AOBTA.org

Year end Presidents report for 2009: Written in December of 2009 for the AOBTA® Board of Directors in preparation for our strategic planning retreat held January 7-10, 2010. 2009 is now coming to an end; the year of the Ox is pulling the plow into the final field and the Tiger is looking on from the jungle’s edge. The Organization is starting to move out of the water cycle and is looking toward the wood cycle. With our strategic planning meeting in January hopefully our roots will sink deeper into the earth and sprouts will become ready to burst forth. Our paths will become well defined and hopefully we will have the wisdom needed to choose which one to walk down. This is my penultimate year-end report as AOBTA President and I am happy to say a lot of changes have happened, nothing seems to have stagnated and all is moving forward. No, that is not to say we don’t have any challenges before us, as change brings nothing so well as it does the flow of challenge. The most readily apparent change has been the personnel of the AOBTA board of directors. There has been an almost 50% changeover in the board’s membership, bringing fresh blood and talent onto the board. This is healthy growth and has happened slowly during the year. The timing is right for a retreat, bonding and transmission must be processed this way. This process helps to build up the qi of the organization and its leadership, as well as pass down history and insight to the future leaders. Even with the changes in board membership we have been doing well: getting our work done, and doing our best not to let important things drop through the cracks. We have been able to let some things go that are not working for us as a whole. Most exciting is that we are starting to reevaluate some long held ideas as they may no longer be relevant or helpful to the organization and its practitioners. To paraphrase using this episode’s ship analogy, we have now finally weighed our anchor and are sailing forth into the open sea headed for new shores of distant lands. Just as the sailors of yore did, we must adjust our course as the stars shift overhead. With the advent of monthly meetings we are more able to do just that quickly and keep up on important issues. As much as I didn’t like the idea at first, this has really helped improve communication, not only between board members, but also from the membership to the board. The work we will do with our facilitator will serve as the compass to guide us toward the direction we need to move with the organization. It seems as if we could go in any direction at this point. I promise to guide this organization in the direction of the outcome of this meeting. My job as president is not to set the goals of the future; instead, to keep the chosen goals in sight and guide the organization toward those goals. I am proud of every one of you who serves on this board of directors and those who have served in the past. We have made great strides in elevating our field of practice into a profession within the United States. Many have worked hard to get us all though the obstacles along our journey. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done in order to secure our future as a standalone profession: alliances that need to be further developed and legislation that needs to be improved. This will continue to take many man hours and we are going to need a lot of help. Without help we may become stagnant and it will be very easy for us to lose our way in those mucky waters. This struggle is amplified by the low number of ABT practitioners. Legislators want to see numbers before moving forward on legislation and we are very few and getting smaller with each year. We need numbers in order to have enough people with the passion and time to work in these arenas when it is needed. How then do we build the numbers of ABT practitioners and help them to be better professionals in order to fulfill the final stage of professional acceptance? Have we created a profession just in time for it to die out or are we on the precipice of the next wave? What is our place as a membership organization? How do we maintain a viable membership level? This is where our challenge lays now. We are losing more members than we are managing to sign up. More than 70% of our member practitioners are baby boomers. Why does that matter? It means our membership is aging out. Remember, we do manual labor, and the body can fail. We can expect to see more and more moving their membership into the retired category or just going away in the coming years. How do we get to that GenX-er looking for a second career? Or what is even a bigger problem: less than 5% of our members are GenY – How are we going to get these groups interested? We have been moving into a stronger presence on FaceBook and hope that will pull more members into the dynamic website that has been developed for us but this is only a small start, we must find more avenues. Both of these groups are heavily wired. We have actually pissed off many of our elder members by moving to a more web-based organization; this has not been an easy move for the organization, and many are still fighting it. I still loudly voice that if we do not continue this move we will have no hope of evolving into the future. Speaking now from personal experience: I myself, am only a member because my sifu told me to join. - period, end of discussion. Without his strong ‘do this,’ I would not have. I am also by nature one to “pay it forward” to the next being coming along. However, I am most defiantly from Generation X; I love punk music and I have been working on/with computers and involved with online communities since 1984. The reality of my life and others like mine is this: • I can get insurance for about $100 from at least 3 sources without membership. • I have friends and colleagues in the virtual world I talk to daily. • I can download articles when I need them, and read them in line at the bank on my BlackBerry. • Google is the only known research tool. • I Google continuing education classes, and some I even take at my own desk. • In this time of financial crunch we are all asking ourselves – why am I paying anyone anything? • If I can’t do it online, it must not be real… think about that… though that may not be my personal relationship to the world; I know many that think this way. • I saved this biggest one for last: Organizations are not important to Gen X and Y like they were to the Boomers. If anything, we are anti-organization, tending toward anarchism. Within the mindset just described, what would you do if you were pinching every penny in your household budget, looking at 10% unemployment in your client base? Even with my long-standing steady practice, I have seen approximately a 12% drop in clients/income this last year alone. There are many things you have to spend money on when you have your own business. You must pay for your licenses, insurances and other business expenses just to keep your doors open, and somehow things you may want to support- like a membership organization-- seems fairly low on the list of money that must go out. Why would I want to be a member? Why would I want to pay this group $100-150 dollars of my hard earned money? I think that is the biggest question we will be asking ourselves at the strategic planning meeting. We are not the only non-profit membership group in this position thinking these thoughts right now. Many are dealing with losses in general membership, attrition, and death. What can we do to make ourselves more of a ‘need’ for our members? Are we obsolete? What to do about the next convention? The convention planning is going nowhere fast. We had a great groundswell at the last convention but nothing has really moved forward in the last year. There is great interest on the part of the board, but we cannot allow ourselves to be the ones who do all of the work. I know that most of you are putting in as much free time as you have- and then some-- to keep your part of this organization afloat, and I have seen the stress of a board doing everything in the past. We must have a functioning committee and a coordinator to move this project forward. How do we do this? What is our place in the grand scheme of things? Do we have a place in the American Health Care System? What would it look like? Do we really want a place in it? Is it advantageous for our membership now and in the future? The work we do at our board retreat will hopefully be answering these questions I have posed and more. These I would say represent our “gargantuan, neon pink elephants in the room.” These are the things that we have to not only just talk about but must actually resolve. You told me 3 months ago at the board meeting that you were all willing and ready to do this, so if we are really going to look at our shadow side as an organization and move forward, now is the time to do it. There is no time… and no time like the present. We cannot move forward, sideways or backward without addressing all of these issues. In fact: let’s change that word in favor of honesty, they are not merely issues… they are Big Problems! If we are going to keep this organization running for those who may come after us, we have a lot of big problems to solve over this board retreat and in the coming year. We are at a breaking point of sorts. It is crunch time and I am pleased to be there with you all. I don’t know what will come out of this next board meeting, but I am excited as to what will be decided, and like I said at the top of this, I will keep the helm and steer this ship in whatever direction we all choose as being the best course for ourselves, our organization, our profession, our society as a whole, our planet, our future. This is not easy work and I am so happy and honored to know that you are all willing to do this and do this now! Thank you! Maria Spuller – AOBTA President