During 2002, ATA underwent many changes, primarily due to the retirement of John Gilbert, ATA’s founder. Although his retirement was originally planned for late 2002, the publication of the Open Letter to the ATA and TCB on the Internet contributed to an earlier retirement than planned, and subsequently left many of ATA’s programs in disarray. The then-current Board was suddenly faced with many unexpected responsibilities, and there were some ill feelings between those on various sides of the issues that were raised by the letter. In July 2002, this led to the resignation of the Board of Directors to pursue other activities, and a new Board being constituted, in the hopes of resolving many of these difficulties and addressing the issues raised by the Open Letter, as well as overall revitalization of the ATA.

Compounding the difficulty of this transition period was a period of nine weeks in which we had no access to our bank accounts or money. All of ATA’s money and financial records were entrusted to the previously-appointed Treasurer, and during that time she did not open a bank account or provide us with copies of the financial records. Over the summer, we had no way to pay bills, process memberships or orders for educational materials, or refund members’ registrations for conferences that had been cancelled. In the end, to ensure ATA’s survival, it became necessary to remove the Treasurer from the Board, in accordance with the By-Laws, and appoint a new Treasurer. John Gilbert assisted us in recovering our money from the old bank account, and within days we were back in business. Within one month, all outstanding bills had been paid. However, between the Open Letter and financial issues, it was a very stressful time for the Board and the members.

On the plus side, we have greatly streamlined what had been a very complex and unwieldy organizational structure, dealt with a lot of internal ethical and administrative issues, improved our finances so that we are now operating in the black, and have been able to make large steps toward the new vision we have for ATA’s future. Many of these tasks were administrative in nature and largely invisible, but very important to establishing a functional and responsible organization. We’d like to take this opportunity to tell you about what ATA has accomplished in the last year, and what we hope to work on this year. While there was not enough time to complete everything on our list (when is there ever?), we hope that many more positive and outwardly-focused improvements will be visible to our members and the public in the coming year.

The following activities have been successfully completed or improved in 2002:

• Reorganization. An organizational chart was created for ATA, including responsibilities of Directors and key volunteers. This chart was used to identify areas of ATA that were inactive, no longer needed, or low priority to maintain. Several adjunct websites were discontinued, including Tarot Review and Tarot Auction, which were lightly used and it was felt that their functions were better carried out by non-ATA sites such as Tarot Passages and eBay. The Tarot Master’s Network was also discontinued, as it never really got underway and was non-functional.

• Corporate Headquarters. The corporate headquarters has been moved to a location in Kentucky near the home of our Membership Coordinator, to eliminate mail forwarding and ensure faster response to mail inquiries. We have also obtained the services of a corporate agent in Colorado, who will receive and forward official state mail and any legal documents served on the ATA. These changes have been registered with the States of Colorado and Kentucky, and on the website and letterhead.

• Finances. New bank accounts were opened, as a business account rather than a personal account. Checks for more than $200 now require dual signatures and prior approval of the Board. The Treasurer provides the Board with a monthly financial report, and a formal financial report will be created annually and distributed to the members (this was also written into the amended By-Laws). The 2002 Financial Report is included as part of this Annual Report. All transactions are recorded in Quicken financial software, and detailed reports can be quickly and easily created as needed. All expenses and income entries are organized by category within the software.

• Taxes. For the first time, the ATA has registered with the IRS and has submitted a corporate income tax return for 2002. We have also submitted a 1099 for the 2002 Membership Coordinator’s salary. While incorporated in the form of a non-profit organization, the ATA does not actually have federal tax-exempt status, as the correct forms were never filed. We have determined that, at this time, we cannot file forms to obtain tax-exempt status, since we are not in possession of the last three years of financial records. We have also completed a review of state sales and income tax provisions to ensure that the appropriate state taxes are collected and paid, and are filing a Kentucky income tax return for 2002.

• By-Laws and Elections. The By-Laws of the ATA were rewritten to reflect the organizational changes noted above and to incorporate needed procedural and ethical provisions. Significant changes included updating the Director positions and descriptions, providing for two-year terms of office on an alternating basis, providing for elections in which members could vote for candidates for office, inclusion of ethical provisions for Board members and volunteers, clarifying procedural issues such as quorums and how to handle resignations and replacements, and updating the relationship between the Membership Coordinator and the Board. Procedures for conducting elections at the annual meeting in December were written and distributed to the membership.

