Dear friends,
As the year draws to a close, it’s the perfect time to reflect on the incredible journey that we’ve shared together. 2023 has been a year of collaboration, growth, and resilience for our T&S community. Before we move onward to 2024, we want to thank our members for all the ways they showed up for TSPA and TSF – and for each other – this year.
I became Executive Director of TSPA and TSF three years ago this week, and I continue to marvel at how these organizations have developed since 2020. At TSPA, we’ve grown from a couple hundred members based primarily in the US into a global organization serving thousands of professionals around the world. TSF started out as a fiscally-sponsored project of the Internet Education Foundation, and is now an independent organization connecting practitioners and scholars, powering original research, and furthering the world’s understanding of trust & safety.
Here are some our favorite highlights from this year:
- TSPA membership grew over 40% in 2023 with over 35 countries and 150 companies represented.
- We expanded our team from five to eight: Maggie Cook Kerr (February 2023), Kristy Kosak (October 2023), and Maia Levy-Daniel will be starting in early 2024!
- TrustCon 2023 nearly tripled in size from last year! Though it was only our second year, we hosted 175 sessions for 850 in-person attendees, including 260 speakers!
- We kicked off our inaugural EMEA and APAC Summits in Dublin, Ireland and Singapore respectively. Psst… The 2024 EMEA Summit will be held on May 17, 2024 at the Clayton Hotel Burlington Road in Dublin.
- We hosted in-person Meet and Greets in Washington, DC and during SXSW in Austin, TX.
- We hosted 15+ virtual events this year with recordings posted to our YouTube channel!
- Through TSF, we began our History of Trust & Safety project, featuring (to the best of our knowledge) the first public archive of academic scholarship related to trust & safety with more than 1300 sources. Want to contribute your experiences to the project? Sign up for an interview here!
- TSF also filed two US Supreme Court amicus briefs in the Gonzalez and Netchoice cases, with the goal of educating the Court about the operational realities of trust & safety work.
This was also a year of great challenges for our profession. Nearly everyone in the TSPA community has been affected by rolling layoffs or deep budget cuts in the last twelve months. Together, we watched as many companies shrank their investments in trust & safety, reducing or even effectively eliminating their T&S teams. Even as so many teams were torn apart, the people of TSPA worked to keep this community together. With the support of our advisors and over fifty enthusiastic volunteers, we created TSPA Coffee Hours – a peer-to-peer mentoring program for trust & safety professionals. Our members raced to get new opportunities posted to our Job Board as soon as they surfaced, and spent countless hours encouraging each other and doing resume review and practice interviews. We’re so proud of how many people found a new job through TSPA this year, and we’re continuing to support everyone still looking. Trust & safety has always been a team effort, and this community has your back. (As a reminder: if you’re a member who’s been impacted by a layoff, you can get in touch with us for event discounts and a free extension of your membership benefits.)
Enabling us to do all of this (and more) is our amazing team. This year, we hired Maggie Cook Kerr and Kristy Kosak to help lead our community programming and activities. Ileah Vazquez is leading our membership efforts on the TSPA side, and Kristelyn Berry is organizing all our events and comms (including this newsletter! Thank her for keeping me on track!). Amanda Menking has taken on more of our TSF work, and Maia Levy Daniel will be joining her to support TSF’s programming. We’ve truly come so far from our first year when it was just me and Kaofeng!
We have done so much this year, but none of this would be possible without the support of our hundreds of individual members and the T&S teams at our 38 corporate supporter companies. Your support means everything to us, especially when T&S budgets are so tight, and we’re so honored to continue to serve you.
No matter where you are in your T&S journey, there are so many great ways to get involved with TSPA and TSF. As the year wraps up, consider registering and submitting a proposal for TrustCon, joining the EMEA Summit 2024 planning committee (note: applications close December 20, 2023!), or catching up on all of the content on our YouTube channel. If you’re a longtime trust & safety professional, sign up to participate in our History of Trust & Safety project! And take a moment now to mark your calendar for our major events next year: TrustCon 2024 (July 22-24, 2024 in San Francisco, CA), the EMEA Summit 2024 (May 17, 2024 in Dublin, Ireland), and the APAC Summit 2024 (October 2024 in Singapore).
As always, it is such a joy and a privilege to serve this incredible community. Your thoughtful feedback, direction, and vision are what’s brought us to where we are today, and we’re so grateful that you’re continuing the journey with us into 2024 and beyond. I can’t wait to see what the next three years hold.
All my gratitude,
Charlotte Willner
Photo by Samuel Arkwright on Unsplash
