As a board member for the Society of Government Meeting Professionals, I’m proud to publicize a cognizant and deliberate change to the mission of our organization this year. The mission is now to enhance and promote the expertise of government meeting professionals. This varies only slightly from our previous mission, adding the very important word – promote. Promote can mean a variety of things and never before has promotion has so much consequence in our professional lives.
Promotion in this sense most tangibly relates to advocacy. And although SGMP is not an advocacy based organization, we all heard the call of our membership to start being present at the table when conversations are had relating to the advancement of government meetings. Why is it that no one has called upon the only association dedicated to the education of government meeting professionals when there has been a crisis in our industry? It’s time we had a role and a say. And while we can make no attempts to lobby congress, we can certainly advocate for our profession, and tout that no one who values their membership with SGMP and attends our educational programming would ever be caught in an unethical situation as we learned about in the last two years. So in this sense, we need to be proactive in promoting the professionalism of our members and advocate to those who would legislate against us, a better understanding of how it is we truly operate and how impactful we are on the economy as a whole. If no one comes to the table to speak for us, there might soon be no table to speak at.
And so I’m so very proud to be on the board whose repositioned the aim of the organization so that we might have a fighting chance at saving our industry and returning it to the thriving environment we once knew.