• Advisory Board. An Advisory Board was established, composed of experienced, respected tarotists from various walks of life. It includes some ATA and some non-ATA members, members from the USA and abroad, and members with a variety of tarot-related interests, including authors, speakers, deck designers, historians/collectors, and practitioners. The Advisory Board is intended to assist the Board with some of our more difficult issues, provide feedback on draft documents and ideas, and help us connect to the greater tarot community. We are still working out the relationship between the Advisory Board and the ATA Board, but we feel it has been productive and useful so far. Members of the Advisory Board include:

• Ethics. The ATA Code of Ethics has been updated and revised, as it was felt that the existing Code of Ethics was more a model of a tarot reader’s Code of Ethics than an organizational Code of Ethics. We strove to develop a Code of Ethics that would provide minimum standards for tarot reading, and where applicable a tarot business, that at the same time would not infringe on individual tarot readers’ philosophies and styles of reading. This Code of Ethics is intended as a minimum requirement for membership in the organization, as a guide for learning and developing one’s own code of ethics, and as a code of conduct and way of evaluating grievances that may be brought against members.

• Member Access to ATA Business. One of our most important goals this year has been to open all ATA business fully to members, and where appropriate, to the public. All ATA Board meeting minutes are posted on the ATA website and available to the public, along with motions passed, the organizational chart, and descriptions of Director responsibilities. All significant decisions are made at Board meetings and fully documented in the minutes, including any final disciplinary actions taken against members or Directors, and the reasons for them. We have worked hard to keep members and the public informed of our activities through the on-line and published newsletters, e-lists announcements, and the establishment of the Annual Report, of which this is the first.

• Free Reading and Free Tarot Networks. As part of a review of all of ATA’s programs, the FRN/FTN Network Membership Requirements and policies have undergone some changes this year. Key changes included having written membership requirements and policies in place of the out-of-date Network By-Laws, opening the networks to non-ATA members for a small administrative fee, incorporating ethical provisions, establishing requirements for mentors and "senior readers" (those who can read unsupervised), providing for a larger number of cards to be used on FRN, and providing greater access to FRN for experienced readers.

• Mentoring Programs. In response to many requests from members, we have reinstituted the one-on-one mentoring program, allowing members to have individual mentors. Along with changes planned for 2003 in the educational programs, we expect to eventually replace the open-ended teaching lists, which are experiencing low participation and teacher burnout, with individual mentoring and on-line classes of limited duration and on specific topics. Mentor and mentee questionnaires have been designed to better match mentors and mentees, and to allow for more individual choice. A mentoring program for the Prison Service Project has also been established using volunteer incarcerated mentors with certification credentials.

• Publications. A great deal of work has gone into improving the two ATA publications, which have also been renamed. Tarot Reflections is now the on-line bimonthly publication, which is free to the public and has been reformatted as an html newsletter, with color and graphics capability. The ATA Quarterly is our members-only printed newsletter, which will now also be available on-line as a web publication. Both are greatly improved in readability, design, and content. These publications have been reoriented toward quality content, teaching materials, articles, and information, rather than being primarily vehicles for publishing codes of ethics and book/deck reviews for certification purposes. Book and deck reviews are still accepted for publication subject to an editorial review and timeliness of the information. Advertising policies have also been developed for both publications, and they have been placed on a regular schedule with submission deadlines for content and advertising.

• Conferences. This has been the area that has been the most difficult to maintain, compared to the previous ATA program. For financial reasons, we can no longer hold several small conferences a year in different parts of the country; we are relatively certain that this is why ATA was not breaking even before. For now, until we have a better handle on the annual budget, we are focusing on one conference a year, and on attracting quality speakers, fun activities, and a larger number of attendees. We have held discussions with other tarot organizations and our intent is to hold our conferences in areas of the country that are not well-served by other tarot events and at times that do not conflict with other major tarot happenings. We also hope to team with other organizations for major conferences in the future.

Our focus for 2003 includes part of our vision for ATA that we didn’t have time to develop in 2002, as well as areas where we experienced some difficulties and are hoping to improve, as follows:

• Communication. ATA has always been hampered by not having a single electronic notification or discussion list for our members. We are prevented from directly creating such a list due to privacy concerns and permission issues. We have created a voluntary Yahoo list just for members that is for notifications only, and would deal with informational issues such as elections announcements or reviews of draft policies. So far, about 20% of the members with e-mail addresses have signed up, and we hope to greatly increase that percentage in 2003. We have dedicated one Board position solely to communications with members, and it will be the VP of Communication’s job to creatively figure out ways to do that. Improving the quality of our publications will help, we believe, but we are looking for ideas that would initiate more two-way communication among members and between the members and the Board.

