President's Column - January

by Lorrie Hallman, President, AAP

The two items that are uppermost in my mind as I sit down to write this column are both about success, but very different from each other.  The first is the success of our recent Institute and Conference in Philadelphia.  We had a good blend of members, nonmembers and scholars in attendance, all of whom reported enjoying the meeting, feeling stimulated to go back to their work and/or studies, and looking forward to returning soon.  We all owe a big “Thank You” to Kristie Nies, our intrepid chairperson, and her stalwart committee, Lisa Makstein, Adam Klein, Denise Castro, Bradley Lake, Jenny Savitz Smith, Diane Shaffer and Janet Tyler.  Each of us in attendance appreciated your hard work and welcoming spirit.  I myself was especially inspired by Nancy McWilliams’ presentations and personhood. Not to mention that you are very entertaining dancers!

The second item on my mind, and soon to be on yours, is the success of your Executive Council in addressing the difficult and complex issues of wanting to increase our membership, welcome newcomers, and maintain the valued presence of our senior members, all while attending to how our dues affect our long-range budgetary process.   Those of you who have wrestled with a business or a family where members must be added and nurtured, while the cost of everything goes up and incomes go down, can appreciate the frustrating, necessary and intimately difficult choices we faced.  I consider us successful because we made significant progress this fall towards a workable solution we can all live with for the foreseeable future…until it all needs to be reworked again.

Our primary charge, emerging from our Strategic Planning meetings, was to create a structure of membership categories and their associated dues requirements that would keep us solvent while making it financially easier for young professionals to join us, whether as Students, Associates or Full Members, there being no doubt from our research that that the cost of membership is a primary obstacle in drawing these younger members.  Our task in the Executive Council meeting was to create and begin to implement the necessary groundwork of our earlier deliberations. To that end, several important decisions were voted on by the council and will be put in place beginning November 2014.  We will then come back to this issue at our summer EC meeting and work on the items we elected to delay to allow for more input and deliberation.  The heart of those discussions will be whether or not we need to raise our dues for the first time in over ten years.  We all hope not, but there are so many moving parts affecting that decision that we wanted more time for thought and discussion.  It has always been our goal to keep costs to our members as low as possible while maintaining our financial security.

In this meeting we primarily focused on our membership structure.  Our goal was to streamline the structure so that we could eliminate that which was not working and make the remainder more efficient and easier to alter when necessary.  Starting with the topic of welcoming younger/newer members and establishing a track to membership that they can afford, we came to several decisions.  First, we decided to combine the categories of Post-graduate Member and Associate Member into one category to be called “Associate.”  Since the old category of Post-graduate seemed redundant and unnecessarily cumbersome, we will now have only two categories before full membership, Student and Associate.  We also will create a tiered dues structure for Full Members newly joining AAP who are also new professionals, paying reduced dues for 2 or 3 years, gradually increasing to our Full Member dues.

We as an association have long been struggling with how to honor our older, loyal members while not straining our budget.  When the category of Life Member was established, there were quite a few who fit that category, but there were many more of us who had not reached the age of 65 at that time.  At first, Life Members did not pay dues.  Then, as we saw the proportions of older to younger members shifting, we asked Life Members to pay at least $117 in dues.  As the baby boomers have gotten older and our membership has decreased, we find ourselves in the same bind as Social Security and Medicare.  There are simply not enough members less than 65 and/or with less than 20 consecutive years of membership paying $350 in dues to support our increasing Life Members paying only $117.  This reality saddens us all but we are not at liberty to ignore it any longer.   

We have two solutions that we are working on simultaneously.  The first and most obvious, energizing solution is to continue to work on our programs that bring in new, younger members.  The second solution is more complicated.  We have decided to establish a new membership category called “Retired” as of November 2014.  “Retired” is defined as no longer having a private practice or working in any income-producing capacity as a psychotherapist.  Members will be asked to self-designate themselves as being retired and will be asked to pay a minimum of $117 in dues per year.  Retired Members will receive all the privileges of Full Members except that of being listed in the Find-a-Therapist section of the public portion of our website.

The honor of Life Membership will continue to be presented to those members of 20 consecutive years or more who have reached the age of 65 years old.  Life members will no longer pay reduced dues as of November 2014.  Instead, they will pay the same dues as Full members, unless of course they are retired and then they will continue to pay $117 annually. The EC believes that this change will allow us to continue to honor our Life Members while modernizing our attitudes about retirement age within our field and our membership.  Inevitably there will be a few people who are caught in the overlap between the Life Membership category (as related to dues) and the Retired membership category.  These are members who are already Life Members as of November 2014 but are not retired.  In order that we not ask them to pay $350 when they have already been paying a minimum of $117, EC has decided that they will continue as Life Members and pay the same dues as Retired Members, even if they are not yet retired.  Anyone who becomes a Life Member after November 2014 will continue to pay the dues of a Full Member until they self-designate as Retired.  Please remember that, if you are unable to pay your dues, you may request to pay hardship dues by contacting me by email or letter.

We also decided to remove the Inactive status from our categories of membership.  If you will remember, several years ago when I was Dues Chair, we instituted a year’s grace period before we made non-payment of dues an automatic resignation from AAP.  The reason for this addition at that time was that our dues and membership records had been so chaotic and mis-managed up to then that we had many “members” who had not paid their dues for years, some of whom were deceased!  We now believe we are past needing such a soft cushion.  Non-payment of dues by the deadline will result in the immediate loss of membership the first year it occurs.  Any member may be reinstated by consulting with the Membership Chair and paying an administrative fee of $25 as well as that year’s dues.  However, this will result in the loss of 20 years of continuous membership required for the Life Member honor.  As you might imagine, the backstory on this change is that we believe it’s time for us to grow up and give up being reminded, cajoled, and downright begged to pay our own way.  As Dairlyn, our new Dues Chair, has stated, you will be reminded only once before the deadline to pay your current dues.  You can do it now right on our website, if you haven’t already.  It’s a snap!

This summer we will be inviting Associates to our Summer Workshop for the first time.  In conjunction with the Membership and Outreach Chairs, we established several requirements Associates must meet in order to qualify for attendance.  They are as follows:  attendance of at least one I&C, 9 hours of process/experiential grouping, being active in gaining the required 100 hours of both therapy and supervision, attendance at a 3-hour process/orientation group Wednesday afternoon (to be led by two seasoned AAP members), plus being up-to-date with their dues and actively consulting with their AAP mentor.  We on EC believe that these requirements will both protect the Associates and protect the quality of our meeting.  The Membership Committee will be vetting our Associate Members to see who meets these qualifications for SW attendance.  At this time, we think 9 or 10 Associates may qualify.  Since Summer Workshop is highly desirable and the most valued offering for our Full Members, it is our hope that our Associate members will want to qualify.  We believe that both our Full Members and our Associate Members will benefit from this change; however, if it doesn’t work for some unforeseen reason, we will cease doing it after a 3-year trial run.

At the next EC meeting this summer, we will be working to nail down the dues amount for each category of membership and beginning to discuss the idea of AAP offering training programs for graduate students and post-graduates.  We are excited about the progress we have made thus far and anticipate developing current programs and creating new ones that will insure a secure and fulfilling future for the Academy we love and for the future of psychotherapy.