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Food Protection Trends A View from Wisconsin The humanitarian Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi said, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” This month, we recognize and thank the individuals and organizations who demonstrate their commitment to change and improve food safety in the world through donations to the IAFP Foundation Fund, by being Sustaining Members, or by sponsoring events at the Annual Meeting (or perhaps all three). While each of these programs has slightly different direct or indirect benefits to the sponsor, all serve to support current IAFP activities, enhance the educational experience for all attendees at the Annual Meeting, or will expand future programming that advances our mission. For those of you not familiar with the Sustaining Member Pro-gram, Sustaining Members are organizations who provide additional funding to support our existing educational programs; Members at the Gold and Silver levels provide speaker travel funding through a higher level of giving. We are proud to announce that we now have 79 Sustaining Members, including nine Silver and four Gold Sustaining Members. All Sustaining Members receive monthly recognition in our journals and on the Association’s Web site, discounts on advertising and exhibit space, and full membership benefits for an individual from within the organization. Silver and Gold Sustaining Members receive additional complementary memberships for individuals, and are further recognized by promoting their logo and company profile in Food Protection Trends. Be sure to check out pages 340–341 to see the list of current Sustaining Members and for other program details, see page 335. The IAFP Foundation Fund, which relies on contributions from individuals and corporations, supports other essential programs. You or your company benefit both directly and indirectly from donating to the Foundation Fund. For instance, the Fund sponsors the prestigious Ivan Parkin Lecture as well as supporting travel for other exceptional speakers to our Annual Meeting, both of which greatly enhance the educational programming for the nearly 1,600 conference attendees. On a daily basis, the Fund provides no-charge access to nearly 200 titles of audiovisual materials, including Spanish language videos, which can be used for employee training programs. Each year, the Fund assists food safety professionals globally by shipping surplus volumes of the Journal of Food Protection and Food Protection Trends to scientists in developing countries through FAO in Rome. The Foundation Fund is particularly committed to fostering the professional development of students and young scientists in our field. One program supported by the Foundation Fund is the Developing Scientist Competition, which recognizes outstanding food safety research by graduate and undergraduate research students. As you recall from previous columns, both the IAFP Strategic Plan and the Foundation Fund Vision target expanding our support of future food safety scientists through establishing scholarships and travel grants for needy students and research scientists. We recently initiated travel grants to be awarded to two qualified students to attend IAFP 2005 and we hope to increase the number of scholarships during the upcoming years. Furthermore, our vision is to sponsor travel for deserving scientists from developing countries to our Annual Meeting as well as sponsoring international workshops on food safety. Although we have plans to expand our programming, we will not be able to support new initiatives without increasing our budget. It is the ambitious goal of the Association to raise the Foundation to a self-sustaining level of $1 million by 2010. As an individual, you can easily donate to the Fund at the same time you renew your membership. If every member or affiliate makes a modest annual donation of $10, $50, $100 or more, we will make substantial progress in reaching our goal. We greatly appreciate the support from all of our Members, Affiliates, corporate sponsors, and Sustaining Members. But this month, I would like to give special recog-nition to Paul Hall and Kraft Foods who recently donated $50,000 to the IAFP Foundation Fund. This contribution is in addition to their Gold Sustaining Membership and their sponsorship of the Annual Meeting Opening Session Cheese and Wine Reception! While Kraft Foods has made sizable donations to the Fund in the past, this support is by far the largest singular gift presented to the Fund by any entity. This extraordinary contribution is a bold statement by Paul and Kraft that they are committed to IAFP and the Foundation Fund Vision and that they want to “be the positive change they wish to see in the world.” Their gift will be instrumental in expanding programs that promote the education and professional development of students and food safety scientists from around the world. On behalf of IAFP, as well as all the beneficiaries of the IAFP Foundation Fund, I want to extend our deepest gratitude to Paul Hall and Kraft Foods for the generous gift and applaud them for their leadership. We hope that this donation serves as a prime example to other corporations and individual food safety professionals to support IAFP, its Foundation Fund, and its mission. If you share in the vision of IAFP and the Foundation Fund, I invite you to act by donating to the Fund, and be part of the positive change in the world. As always, I welcome your comments and ideas. Please feel free to email me at kglass@wisc.edu and let me know your view. |