Secretary’s Report
Lisa M. Finkelstein
Northern Illinois University
The annual spring meeting of the Executive Committee (EC) of SIOP was held on April 29 and 30 at the Marriot Marquis in New York immediately following the conference. In attendance were the voting members of the EC as well as most of the incoming, current, and outgoing committee chairs.
After our now Past-President Jeff McHenry thanked the group for their dedication over the past year, President Lois Tetrick set the tone of our meeting by reminding us of our four strategic goals and describing the organization of the meeting’s agenda around reports on our major strategic initiatives. Financial Officer Ken Pearlman provided an overview of our very positive financial situation and described the draft budget to be approved. As is typical for this meeting, we vote on the draft budget that does not yet include conference numbers. The budget draft passed unanimously, as did the approval of the minutes of the winter meeting.
Next, Paul Sackett gave us a journal update. At the previous meeting we approved that he proceed with a contract with Blackwell Publishers. A representative of Blackwell accompanied Paul to this meeting, and we had a short contract signing ceremony, met with much applause.
Ann Howard presented a brief report from the SIOP Foundation. She was pleased to say that $85,000 had already been raised toward the Dunnette Prize. The Foundation will also be raising $25,000 to be used toward a new emerging issue and will report back on the topics. Finally, she requested an e-mail to the membership to be sent following the conference for fundraising toward the scholarship fund. This was approved.
After a short portion of the day was devoted to breakout sessions run by the cluster coordinators where incoming chairs were provided with an overview of their roles and the general committee processes, the group reconvened to begin a discussion centered around our strategic goals.
We discussed several items under the umbrella of science/practice. We began with Paul Sackett providing us more detail of the financial aspects of the journal. There was also a discussion of other expanded services to members. After much discussion of various scenarios (described in another article in this issue of TIP), a motion was approved to raise member and student dues by $5.
Another major item under science/practice was a presentation by Vicki Vandeveer, who reported on the APA Model Licensure Act update. Vicki provided an overview of changes that might be on the horizon that could impact both licensure requirements in some states as well as graduate training requirements to meet those needs. After a thorough overview of the issues, the EC decided that we would need to begin working on a response to this as a group. Other science/practice issues included an update on the conference, the master’s consortium, and the fall consortium.
Moving on to visibility, we heard an update from Doug Reynolds on the work of his committee, including the recently successful media event in New York and the progress in hiring a public relations firm for SIOP, with discussion ensuing about the various activities such a firm could do to help with SIOP’s visibility. Currently the committee is reviewing requests for information from six firms. We also discussed the electronic newsletter, which will go live in the next few months and will be a new benefit to keep all SIOP members in the loop about important dates and activities within the society.
Advocacy points of interest included a proposal by Gilad Chen to work with the Federation to put on a large event around a hot workplace topic. The event would have SIOP members with expertise in the topic give presentations to representatives from grant agencies and to congressional staffers. Discussion ensued about topic selection and the criteria for success of such an event. Most people were in agreement that we must continue to tap the potential for advocacy activities with both the Federation and APA. The great importance of state-level advocacy was put forth by Judith Blanton, State Affairs chair. Everyone is encouraged to become involved with their state’s psychological association.
Donald Truxillo and Talya Bauer updated the group on the membership initiatives, including a committee to better gather and track membership metrics and a plan for revising the volunteer application and matching process.
Finally, Kurt Kraiger updated the group on the work of the Governance Task Force. His committee has met and narrowed down the general problem into three specific issues: representation in SIOP governance, organization of SIOP governance, and organizational strategy. Kurt called for EC input on and reactions to the specifics of these areas and will continue to work with the committee to collect data to report at the next EC meeting.
This is just a thumbnail sketch of the issues discussed at this meeting. Please see the minutes posted online for a wealth of detail, and please as always drop me an e-mail with any questions about this report at lisaf@niu.edu.