Organization & Leadership

2026 has been the most revolutionary year in the history of the global Speakers Federation.

When I took over as president in August 2025, we went into a 3-day strategic planning session with representatives from each of the 17 associations around the world. That was held in Scottsdale, Arizona, although some people did join us virtually. From this meeting, we created a strategic plan organized under three pillars: Governance, Partnerships, and Advancement of our industry. Those three pillars had 21 initiatives, and I'm pleased to say that as I write this now, in April 2026, those initiatives are well under way. 

In fact, today, what's prompted me to write this note is the fact that we're delighted to make available for our associations a new way to access the GSF resources using notebookLM. This is our 1st foray into AI and doing AI-powered research within our own knowledge base. What it does is it acts as a specialized AI expert, by utilizing Google's Gemini language models to analyze all of our GSF documents, our videos, and our websites, to create summaries, to answer questions, and to generate insights based solely on that provided content. This will save you hours as an association of searching through our GSF researcher resources. Our associations can now ask questions and can get quick summaries, and they can explore our policies and best practices so easily and the good thing is, there's nothing new to learn in doing that. 

In addition, at the recent highly successful GSS 2026, we launched a number of initiatives. Firstly, there was theGlobal Speakers Network. This is a network for speakers run by GSF, in conjunction with their associations, specifically for people who truly want to be global speakers. I'm pleased to say that, in the 1st month alone, we had over 90 people join that network. I'm also pleased to say that the GSN is now going to be chaired by Jonathan Low. CSP, Global Speaking Fellow, past president of MAPS, past president of the Virtual Speakers Association, and past president of the Global Speakers Federation. Jonathan is a real powerhouse, somebody who understands the word community, and he is going to be leading that project forward for us. 

I'm also pleased to say that we were able to announce our Masterminds Series. Starting in October this year, with our very first masterminds, five of them will run simultaneously in one venue. With a maximum of 12 people in each mastermind, focusing on topics such as scaling your business, customer experience, book writing, going international, how to build a $100,000 business from scratch. Different concepts that are going to be interesting for different levels of speaker from around the world, run by leading speakers themselves. 

Not only these new initiatives, but we have also already had other initiatives. Between August last year and the launch on the 14th of March this year, 2026, at the Global Speakers Summit, GSF was able to produce our 1st multi-authored book, where 31 speakers from around the world came together and produced an amazing book, ‘Global Voices Shaping The Future’, which became an Amazon number one bestseller in four countries in every category. 

GSF has also created significant partnerships in the first eight months of this presidential term. I will be talking more about those when we launch the partnerships in the next couple of months. We're strengthening our board through succession planning, looking at how we can support our associations in having more profitable conferences (an initiative that happens this month as well), and we even have a brand new GSF video on our homepage. 

I want to thank everybody who's been involved in these processes. These processes are really bringing us into the future. We're currently looking at youth speaking via youth speaking competitions. We are looking at speaking and neurodivergency and how we can assist and create a community for speakers that have certain neurodivergencies, and we're also, at the same time, updating all of our policies and have brought out a new ethics policy, a new sexual harassment policy, and much more. 

Keep watching this space on this website where you are right now, because the GSF is really moving into the future.

Mike Handcock
CSP, Global Speaking Fellow
GSF President 2025/26

Presidential Leadership Team

The Presidential Leadership Team consists of the GSF President, President-Elect, Vice President, Immediate Past President, and Executive Director. The Presidential Leadership Team serves as the interim governing body between meetings of the GSF Board of Directors.

Board of Directors

The GSF Board of Directors, which meets quarterly, consists of a representative from each GSF member association and each has one vote. In addition, the GSF President, GSF President-Elect, GSF Vice President, GSF Immediate Past President, and GSF Executive Director serve as voting members of the Board.

Steering Committee

The Steering Committee consists of nine members, namely:

• the Board member from each of the three largest member associations (as determined by membership count based on dues paid, 30 days prior to the Annual General Meeting)

• the Board member from two of the remaining member associations (elected annually by the two highest votes cast by the GSF Board of Directors)

• the GSF President, GSF President-Elect are voting members of the Steering Committee, while the GSF Vice President, and GSF Executive Director are non-voting, ex-officio members.