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Food Protection Trends COMMENTARY from the Executive Director “In your contact and communication with other food safety professionals, we encourage you to encourage them to consider IAFP Membership” Membership is what drives the Association forward. We have been fortunate over the past year, to see growth in our Membership, both individuals and Sustaining. After three years (2002–2004) of remaining mostly stable, we experienced an increase of about 70 Members in 2005! We also added 10 to our Sustaining Member count. Membership levels so far in 2006 are outpacing our 2005 levels. Our Gold and Silver Sustaining Member Program also experienced great increases over the past couple of years. At the end of 2003, we had seven Silver and two Gold Sustaining Members. Today we have ten Silver and seven Gold! Please review the listing on page 212 to find our newest Gold (BPI Technology) and Silver (Food Safety Net Services) Members. We welcome them both to our growing list of Sustaining Member supporters. We are pleased that BPI Technology and Food Safety Net Services have chosen to join with other companies lending additional support to IAFP and the IAFP Foundation along with providing monies for a separate speaker travel fund. This speaks highly of those companies listed and of IAFP. They have seen the value of information that IAFP provides through our journals, the Annual Meeting and through networking with colleagues. If your employer is interested in supporting IAFP in this way, please contact me to discuss further. I mentioned the speaker travel fund and that it is supported through the Gold and Silver Sustaining Member Program. In just more than five years time, we built the fund to $60,000 while supporting speaker travel in the amount of $20,000. This program allowed us to assist nationally and internationally recognized speakers to travel to IAFP’s Annual Meetings and deliver their research to our audiences. In most cases, these speakers would not have been able to present at our Annual Meetings without this help. For that, we thank our Gold and Silver Sustaining Members for making the program work! This year, for IAFP 2006, we expect to spend more than $15,000 on speaker travel. This is a vast improvement over the $2,000 that we had available just six or seven years ago. Again, this is because our Sustaining Members have seen value in developing a fund to support speaker travel to the Annual Meeting! We know there are many Members who actively promote IAFP to their non-member collea-gues. You can see what happens when this takes place – we experience Membership growth! In your contact and communication with other food safety professionals, we encourage you to encourage them to consider IAFP Membership. We want to continue to see individual Membership increase along with our Sustaining Members. Beginning in January of 2007, IAFP will implement a new dues structure to allow Members a choice of what publications they want to receive. The dollar amounts need further study before announcing, but we will have a base level Membership that will be offered at a very reasonable price. This, we hope, will allow interested persons to join IAFP without requiring a substantial dollar investment. This new “base level” Membership will include an electronic newsletter that all Members will receive. Then for those desiring Food Protection Trends or Journal of Food Protection, they may add them separately (or receive both) for additional fees. It is our hope that Membership will be more affordable for all Members! As more details become available, we will share them with you. We are proud of our Members and the work that they perform each and every day – to help make a safe food supply available for the world’s consumers. We know the work you perform is important to the world’s health and well-being. Without a food supply that can nourish the population, we cannot maintain a healthy workforce that is required to produce goods and services for the population. This is why we know our jobs here at the IAFP office are so important – for us to facilitate the transfer of information among food safety professionals worldwide! What can be more important than the health of the population? April begins thoughts of spring-time and warmer weather to those of us in the northern part of North America and that means that summer is just around the corner too. Spring and summer always bring a renewed look at life. Maybe it is because the trees begin to bud, leaves are popping out, and the flowers are beginning to bloom! Also, it is a time when people get out of their homes, go for walks, work in the yard and have outdoor get-togethers. This is a fun time of the year! Get out and enjoy it! A wonderful thing occurred while I was writing this column. Sharon Whitchurch from Microbial-Vac Systems, Inc. (located in Jerome, Idaho) called on the telephone and told me her company wanted to become a Gold Sustaining Member! Bruce Bradley, the company’s president will be the main contact. In addition, Microbial-Vac Systems will exhibit their products and services with us at IAFP 2006 in Calgary. They will be included in the May Sustaining Member listing and we welcome their active participation.
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