labor… because of the lack of volunteer labor. Given that two-thirds of the Ad Hoc Committee identified as “remote-only” members themselves, POD was once again dictating to its members how they were allowed to be involved rather than simply listening to them. If POD is so concerned about volunteer fatigue, why create a committee with the explicit purpose of proposing a virtual program and then denying that very same program they were asked to propose? No wonder the organization feels it “lacks capacity” when it continues to squander and undermine the capacity it actually has.
Immediately after the memo rejecting the Spring/Summer 2025 conference was approved by the Core Committee, POD leadership recommended that a grassroots virtual event could still be organized this year through the Accessibility and Disability SIG. Leadership specified that such an event would need to be SIG-specific, focusing primarily on accessibility and disability issues, as opposed to a broad-based conference for a general POD audience. The Accessibility and Disability SIG thus requested POD leadership to expedite their review of a proposal for a June conference, especially given that they had waited patiently for the Ad Hoc to complete its work, expecting a virtual event in Summer 2025, as outlined in the charge. However, this request was declined, once again, due to a lack of organizational capacity. It was suggested that the non-expedited review might happen in June, when the virtual gathering was planned to take place. Faced, for a second year, with the decision of indefinitely postponing the event until Core approved it in a reduced form or organizing the conference independently, the organizers chose to run the conference independently. This is the second year in a row that POD has refused to host a virtual conference citing a “lack of capacity” while a virtual conference is already being organized in parallel (but independently) by POD members.
To be sure, the Executive Committee did recommend some of the proposals outlined by the Ad Hoc Committee that did not involve hosting a virtual conference. These include better communication of existing events and clarifying the existing process by which new SIG programs may be proposed.
Notably, the second “recommendation” outlined in the memo is simply to “utilize existing outlets for virtual programming,” with PODLive mentioned as the only such “outlets.” It’s important to note that utilizing existing outlets is not a recommendation to do anything different. There is no action mentioned for POD to take in order to implement this recommendation. Instead, it rhetorically serves to showcase POD’s complacency with what they are already doing, suggesting that members should stop advocating for a virtual conference and instead be grateful for the one avenue POD already provides, however limited it may be. When POD members voiced a need for a virtual gathering, POD leadership effectively responded: “Make what we’re already doing work.”
The memo’s fourth recommendation is to “explore opportunities to expand online events and resources.” Here POD alludes to their emerging partnership with OneHE, which allows members “access to synchronous and asynchronous virtual learning opportunities.” OneHE has been billed by POD leadership as a key component in building organizational capacity for virtual events, such as virtual conferences. In an email sent November 11, 2024, to all POD members, the Executive Director notes that OneHE will offer “Live virtual events where you can share experiences and learn from educators worldwide.” However, when the Ad Hoc Committee was given a demo of the OneHE platform on August 28, 2024, no such live event feature was even shown, confusing members of the committee about the purpose of the demo and raising the question of POD’s genuineness in pitching OneHE as the solution to the problem of virtual conferencing.
The memo’s final recommendation is for POD to “establish a new process by which new programs can be proposed.” This primarily refers to events proposed through a Committee or SIG. While greater transparency in POD processes is sorely needed, this transparency should not come at the cost of the organization’s flexibility to serve member needs and interests. For example, POD leadership has expressed a desire to restrict SIG-sponsored events to SIG-specific material. Because the Accessibility and Disability SIG is not only concerned with the literature on accessible teaching and the best-practices of teaching disabled students but also on mainstreaming the accessibility of professional development opportunities for educational developers in general, these new policies would likely restrict the work of the SIG more than to empower it to meet its goals.
POD leadership continues to weaponize the language of “inclusion,” “belonging,” and “accessibility” against disabled and other marginalized educational developers. But the organization’s actions on accessibility speak louder than their words. POD’s response to the Ad Hoc Committee Report echoes POD’s conference communications over the past two years, which have all contained some variations on the theme: We’re not ableist, but…. “We recognize the benefits afforded by an online conference,” they write, “however, there are insufficient resources and support to host such an event at this time.”
At the same time, POD frequently resorts to tone policing the language of its disabled members. For example, members of the DAG were privately accused of violating guidelines about communication between Committees, Affinity Groups, and SIGs—guidelines that had only been approved days and weeks before these accusations, are very difficult to find, and remain ambiguous about their application to Affinity Groups. Similarly, members of the DAG and allies were privately accused of violating the Care, Dialogue, and Accountability guidelines, which were not made public until after members had been accused of violating them, and which are situated in a particular “politeness” culture. These reactions often seem punitive: disabled members and their allies have been held to standards that had not been adequately communicated and are culturally situated in a predominantly white, abled, neurotypical context. POD’s efforts to formalize policies and procedures should not be used to undercut the complaints and requests of the organization’s disabled contingent.
