A little more than one year ago, your SMA officers and board met to map out a direction for our organization.  Through that strategic planning meeting, we developed five long-term priority objectives.  I’m pleased to be able to report significant steps toward those priorities.

Priority 1.  Further enhance program quality and attractiveness.

We continue to have near record submissions that always lead to a high-quality program.  However, this year our Program Chair Peg Williams, aided by a committee of Claudia Cogliser, Angela Miles, Mark Gavin and Marcia Simmering has introduced a Most Innovative Session Award to try to encourage creativity in our meeting session development.  We should all enjoy seeing what develops from that initiative.  In addition, the committee will move forward with Mark Gavin at the helm to develop other program enhancement activities for future meetings. 

Priority 2 .  Expand and enrich professional development opportunities. 

Priority 3.  Provide comprehensive internal and external communications and marketing.

Kudos must be offered to by Gary Castrogiovanni, our Communications Coordinator, and Rahul Sawhney with Aquinex, in moving us forward on this objective.  Gary steps down from his position at the end of the November meeting.  He has done a great job with our newsletter and working with Rahul to make our web site one of the most informative and accessible organizational web sites around.  The officers cannot thank Rahul enough for keeping us on track with our communications to SMA members and for making that process so easy.

Priority 4.  Organize and fund large scale collaborative research studies.

One of the most exciting developments is the new Research Incubator, a program to connect people interested in research on a given topic and assist them in the development of joint research projects.  The groups will meet at the SMA meeting in November and be mentored by senior scholars.  The resulting research projects can be submitted for potential funding of up to $10,000 from the SMA. This year, the topic for the Research Incubator is social and corporate responsibility. Additional details and an application form are available elsewhere in this newsletter. I’d like to thank Bill Gardner and the Research Incubator Committee (Gary Castrogiovanni, Claudia Cogliser, Jim Combs and Peg Williams) for their work on this very important initiative.

Priority 5.  Organize socially responsible initiatives.

Again this year, SMA will be collecting clothes for charity, with an emphasis on business attire. We are also working with the conference hotel to offer recycling bins and to encourage the recycling of appropriate materials.  Thanks to Hettie Richardson, Amy Henley and Marcia Simmering for their work on the Social Responsibility Committee.

Accolades also go out to Geralyn Franklin, our meeting coordinator, for helping to arrange the logistical details of what appears to be an outstanding meeting.  For more information on our meeting site, visit the TradeWinds Island Resort web site.

Many others have done significant behind the scenes work in order to make SMA function, and I would like to say that I am personally grateful to all of you who give of your time and skills to help make SMA the great organization that it is.

As I look with excitement toward our Fall meeting, I also realize with some sadness that I will be passing the gavel to Allen Amason.  It has been my pleasure and honor to serve SMA and to work with such a wonderful group of people who make up SMA.  From the members to the officers, this is a first-class organization.  Thank you for allowing me to serve you.

Charlotte Sutton
SMA President