President's Message
April 2012 Newsletter Article
Defining Our Purpose and Our Future: Revisiting and Revising Our Mission, Vision and Core Values
As part of the strategic planning process that has been taking place this year, we, the APA Board, have reviewed our mission, vision and core values. These were developed in 2006-2007 and we began the review process thinking that they might need "tweaking", but not a major overhaul. We started these discussions during the strategic planning retreat last October, which included APA Region Co-Chairs, APA SIG Chairs, Research Network leaders, colleagues from APPD and COMSEP, and former Board members. And we continued the review as an ongoing discussion of the Board over four months.
What began as an exercise in tweaking became an intense and ongoing dialogue about the very essence of our organization. The process, which started with initial suggestions from all the members of the fall retreat, was iterative and democratic. Initial thoughts were followed by suggested changes, voting by Board members, leading to further discussion and suggested changes and new voting by Board members, which in turn led to new discussions. In the end, we were thinking deeply and discussing actively about the priorities and identity of our organization. These were often clarifications of our purpose as an organization, rather than new directions. Nevertheless, out of these deliberations some important basic principles emerged.
- Put Children First: Our goals and all that we do must have the ultimate aim of helping children and families. Our mission, vision, and core values should all reflect that guiding principle.
- Champion Both Health and Well-Being: We are committed to improving the health and the well-being of children, adolescents and young adults. We believe that every child should realize his or her own potential, be able to cope with the normal stresses of life, and develop and grow to learn and work productively and fruitfully, and ultimately to make a contribution to her or his community.
- Express a Yearning For a Vision of Really Making a Difference in Children's Lives: We want our vision statement to be an inspiration to our members and to relate to a better future for children.
- Clearly State Our Focus on Members:
- Professional development of our members is a major goal of the organization. It involves all of our standing committees, which are the pillars of our organization: education, research, health care delivery, and public policy and advocacy. It also involves many of our core activities, including some in collaboration with other organizations. We want our commitment to the professional development of our members, a core value, to be clearly stated in our mission statement.
- Our strategic plan is very much focused on the needs of our members. We want to make sure that we communicate our focus on our members in the mission, vision, and core values statements.
- Stay True To What We Do Best and Describe What Differentiates Us from Other Pediatric Organizations: Create a mission statement that describes what is unique and uniquely important about our organization.
Our New Mission now reflects our concern about improving the health and well-being of all children and adolescents. It expresses our core activities as a means to this end. It clarifies our focus on health care delivery as a focus on "what we do best", i.e. innovations. And it highlights our focus on "fostering leadership and career development of child health professionals" as an individual goal and activity. We struggled with choosing a short, "pithy" style for the mission versus describing our organization in enough detail to present our actions and goals in a way that reflects what is truly special about the APA. We chose a "middle way", too long to be "pithy", too short to be overly wordy, long enough to, hopefully, differentiate the APA from other organizations.
Our New Vision is most changed from the previous version. It now looks to the future and expresses, simply, a desire to work towards creating a better world for children and families by advancing child health and well-being. Of course, we can only do this through the work of our members, who are the real visionaries, and through effective collaborations. At the end of our deliberations, we asked ourselves, "Isn't this what we really all want to do? Shouldn't this be our vision as an organization?"
Our New Core Values remained similar to the previous version. The changes include: emphasizing "putting children first", stressing a focus on meeting our members' needs, and simplifying the presentation to make our core values clear and concise.
Please check out our new mission, vision and core values on the APA website at:
http://www.academicpeds.org/aboutUs/about_mission_vision.cfm. We hope they reflect the APA as it is and where we see ourselves going in the future. And we hope they reflect your values and your goals for the APA. They form the foundation of our developing strategic plan for the next five years.
PAS in Boston
I look forward to seeing many of you in Boston! As usual, we will all have too many choices for each time slot and end up being exhilarated and slightly frustrated at the same time! In addition to the science presented at platform and poster sessions, and the educational activities such as workshops and invited science, please try to attend the following exciting sessions:
- APA Committee Meetings: Sunday, April 29th at 11:30 am. Please come to our APA Committee meetings on Sunday. These meetings are open to all, and are a great opportunity to learn what the Committees are doing and to get involved.
- APA Membership Meeting and Debate: Sunday, April 29th at 3:45 pm. Come and find out what is going on in your organization, including our new strategic plan, and enjoy the annual debate.
- APA Regional Breakfasts: Monday, April 30th at 7 am. Join your colleagues in your Region for breakfast, discussion and news on the latest regional activities. APA leaders will be visiting the Regional Breakfasts to discuss our new strategic plan.
- APA Presidential Plenary: Monday, April 30th at 1:30 pm. Please join us to hear and see these exciting scientific presentations, among the best in the PAS meeting. I will also be sharing my thoughts on a future agenda for the APA concerning the needs of children during my Presidential Address.
- APA Special Interest Groups (SIGs): SIGs are scheduled throughout the meeting. We have 39 different SIGs covering the varied interests of our members! If you haven't attended SIG meetings, you are missing a highlight of the PAS meeting. If these 39 SIGs don't cover a topic you are passionate about (which I doubt), find out how to start a new SIG on that topic.
New This Year-APA Mentored Feedback for Trainee Posters: APA Regional Co-Chairs have organized "mentor-teams" who will be visiting posters by trainees in their regions. They will have reviewed the abstracts in advance, and will visit the posters and offer constructive and positive feedback to the trainees. I know that trainees often feel that they are not getting the benefit of really in-depth feedback from senior leaders at PAS because of the size and scheduling of the poster sessions. We hope this will enhance their educational and research experience.
The PAS meeting will certainly be a rich and rewarding experience. I hope to see many of you at PAS and talk with you personally. Please seek me out!
Benard Dreyer
President
Academic Pediatric Association
bpd1@nyumc.org
Previous Newsletter Articles
- February 2012 Article
- December 2011 Article
- October 2011 Article
- August 2011 Article
- June 2011 Article
- April 2011 Article
- February 2011 Article
