As I sit down to write yet another Presidential Column, I realize that there is little in the way of EC business that I feel pressed to relate this time (if you are experiencing serious symptoms caused by the deprivation of hard facts, see the last Newsletter online or your doctor). Instead, I thought I’d take the opportunity to let you in on my musings about AAP in general. In no particular order, they arrive and leave my brain, seemingly at will. And that is how they will appear here as well.
I wonder why so many of us have not paid our dues yet. We have sent a statement and two reminders by snail mail and still we don’t pay on time (the deadline was February 15th). We have instituted a late fee (10% of your dues amount) and still we don’t pay. We on EC wonder if we have created this monster by being too lenient and/or by being too willing to make phone calls to remind and cajole. Needless to say, this puts an enormous burden on our Dues Chair, our Central Office, and on those of us who are responsible for the fiscal health of our organization. Coming after late-payers each year costs us money, time, and energy.
You will be increasingly aware that EC has lost patience with this problem because, starting now, you will actually have to pay the late fee if you send in your dues late and you will be dropped from membership after April 1st if you still haven’t paid. Then, if you want to be a member and come to the wonderful Summer Workshop 2014, you will have to reactivate and pay both the late fee and the $25 for re-activating your membership. Inactive status, (where you got most of the benefits of membership except attendance at Summer Workshop) without paying your dues for a year, was a category we felt we needed when we first had to clean up the mess in our membership rolls, but it is not in our best interests now.
"Mama" has resigned and we must now each take responsibility for ourselves. Fair warning: the days of AAP’s finances being run like all too many family “budgets” are over. There now; I hope that I have gotten that off my chest and onto yours. I’m beginning to sound like my mother, a phenomenon that seems to be occurring more often as I age, as in the familiar phrases from my childhood: “How many times do I have to tell you?!” “Are you listening?!” “Get your nose out of that book and help me make dinner,” and my personal favorite, “You should want to do the dishes.” Well, I don’t dream that most of us will ever want to pay our dues, but we do pay them because that’s the way the world works. Now, more than enough said.
We are now in the process of vetting Associates and Post-graduate members for possible attendance at the upcoming Summer Workshop. The qualifications for attendance are listed in Nelia’s column in the last Newsletter, if you’re curious. In this process, we realized that we are requiring more attendance from them at our I&C and/or Spring Conference process groups than we require of people applying for Full Membership, which guarantees an invitation to SW. I suspect our anxiety about rolling out this change in tradition has caused us to be overly careful about who we will invite to attend. However, I am not yet worried about that since this change is experimental for three years, and we can alter what doesn’t work as we go along.
I would have said, “Please give us/EC feedback on what you think of this new program,” but I despair of getting much, if any, feedback. We are a wonderful team and really help each other, but I am acutely aware of how often it feels like we are working in a vacuum. Sometimes we get comments from members in the food lines at meetings, in the Hospitality Suites, or by hearsay. While all of these count in various weights, they are no substitute for serious feedback and suggestions. I don’t know how to solve this problem (like I don’t know how to solve the dues payment problem) and would welcome suggestions…LOL.
The current forums for your criticism, praise, and ideas are as follows: the Newsletter as a whole, the blogs now available for each article in the Newsletter, the Annual Business Meeting at the Summer Workshop, and the emails of each of your EC members and officers listed in the Newsletter.
Formats that are not available for EC feedback are the Net, which is not owned and operated by AAP, but by Josh Fendel at his most generous, and the Ladies’ Room, where I, at least, go for peace, relief , or socialization, not for business (I suspect that the same reluctance may be true for the EC men in the Gentlemen’s Room, though I could be wrong).
We would welcome invitations to conversations about AAP business and programs over food, coffee, and walking or sitting in our still beautiful natural surroundings, in person, over the phone and by email. Some of us even text, though that would not seem to lend itself to complex dialogue. Most of us do not welcome them in the hot tub, in process groups, at the dance, or on the plane home (perhaps this one is idiosyncratic, as I have escaped into my current book and am as reluctant as ever to get my nose out of it).
I must admit that, as an introvert, it feels funny to be asking, nay, begging, for contact. But it is hard to do this job well in the aforementioned vacuum. Granted, I don’t ask for help easily (merely one of my character flaws that begins to glare in this job) but I am asking here and now. I’ll only speak for myself, but I believe that I have a few companions in this statement: If you like what I’m doing, tell me. If you don’t like what I’m doing and can offer a better idea, for G-d’s sake, tell me. And, if you feel nothing, wake up, your beloved organization is entering the 21st century, albeit slowly.
Join us,
Lorrie Hallman, President of AAP
