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Food Protection Trends COMMENTARY from the executive director “We must always be changing and evolving to meet the new needs of our
Members” Change is good! If organizations are doing the same thing they did last year, they might be one-year out-of-date. If an organization does not serve their members’ needs, someone will quickly pick up on that and attract their interest and support. These are all statements that relate to what most of us deal with on a daily basis. You could replace “members” with students or customers depending on your employment, but the message stays the same. We must always be changing and evolving to meet the new needs of our customers, or Members in IAFP’s case. I can assure you that the IAFP Executive Board is a forward-looking group who are willing to take risks to keep this organization fresh and up-to-date. At our recent Board meeting held in late January, the Board discussed many topics and made decisions that can have a major impact on the future of IAFP. This month, I want to share some of the key items that I feel would be of interest to IAFP Members. One item of particular interest is a decision to modify our Annual Meeting schedule for IAFP 2005. The most noticeable change will be that our Tuesday afternoon schedule will be shifted to Wednesday afternoon and of course Wednesday’s afternoon schedule will move to Tuesday afternoon. This means our short sessions from 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. and the John H. Silliker Lecture (from 3:45 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.) will now be on Wednesday afternoon and Tuesday afternoon will hold full-length sessions from 1:30 p.m. until 5:00 p.m. The Business Meeting will be held from 12:15 p.m. until 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday. The Executive Board and the Program Committee discussed the advantages and disadvantages of making this change and felt it would provide IAFP attendees with additional reasons to stay for Tuesday afternoon and on through Wednesday. Rather than reducing programming on Tuesday after-noon and giving attendees a reason to “exit early,” we now provide program strength to Tuesday afternoon and placed our “carrot,” the John H. Silliker Lecture, at the end of our program. This gives attendees a HUGE reason to stay until the end of the IAFP meeting, to hear the John H. Silliker Lecture! Not to get sidetracked, but this year’s John H. Silliker Lecturer and Ivan Parkin Lecturer are Michiel van Schothorst and Douglas L. Archer, respectively. Announcements of their lectures are on pages 210 and 211. Another exciting change in the schedule for IAFP 2005 involves the Exhibit Hall. Beginning this year, the Exhibit Hall will open on Monday and Tuesday mornings at 8:00 a.m. with coffee and pastries available. This will allow attendees to start the day with coffee and a little breakfast while visiting with exhibitors! It also gives a window of “exhibit only” time where there are no sessions in competition for attendees’ attention. With the Opening Reception and our Monday Afternoon Reception in the Exhibit Hall, our exhibitors should keep very busy this year! The hours will be as follows: Sunday 8:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. (Opening Reception) We believe the new exhibit schedule will benefit both our exhibitors and attendees by allowing additional access to the Exhibit Hall. We are looking forward to these changes and more to improve IAFP 2005! Another exciting item of particular interest to our European Members is the Board’s decision to go forward with a one-day symposium to be held in Europe. More details will be announced soon, such as the program topic, date (in mid-October) and location of where this symposium will be held. We will work closely with our Portugal and United Kingdom Affiliate organizations and other European groups in carrying out this program. The Board also supported the IAFP Foundation Fund Committee’s efforts to develop new promotional materials to encourage the goal of building the Foundation Fund to $1 million by 2010. The Foundation subcommittee responsible for developing the promotional materials has scheduled further meetings and it is projected to complete this phase by next July. This is truly an electrifying project for IAFP and the Foundation and one that can have a profound effect upon the future of IAFP! Also beginning in March, our University Speaker Program is scheduled to get off the ground. This is an exciting program allowing for our Executive Board Members to deliver presentations to food science students at universities. Frank Yiannas will address both graduate and undergraduate students at Texas A&M University this month. He was scheduled to do the same in January at Iowa State University, but had to reschedule due to weather considerations. At any rate, this is a method for IAFP to reach out to students interested in food science and to invite their participation in IAFP. Students will become informed about the Association while learning from experienced food safety leaders. We believe this will prove to be a tremendous tool to attract additional student interest and participation. The last subject, for this column at least, is the opportunity for IAFP to quickly respond to a topic of interest that needs addressing immediately. We have titled this effort the “IAFP Rapid Response Series.” We are still in the development stages, but when completed there will be a small team that is on the look out for topics they feel are worthy of a one or two-day session led by topic experts. Because of IAFP’s size, it was felt that on short notice, we could assemble the experts and organize a small conference on breaking news affecting our IAFP Members. I should wrap it up for this month now. As stated earlier, let me assure you
that the IAFP Board is looking to a bright future for your Association. If you
have thoughts or comments on items discussed this month or have suggestions
for other projects for IAFP, please contact me or any Member of the Executive
Board. Thanks for your continued support! |