Christina Crowe
Eleven months ago I made a confession at the start of my term as your NWA President: I’m a nerd. I also invited you to join me on a year-long journey of “Continual Growth & Development” where we embraced the phrase that:
“You’re either green and growing or ripe and rotting.”
It’s the principle that when you decide to stop pushing yourself and developing, you’ve resigned yourself to getting stale.
Eleven months seems both forever ago and just yesterday. Is that the same for you?
Over the course of the year, I challenged you to join me in setting goals for yourself and our NWA team worked hard to provide new ways of learning and growing — especially during the Annual Meeting. The “Continual Growth & Development'' theme wasn’t just about continuing to learn and grow in our understanding of our atmospheric science, but also about our soft skills. It includes soft skills such as our understanding of the communities and partners we serve, and how we can be more welcoming and inclusive of a multiplicity of perspectives within our NWA community.
So it’s always good to review goals set for yourself and see where you’ve done well or what you need to continue working on.
What have we done this year as an association?
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Tested out innovation ideas for the Annual Meeting (including the new workshop formats), which were VERY well received!
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Started planning for our 50th Anniversary (2025) and secured the 3 co-chairs for the 50th Anniversary Committee!
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Launched a new volunteer form to make opportunities available to more NWA members to get actively involved in association / committee activities
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Reenergized our Diversity Committee with Co-Chairs and helping them set some goals for providing training for NWA members (such as the Crucial Conversations Workshop) and engaging with schools and associations serving groups underrepresented in NWA
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Started the process of creating formal charters for all NWA committees
I’m so excited to see us keep the momentum going on our Strategic Goal efforts in 2024!
Personally I’ll reflect on the progress I made on the goals I set for myself this year on the Community thread where I initially shared them. I hope you’ll consider joining the thread to share what you’ve accomplished this year and consider sharing what you’d like to do to keep that growth going next year.
As a final note to you all from my current position — I just want to again thank everyone who makes this community possible:
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The brilliant staff (Not just Janice but also Nicole, Valerie, and Debi) who keep everything for the association running so smoothly on a daily basis.
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The Board of Directors — those rotating off (Bryan Busby, Sean Sublette, and 2022 President Kathy Sherman-Morris), those continuing to serve, and our newly elected members – for driving the strategic direction of the association so we will be able to serve members for another 50 years.
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Our Committee Chairs and Committee Members who come up with and deliver brilliant ideas and creative opportunities for all our members.
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Those who had a hand in running our Annual Meeting, especially our co-chairs and all those who ran workshops and other innovative projects.
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Bryan Karrick who will do an AMAZING job as your next President in 2024.
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And YOU for being a part of the NWA and investing in yourself and each other! We can’t do this without you.
Keep Continuing to Grow and Develop!