POD Fears the Financial Risks of Spending Nothing on a Virtual Conference
POD is not being honest with its members about its lack of “resources” or “capacity” to support a virtual conference. POD is already aware of the internal capacity of volunteers to organize this event, as demonstrated by the Disabled Affinity Group and Accessibility and Disability SIG, the Ad Hoc Committee, and the independently-organized virtual gatherings in 2024 and 2025.
Since the virtual conference has been proposed, POD has already leveraged resources to stand up other new programs, such as JDEED, the Journal of Diversity and Equity in Educational Development (which is to be applauded!). The presidential address email from Stacy Grooters in 2024 indicated that $40,000 had been set aside for need-based financial aid to attend the on-site conference, but mysteriously no resources could be spared for a virtual offering that could accommodate the same members (and potentially many more!) unable to fund travel. On both organizational and member-volunteer levels, POD has demonstrated the capacity to support new programs and the resources to fund access to on-site programming–just not a virtual conference.
Why this resistance? And why POD leadership’s reversal in first stating that a pilot conference could help provide data to determine if a virtual offering could become sustainable, and then later declaring outright that such a thing was not feasible before the pilot even got off the ground? The POD Network email sent on March 31, 2025, announcing the opening of the Call for Proposals portal, ends with a clue. Under a heading titled “A Collective Effort, A Shared Experience,” the email reads: “As a nonprofit organization, the POD Network relies on the Annual Conference as a vital source of support for our ongoing viability and our ability to provide professional development programs and resources. It’s the foundation that sustains our work and fuels our future.”
POD has consistently been concerned with the impact of a virtual conference on their annual budget. In the charter to the Ad Hoc Committee, they write that one of their review criteria will be “ensuring POD’s fiscal health by proactively working to ensure that the organization has the funding to follow through on its strategic plans.” They also note that the guidance for the annual on-site conference includes striving to “generate the revenue necessary to fund POD’s expenses for the fiscal year.” The Executive Committee’s memo to the Ad Hoc states that POD leadership “discussed the financial risks associated with standing up such a significant new program.”
Stacy Grooters’s 2024 presidential message indicated that about one-third of POD’s annual operating budget goes to conference costs. The 2025 fiscal year budget of $1,089,541 was balanced and passed by the Finance and Core Committees. This means that POD spends approximately $350,000 on the annual conference. Keep in mind that the robust, accessible non-POD affiliated virtual gathering in 2024 used volunteer labor and required a budget of $0. While certainly there may be some limited expenses involved in a POD-sponsored virtual conference, these can be expected to fall well within the range of the $40,000 in need-based financial aid already being provided for members to attend the on-site conference (and perhaps much less than this). The possibility of running a low-cost virtual conference was echoed by the Ad Hoc Committee, who did not request any budget from POD leadership because they did not foresee any “significant additional costs” beyond the free support that had already been promised by POD to come from OneHE.
One thing POD might mean by “financial risk” is that they are afraid a virtual conference could divert revenue from the on-site gathering, on which the organization’s operations depend. While POD noted in a March 19, 2024, email that one reason for eliminating a concurrent virtual conference was “declining online conference participation,” POD leadership may now be concerned that if they make their programming too accessible, members will choose this option. Given the changes in national and state political landscapes affecting higher education funding, this worry makes sense on some level. Many institutions are cutting back or eliminating professional development funding and restricting non-essential travel. What’s not sensible is POD’s response to this sector-wide shift. Rather than adapting to the moment to bring more accessible options to their members by leveraging proposals, plans, and efforts for a virtual conference that are already in motion, POD is choosing to artificially restrict options in order to protect their cash cow.
POD cannot serve its members if it is not financially sustainable as an organization. At the same time, POD is not serving its members when it prioritizes fiscal health over member needs and its own mission. When organizational self-preservation is pitted against member interests, the founding premise of a membership organization erodes. What use to educational developers is a member organization that is no longer acting in the best interests of its members?
While POD publicly laments its “budget limitations” restricting the possibility of a virtual conference, the numbers tell a strikingly different story. The reality is that POD is in remarkably good “fiscal health.” In recent years, POD has successfully balanced their budget, matching revenues evenly with expenditures. Importantly, this “balanced” budget includes contributions to POD’s investment portfolio, meaning that POD takes in more money than it needs to operate. POD’s 2022 tax filing, which is publicly available due to its 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, shows that the organization held net assets of $807,698, including $564,822 in publicly traded securities like stocks and $303,414 in cash and savings. Naturally, it makes sense for an organization to maintain a financial cushion, what POD calls Operating Reserves4, and POD would not need to dip into these funds in order to support a virtual conference. But the numbers do not support the conclusion that POD is currently experiencing a financial hardship that would prevent them from taking on a responsible amount of financial risk in order to serve member needs in line with their stated mission.
