NWA Announcements

Janice Bunting, NWA CEO:
Hey everyone, hope you're doing okay out there. The NWA continues to work, but we are working remotely from our homes right now for many reasons. Keeping our distancing in place and also OU is not totally shut down but they are recommending people don't work at the facilities right now. So we are going to be working from home for the time being. But like I said we are keeping everything running. And I have Nicole Van Every here and Bryce are my other coworkers in the office. We're going to give you some quick updates of what's going on and how you can contact us while we are out. Right now, not much has changed. We are still monitoring our email accounts. All of us can receive voicemail messages coming to our phones, through our email, and I even have one phone line forwarding to my cell phone so we can take and make calls that way.

Janice Bunting, NWA CEO:
We do have the email account, NWA help, and we all monitor that. Bryce does most of the monitoring but forwards messages to Nicole and me as we need to work on them, but we can all monitor that account. And we are keeping tabs on the member connect portal as well. But we have some important deadlines coming up, especially with the annual meeting and as we've mentioned before, we're planning to continue with annual meeting unless things change. So we are keeping on our schedule with those activities.

Janice Bunting, NWA CEO:
Oh, one other thing we did want to mention, because we aren't going into the building right now, if you're mailing anything to us via the US Post Office, we won't be checking that as routinely. So if you've sent a membership check or something like that, please keep in mind that it may be a week or more before we get that log. And member connect does send automatic reminders, so if you received one and you've sent a check, please disregard it for now. And if we have to stay out of our office for a long period of time, we already have some plans in place to handle mail so that we can access that more easily.

Janice Bunting, NWA CEO:
So I am going to turn it over to Bryce now to talk about a few other things that we have going on. Okay, Bryce, take it away.

Bryce McElhaney, NWA Communications & Marketing:
Hey, everyone, just a quick few announcements for this week. We have the abstract submissions deadline, as well as the event and workshop proposals deadline coming up on Thursday. That is going to be March 19th. You have until that time at midnight to submit those. So make sure those get in, as well as the awards nominations deadline. That's coming up pretty quickly on May 14. So, be on the lookout for that. Registration is in the works, it's being finalized in the next coming weeks. So keep an eye out for that. And also a JOM article should be published this week also (see here). So again, be on the lookout for that. And if there's any additional events that you would like to see promoted on the NWA calendar, feel free to message them to us at NWAhelp@NWAS.org. I think that's it.

Janice Bunting, NWA CEO:
Thanks, Bryce. Okay, let me work on this and turn it over to Nicole. Nicole, take it away.

Nicole Van Every, NWA Administrative Assistant:
Hi, everybody. For our current seal holders and anybody who's interested in applying for the seal, you can still do so through your member portal. So just a reminder that your re-certifications if you're due in 2020, it's not due until December 31st of this year, but you can submit your materials, your CEUs any time. So again you can do that through your portal. Also if you want to apply, there's a link in your member portal. If you have any questions you can always email me directly and that email address is nicole@NWAS.org.

Nicole Van Every, NWA Administrative Assistant:
Also we've been getting some questions from our seal holders about a lot of these symposiums and conferences are starting to turn to online instead of in person. And so seal holders are wanting to know if those CEUs still count. And I wanted to let you know that we're working on that. We're working with the broadcast committee and we should have an answer on that very soon. Also if you're interested in scholarship applications or grant applications for the spring of 2020, we are also working with the foundation to get those out very soon, so please watch the NWA social media page and also your email for more information. That will be coming very, very soon.

Janice Bunting, NWA CEO:
All right, thanks Nicole. And Nicole brought up something very important. We realize that several of our local chapters have had to make adjustments to the conferences that they had scheduled this month and the next few months. We're sorry that you're having to go through that and if there's anything we can do to assist you, please let us know. We will do our best to do that, but also keep track of some of those because they are going online so you may be able to support them in that way. And if you have any events that have changed or any events that we don't have on our calendar, please send those to us, and you can send them to NWAhelp@NWAS.org and we'll get those posted on our website. Bryce has been monitoring that.

Janice Bunting, NWA CEO:
So, we hope you're all taking care of yourself. We're checking in with each other every day and supporting everybody in taking some time to make sure we stay healthy. We are expecting some storms here today, might have some severe storms over the next few days, so that might be a nice distraction for us. But foremost we want you all to be healthy and safe and we know many of you, well almost all, if not all, of our members are continuing to work and carry on the important services of weather forecasts and warnings through this time, even through some pretty challenging new work situations. So, thank you. And if there's anything you think that we could do to help, please let us know and let us know what you think about this video format. We'll see how it goes. We have Bryce who's going to help us edit it to make it a little smoother. But Bryce or Nicole, have you thought of anything else?

Nicole Van Every, NWA Administrative Assistant:
Just one more thing I forgot to say. For seal holder applicants, we are currently not scheduling any seal exams right now, but again, you can always email me and we can work that out once things become a little bit clearer. So just email me directly and we can discuss when might be best to schedule your exam. Thanks.

Janice Bunting, NWA CEO:
You're welcome. Good point. Anything else, Bryce?

Bryce McElhaney, NWA Communications & Marketing:
No, I think that's it.

Janice Bunting, NWA CEO:
And Bryce is still standing by and Winnie Crawford also. If anyone has any newsletter articles for the April issue, get them in right away because he's already starting work on that. So that can go to NWAnewsletter@NWAS.org. And you can find more information on our website. All right, we're signing off for now, but know that we're still here, keeping the NWA running and we know you're all doing a great job out there. So, take care. We'll chat with you again soon. Goodbye.