• Participation. We will also be focusing on ways to increase participation in elections and volunteer positions, two areas in which we are currently experiencing some difficulties. We held an election at the end of 2002, but received no nominations for the two open Board positions other than for the members already holding those positions. This was disappointing, as we had hoped for greater participation. There could be many reasons for this the very first year of the transition, and we hope that after a year or two of stability that more members will be interested in serving on the Board.

• ATA Website. In early 2003, we expect to launch a completely revamped website, professionally designed by Mark McElroy, our very capable VP of Media. Mark has a consulting business designing websites, and we are very excited by what we have seen so far. We expect the new website to provide many benefits to members, particularly by making it much easier to navigate and find information, being more pleasant and professional to look at, and providing interesting, informative, and up-to-date content. We will also be implementing some new features, such as searchable archives for ATA publications, and a teaching/learning center with sign-ups for classes and downloadable course materials.

• Learning and Teaching Tarot. 2003 is when we hope to put this major aspect of our vision for ATA into place. We are currently working on greatly expanding the range of teaching materials that we can offer members, so that a variety of different course materials will be available in different formats and styles of learning. We have initiated a ground-breaking e-book contract with Llewellyn that will allow us to offer some of their books electronically in whole or by chapter, as part of our teaching programs. We plan to move our teaching lists back to Yahoo Groups, and offer courses of defined length which members can sign up for through the educational area of our website. Courses will range from beginning to advanced, and from several-month curricula to one-time chats with guest authors or speakers. We have defined the core curriculum and topics that we would like to be able to offer at four levels – beginning, intermediate, advanced, and professional – and will be working on filling in the gaps throughout the year.

• Conferences. A major focus of 2003 will be ensuring the success of the Portland conference, and building new relationships with sponsoring organizations and other tarot groups so that we can offer more conferences in the future. Planning will also be initiated for the 2004 conference. One priority will be obtaining credit, so that hotel deposits and catering can more easily be managed without cash flow issues.

• Recruitment. With all these significant changes, we hope to have much more to offer our members during 2003 than ever before. With that in mind, we will spend some time working on recruitment efforts, through our publications, e-lists, and perhaps even more traditional advertising and networking with metaphysical bookstores, other tarot organizations, and local community groups. In addition, we would like to get the word out that FRN/FTN is now open to the general public and recruit both readers and mentors for the reading networks.

The financial report provided below covers the period from the opening of our new bank accounts on July 31, through the end of 2002. Unfortunately, we do not have access to any bank or financial records prior to that. It is our understanding that they were kept only in written form, and the sole copy was sent by John Gilbert to our previous Treasurer, who has not complied with requests to return them to the ATA. We have been unsuccessful in obtaining any records from the bank holding ATA’s previous account, due to their confidentiality policies. Therefore, the records for this year are incomplete. However, now that ATA’s financial records are being kept electronically, we do not expect this problem to ever recur in the future.

We are very pleased to report a net increase in ATA’s operating funds during this period. It is our understanding that ATA was heavily subsidized and did not show a profit in previous years, although we cannot know for certain. This was most likely due to expenditures on certain programs that were not breaking even, including multiple small conferences each year, publication of the newsletters, and the Prison Service Project. We have elected to continue all of these activities, but have made some adjustments to ensure that we can cover our expenses, including decreasing the cost of internet-only subscriptions while increasing the cost of paper newsletter subscriptions to better account for the cost of printing, and holding fewer but larger conferences.

The balance we have remaining at the end of 2002 is the minimum we should have available for cash flow purposes, including regular publication of the ATA Quarterly, hotel deposits and speaker travel for conferences, and monthly bills and salaries. Ideally, this amount would be increased to about five thousand dollars next year, potentially allowing us to hold a second conference each year.

We would like to introduce you to the current ATA Board of Directors and our Membership Coordinator:

President – Sandra A. Thomson, CTGM.    President@ata-tarot.com
Sandra's specialty within tarot is that of an author and teacher.  She is the co-author of three books (The Lovers' Tarot, Spiritual Tarot, and The Heart of The Tarot), the author of Cloud Nine: A Dreamer's Dictionary, and the author of a forthcoming dictionary of tarot, Pictures from the Heart, published by St. Martin's Press.   She teaches tarot classes at the Philosophical Research Society (PRS) in Los Angeles, where she resides. Although she learned to read with the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, she is very fond of the Ancestral Path and the Shining Tribe decks, and uses them for comparative or special readings.  She reads online for the ATA reading networks, and privately. 