To be clear, while the independently organized virtual gathering has been free to registrants, no one is advocating that a POD-sponsored virtual conference be free to attend. While financial accessibility is certainly an important tenet of an accessible virtual offering, any virtual conference will cost most members less to attend than an on-site conference due to the elimination of travel costs. If POD were to price the virtual offering to preserve their existing profit margin of the on-site gathering, there is no reason to believe that any revenue would be lost. In fact, additional revenue might be generated due to a larger number of members being able to attend at the lower price point, as well as members who decide to attend both conferences (given that one is in June and the other in November). It may very well be that the greater long-term financial risk to the organization is not embracing a virtual conference.
The Part Where You Help Fix This
POD has an ableism problem. While the organization continues to provide financial aid for members to attend the on-site conference and spin up new diversity and equity programs like JDEED, it remains stubbornly opposed to a virtual conference that would serve many members. They have refused to listen to the chorus of disabled member voices expressing the need for a virtual conference, and they have actively undermined efforts of disabled educational developers—including labor they themselves solicited—in order to develop an accessible virtual program.
This story is still being written, and the effort to reinstate a virtual annual program is still ongoing. What can you do to act in solidarity with your disabled colleagues and many others who are not able to attend an on-site conference every year, but who still deserve meaningful avenues for professional learning, sharing, connection, and advancement? In the long-term, POD needs to recommit to its stated values for diversity, equity, inclusion, and access. In the short-term, however, POD is prioritizing a funhouse mirror version of “fiscal health” above the needs of its own members. This indicates that the actions most likely to spur immediate change will be those targeting POD’s concern for dollars and cents.
Suggested Actions:
Send an email to POD’s Core Committee (core@podnetwork.org) stating that you do not plan to renew your membership or present at or attend the on-site conference until the organization commits to a virtual conference led by disabled and other non-traveling members.5
Log into your POD Network account and click “Cancel membership.” Do not renew/rejoin the organization until meaningful reforms are put in place.
Only engage in free POD offerings, such as the Google Group and Affinity Groups.
Consider presenting your work at, volunteering to help with, and/or attending the second annual free virtual gathering for educational developers and other virtual conferences, instead of at the POD Annual Conference, until an equitable virtual offering is reinstated.
Vote for Core Committee members who explicitly commit to a sustained and robust virtual conference led by disabled and other non-traveling members. Consider running for the Core Committee yourself to support this work.
Send a letter to POD demanding greater financial transparency, including a justification for holding over $800,000 in cash, savings, and stocks while at the same time using a “lack of resources” to excuse their inability to support new programs that require very little funds.
As a distributed-leadership organization, communicating with POD’s Core Committee members is the way to make your perspective known as a member within the organization. If you have a concern, it is your right to share it, especially as it pertains to Core’s commitment to ongoing DEI work, as outlined in the Core Handbook.
Thank you for your allyship and advocacy in working towards a more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and accessible organizational home for educational developers.
Thank you to members of the Disabled Affinity Group who shared their experiences or provided input and feedback on various sections of this article.
POD Network’s second Value in the Vision, Mission, Values statement is Equity, described as: “The POD Network strives to be transparent and inclusive, with ongoing efforts to promote equitable access and involvement, eliminate systemic inequities that result from biases, and support members in advancing social justice. The organization is strengthened by and committed to expanding diversity among and on behalf of members.”
This is an interpretation of the Governance Manual’s section 1.A.6, which states that, “The corporate name of the Professional and Organizational Development Network (otherwise known as POD Network) shall not be used for any purpose without the express authorization of the Core Committee. This includes, but is not limited to, the use of the corporate name in publications, events, endorsements, educational activities, and any public statements. Unauthorized use of the corporate name may result in disciplinary action, up to and including termination of membership or employment.” However, nowhere in the Governance Manual are affinity groups expressly prohibited from hosting POD-sponsored programming.
In Ludmila Praslova’s book, The Canary Code: A Guide to Neurodiversity, Dignity, and Intersectional Belonging at Work, the author notes that the canary-in-the-coal-mine metaphor serves us well in thinking about workplace and organizational culture: “Organizational problems like the lack of fairness, bullying, and toxic cultures impact people with more intense senses and nervous systems before affecting others” (p. 2). When disabled and chronically ill members of POD are raising concerns about inclusion, it likely means other members will feel those effects soon, too.
The Governance Manual provides details about the POD Network’s financial policies, including investments. You can read more in Section III.B.5.1. Categories of Holdings.
When writing to POD, please be sure to follow the guidelines outlined in the Affirmation of Care, Dialogue, and Accountability document.