We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful George Washington III. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with George below.

Alright, George thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Parents play a huge role in our development as youngsters and sometimes that impact follows us into adulthood and into our lives and careers. Looking back, what’s something you think you parents did right?

What did my parents do right? They persevered.

When I went to college in the fall of 1986, my father was the Chief of Corrections at the Kankakee County Jail in Kankakee, IL. But by the spring of 1987 when it was time to come home for the summer, political and personal disagreements had forced Dad out of his job. I was attending a private university, and my brother, Brandon, 5 years younger, was attending a parochial school. Both of us required tuition. Dad was about to turn 50 years old, and had primarily been a factory worker and manager in the heavy industry that was leaving my hometown. Ma worked off and on during many of the years we were home, but did not have a career as such.

I came home that spring and spent the summer working at the YMCA. And when it was time to go back to school Dad told me “I want you to go back, and don’t plan on coming back here for summers. I don’t want you to feel obligated to pay our bills. We’ll make it.”

Dad and Ma went through some tough times. He worked security, Ma worked at Sears. They were nowhere near where they wanted to be financially. They even had to declare bankruptcy and have the home my brother and I grew up in foreclosed on. But somehow, they were able to make the right kind of agreements to stay in the home for the rest of their lives. They ultimately both retired from Sears after working there for 20 years. But they showed us that even in the most difficult of times, especially while you have children in your charge, you cannot give up. Our parents both died in 2020, Ma from cancer, and Dad from COVID. And it was my responsibility and honor to care for Ma during the beginning of the COVID pandemic, and handle her hospice care right up until her heath. Dad’s death six weeks later and closing up their possessions and legal matters was handled almost entirely by Brandon. They gave their all for us. This was the absolute least we could do for them.

George, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a voice actor with twenty years plus in the business. I am a trained bass-baritone with opera experience as well. I provide virtually all genre of voiceover: commercial, TV and business narration, promo, animation, video games, and more.

Before I entered the field I was an IT professional at First Union National Bank in Charlotte. I happened to get on an elevator with a woman named Elizabeth Taylor…I know, right? And she asked me if I would like to be the on-camera host for a series of videos for that segment of the bank. I said yes, and started hosting. One of the videos required that I go to Concentrix Music and Sound Design to narrate part of it. Getting that chance really sparked something; it was fun and challenging, and I can get paid for this? I spent time putting together scripts for my first demos, and got started as a voice actor in 2003.

I am most proud of the wide variety of work that I have provided over the years; children’s books, a volcano in a casino game, a CBS Sports narration. But the two things i am most proud of are a video game and a museum narration.

I was one of the voices on the original application for the National Museum of African-American History and Culture at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. When that long-awaited museum opened, I was proud and honored to know that thousands and thousands of visitors heard my voice describing a painting of Emmitt Till, talk about the production of the Wiz, and many, many more. I was a part of history being made.

I am also the voice of a superhero: John Stewart, the Green Lantern, was the first African-American superhero in DC Comics history, and I have been his voice in the massively-multiplayer online role playing game DC Universe online for 13 years. As a comic book reader since childhood, It is surely one of the most fun and most impactful roles I have ever had.

I have even had multiple opportunities to use my singing skills in voiceover work for Robitussin, Fruit by the Foot, and Doritos Canada. My versatility is my strengths and the source of great pride.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

In April of 2020, my mother, 75, was diagnosed with metastatic uterine cancer. At that time, my father was still recovering from a broken hip the year before. It was near the start of the COVID pandemic, and my brother was still working full time as a teacher. I left Charlotte and drove to home to Kankakee, IL to take care of my parents. From the second day there, once my mother was released from the hospital, I was their primary care 24 hours a day. I made their meals, did their laundry, ran their errands, and took physical care of my mother as her health rapidly declined.

My care for her quickly went from managing her oxygen and preparing her food to making sure I could get her in and out of the bathroom, dressing her, counting out and giving her her medicines, and ultimately, to performing her hospice care right up until the moment of her death on May 8, 2020. I was doing this while attempting to juggle what little bit of voiceover work was still coming in and being a voiceover coach during that very traumatic time for the nation, with the George Floyd protests roiling the country at the same time as to COVID lockdowns were taking full hold.

