Dear colleagues:
As I finish up this column, we are calling our 2020 AUPHA Annual Meeting (AM) a wrap. And a huge success! Please join me in congratulating and thanking Dr. Tracy Farnsworth and all of the members of the AM Planning Committee for their time and talent, and the quality achieved for our plenaries, panels, educational sessions, and our special doctoral, global, and undergraduate tracks.
On behalf of the entire AUPHA community, I want to acknowledge and thank our team at AUPHA: and in particular, Jason Walker and Jaime Stephens who worked closely with Dr. Farnsworth and his committee. Supported by the entire AUPHA staff, they took what was supposed to be a nearly three-day meeting in Salt Lake City and turned it into a manageable and high-quality virtual experience, gently spread out over much of the summer. Bravo!
Congratulations once again to all of our prize, scholarship, and other award recipients that were recognized during our 2020 Annual Meeting. It was such a pleasure to be able to hear, at least briefly, from all of our named award recipients for 2020: Dr. William Hsiao, the William B. Graham Prize for Health Services Research; Dr. Paula Song, the John D. Thompson Prize; Dr. Diane Howard, the Gary L. Filerman Prize for Educational Leadership; Dr. Joanna Brooks, the Glandon Family Faculty Scholarship; and, Ms. Summer Hill, the HCA Corris Boyd Scholar for 2020-2022.
I am incredibly proud of our AUPHA pivot to “everything remote” following the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. earlier this year. Since late March, AUPHA has provided nearly 80 virtual sessions of keynotes, panels, town halls, educational webinars, faculty forums, and more; and that included three May webinars and two AM plenaries specifically focused on COVID-19.
I am also proud of our community’s response to the long-standing, continuing and escalating, and increasingly visible acts of racism, social injustice, discrimination, and violence against communities of color, and in particular Black communities, in the United States. Thus far, our response has included a strong and united, formal public statement; a newly adopted philosophy statement for AUPHA that has diversity at its core; the addition of a special keynote (co-sponsored by NAHSE) and faculty panel on racism and discrimination during our 2020 AM; and, a recent grant proposal submitted by our colleagues, Drs. Lumbe Davis, Kimberly Enard, and Diane Howard, to the American Society for Association Executives (ASAE), for a collaboration between AUPHA and NAHSE, to do groundbreaking work on DEI best practices in association governance, leadership, and programming.
As our academic program and faculty members prepare to “return to campus” for the fall semester - either physically, virtually, or blended - please know that AUPHA is with you. We are better and stronger together as a community. The amount of sharing for good, better, and best practices for teaching and learning; professional development for our students; managing and leading in academic environments; and being good to and taking care of each other, has been amazing these past four months.
The AUPHA team is here to support and partner with you as we move into a new academic year. To that end, we have planned a special webinar - Creating Rigor and Student Engagement for Remote Learning - Monday, August 10, 4-5 pm Eastern Time. This has been Intentionally scheduled to occur prior to classes starting this fall. Our AUPHA Fall 2020 webinar series will focus on Leveraging Non-Budgeted Resources to Sustain and Improve Programs and Student Experiences. This series includes an emphasis on alumni engagement in September, IPE in October, and partnerships with professional associations in November.
Here’s to a successful fall semester for all of our faculty, staff, students, and alumni! And here’s to our entire AUPHA community’s safety and health!
Dan