Vice President of Communications – Valerie Sim, CTGM.  Vpcommunications@ata-tarot.com
Valerie received her first deck of tarot cards 32 years ago and began studying astrology in 1973. Both have continued to be passions for her over the years and have led to the authorship of her own tarot and astrological teaching materials, with which she has been an online teacher for the past year and a half.  Valerie is the Listowner of a popular tarot email list, ComparativeTarot@yahoogroups.com, a list which is populated by tarot students, readers, teachers, authors and artists. She is currently finishing up her book about the Comparative Tarot method and ways to keep tarot fun and exciting, called Tarot: Out of the Box; has written the pamphlet, or "little white book," for the recently published Lo Scarabeo Comparative Tarot Deck, and is a frequent reviewer for Tarot Passages. On the shamanic path and active in animal rescue, Valerie has many favorite decks including Animal Wise, Vision Quest and Shining Tribe.

Vice President of Media – Mark McElroy.  vpmedia@ata-tarot.com
Mark received his first Tarot deck in 1973, but began serious study of Tarot in 1997. While interested in the divinatory and meditative aspects of Tarot, Mark primarily uses the deck as a tool for brainstorming, enhancing creativity, and planning action. As Mark explains in his forthcoming book, Putting the Tarot to Work, "My approach to Tarot favors the practical over the mystical." Mark works regularly with Carol Herzer's Illuminated Tarot, the Thoth deck, Robert Place's Alchemical Tarot, the Osho Zen, Paula Gibby's Blue Rose, and Julia Turk's under-appreciated Navigator's Tarot of the Mystic Sea. Mark designed and maintains the Comparative Tarot website at www.comparativetarot.com, and is currently working on a professional redesign of the ATA site.

Vice President of Education – Janet Selman. vpeducation@ata-tarot.com

Janet began dabbling in tarot in 1998, but her really active tarot growth dates from 2000, when she joined the Comparative Tarot e-list and began to explore the tremendous variety of nuances and subtleties offered by a wide variety of decks.  Reading both for personal growth and for the Free Reading & Free Tarot Networks, her favorite decks change from moment to moment, but
include Songs for the Journey Home, Paula Gibby's Animal Tarot, Victoria Regina, the Comparative Tarot, and Tarot of the Crone.  She has written reviews for Tarot Passages and is a co-moderator of Comparative Tarot.  In her other life, she is a wife, mother of two, certified nurse midwife, and active in greyhound rescue.

Treasurer – Tracy Hite, CTM.   Treasurer@ata-tarot.com
Tracy first dabbled with Tarot in the fall of '96, but didn't have any luck picking it up from books. When she joined the ATA that December and started working with her first mentor, the cards finally fell into place. Tracy prefers to read by email rather than face-to-face, and she enjoys mentoring more than reading, so the FreeTarot / FreeReading Networks are a perfect fit for her. A working mom, her significator would be a combination of the Empress and the Queen of Pentacles, with a touch of Temperance. Tracy's personal quote is "I'm a tarot reader, not a psychic!" In addition to her position on the Board, Tracy is currently the Network Manager and Webmistress for the FRN/FTN Networks.

Secretary – Teresa Michelsen, CTM.   Secretary@ata-tarot.com
Teresa has been reading tarot for over 25 years, and more recently developed her own tarot curriculum and began teaching beginning and intermediate tarot courses and workshops on-line.  She has participated in FRN, FTN, and ATA for several years as a reader and mentor.  She is also active on the ComparativeTarot and TarotL discussion lists (formerly as Thrysse), and has a website, http://www.tarotmoon.com, from which she does readings and posts tarot-related articles.  Her first book, Designing Your Own Tarot Spreads, has just been published by Llewellyn, and she is currently writing a second book entitled The Practical Art of Tarot Reading.  In her other life, she is an environmental consultant working out of her home near Seattle, WA. 

Membership Coordinator – Rickey Hite. ata@ata-tarot.com
Rickey has been dabbling in Tarot since 1999 when he began programming for the Free Reading Network. Rickey has been responsible for programming much of the ATA and FTN/FRN networks and lists, and has held us together through thick and thin. He considers himself an amateur when it comes to Tarot, and is currently studying card connections, seeing how a particular card relates to the rest of a spread. Rickey's current favorite deck is the Cosmic Tarot by Norbert Losche, which he finds provides symbolism that he can easily recognize. Rickey’s favorite quote is "Life makes plans for us despite the plans we make ourselves."