Once my mother passed, it was on me to manage the funeral I told my father multiple times we should not have. We did it anyway, and there were family and friends from all over in the little funeral home that handled the service. I went home to Charlotte for a week after the funeral, and when I returned, my brother said Dad was not in good shape mentally. It turned out that he also was not in good shape physically, as he had contracted COVID and given it to both my brother and my nephew unknowingly. By the Wednesday after I had returned to Kankakee, I had to put him into the hospital and quarantine myself in my parent’s home, spending nights there alone and sick with COVID myself, for the first time in the 43 years they had lived there.

I spent 10 days in isolation in my childhood home, having fever dreams, pain in old wounds reawakening from the infection, labored breathing, and an inability to eat much of anything besides fruit. I lost 20+ pounds in that 10 days, and I never saw my father again. Through the gift of a dear friend in the voiceover industry, my wife was able to flu to Chicago, and another childhood friend of mine drove her to Kankakee, where she picked me up and drove me home the Charlotte, for 11 1/2 hours with the windows on the car open and me wrapped in blankets and wearing a mask. I ultimately recovered from my bout with the alpha variant of COVID, but my father died on June 24, 2020, six weeks after my mother died, and 3 weeks after i said goodbye to him for the last time.

It was not long after that I decided to commit to being a full time voice actor, setting aside the idea of keeping a foot in both my other work career and voiceover. WIthout my wife Janan, none of it would be possible. And 2020 had not yet revealed its final surprise.

On September 27, after watching my Tottenham Hotspur Premier League squad drat against Newcastle while preparing to watch a Chicago Bears game, I felt like I was having heartburn after a relatively heavy breakfast. It turned out, after sliding to the floor near the couch and being discovered by my stepson Owen, that I was having a heart attack. It was a blockage of the left anterior descending artery. That specific kind of heart attack is often called a “Widowmaker.”

Thankfully, our home is less than 7 minutes from a top 10 in the nation cardiac center, and once I was there, they found that the blockage was only in that single artery, and were able to clear it with a standard procedure without bypass surgery. I was in the hospital for two days. I have fully recovered.

in 2020, I survived the loss of both of my parents in 6 weeks, a serious case of the epidemic illness that killed my father, and the kind of heart attack that killed my maternal grandfather nearly 50 years earlier. That is my resilience story.

Any advice for managing a team?

Among other things, I am currently the president of World Voices Organization, a voiceover group that has members in multiple countries and had begun to stagnate. I assumed the presidency in October of 2024, and since then I have been leading a team of volunteers – voice actors committed to WoVO – in changing the direction of the organization. Though it has only been seven months, and in fact only since January when I brought this group of volunteers together in the Executive Board, we have made great strides in making the necessary structural and programmatic changes to move WoVO in a more positive and active direction.

Keeping morale high as we did, and continue to do, this work has its challenges. What I have found that works is:

1. Provide a compelling vision of the future – From the time In October when I accepted the role of president to the time I assembled the Executive Board in January, I worked on having a vision for what WoVO needed to become: in this case, a peer-to-peer learning, accountability, and support organization for professional voice actors of all experience levels. I tell them where we need to be going, and remind them of the progress we have made in that direction on a regular basis.

2. Give tasks that are both challenging and in their wheelhouse – Making sure that there were things that they could do that they were well suited to while also having an element of challenge to it has kept morale at a high level for the Board. They feel needed and compelled to do good things.

3. Communicate gratitude for the work they do – I have people on the Executive Board that are doing things I simply cannot do. Some if it is technical, some of it is “clerical.” None of them are things that I would choose to do on my own. They have made all the changes WoVO is going through and will go through possible. I remind them of how much they are appreciated by me and by long-standing members regularly. Let them know they are needed and valued regularly, withough being overbearing.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://voevolution.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gwiii/