Dear Div. 20:
I hope all of you are having a wonderful summer. I am excited to see many of you at the 2018 American Psychological Association (APA) annual convention from Aug. 9th to 12th. Div. 20 Program Chairs Allison Bielak, PhD, and Tina Savla, PhD, have assembled a fantastic program that features exciting intra- and inter-division content. I extend a warm invitation to all Div. 20 members who regularly attend the annual APA convention as well as those who perhaps have not done so recently to join us in San Francisco. I particularly welcome first-time attendees as well as those who are still thinking about a division home. I hope you find Div. 20 proves a worthy fit.
By way of division updates: my main presidential initiative has been to ensure the sustainability of Div. 20 in the face of ongoing membership challenges. To this end, Div. 20 created the Div. 20 Fund, which I am happy to report is now an official fund that can accept formal pledges. The Div. 20 Fund will provide support to graduate students and early-career psychologists interested in adult development and aging via travel stipends, awards and similar initiatives to better engage the future of Div. 20.
The Executive Committee of Div. 20 agreed to establish a fund for Div. 20 this past fall in collaboration with the American Psychological Foundation (APF) to seed an initial $20,000 to ultimately result in a $100,000 endowment fund. This Div. 20 Fund will eventually support a number of early career outreach efforts. I think many of us point to Div. 20 as an important professional home that has helped each of us to build and advance our understanding of adult development and aging.
For me personally, Div. 20 has served as an important anchor that allows me to continue to identify with my intellectual roots as a psychologist although my academic affiliations have ranged from nursing to public health. I wanted to give similar opportunities to other early career psychologists to call Div. 20 “home,” and I think the Fund can help do that.
We (myself, Sue Whitbourne, Michael Marksiske and Karen Frye) are currently conducting focused calls to potential donors, and we likely will continue our fundraising outreach efforts in the upcoming months. If you are interested in donating or learning more, please do contact me via email or at (612) 626-2485, and I am happy to share more details. We have signed an agreement with APF, and we tentatively have five years to raise funds towards our $100,000 goal. If Div. 20 does not meet its goal, APF would confer with the division and distribute the funds to accomplish as nearly as possible the Fund’s charitable purpose and intent. Their agreements do not state that the division can request an extension, but that is what has happened in similar cases. I am thrilled to share more with you about the progress of the Fund at APA’s convention this August.
There are a number of other exciting developments. I wanted to thank all of you for completing the Div. 20 mentee and mentor surveys that the two members of our Early Career Psychologist Task Force, Courtney Polenick, PhD, and Nicole DePasquale, PhD, disseminated in April and May. We received over 20 potential mentees and 20 potential mentors.
Our next steps will be to match potential mentees with mentors; Polenick and Pasquale will also be sharing some important resources. We hope to schedule an informal meeting for mentors and mentees as well as anyone else that is interested in early career mentorship at the APA convention this August. In addition, we are potentially planning a webinar or similar event for those interested in the mentoring tips. Please do join me in thanking Pasquale and Polenick for their excellent leadership on the Early Career Psychologist Task Force.
We have made some additional process improvements to how we update information on the division website. All webpage update requests from Div. 20 Executive Committee (EC) members can be emailed directly to Merrill Miller at APA with a copy to the Div. 20 webmaster Tony Sterns and to the Presidential Trio (myself, Michael Marsiske, president-elect; and Manfred Diehl, past-president) for informational/monitoring purposes.
We believe this new communication process will result in expeditious page updates that more closely reflect the changes/initiatives the various committee chairs are engaged in at any given time. We thank Tony Sterns for his ongoing leadership as Div. 20 webmaster as well as Merrill Miller at APA for continuing to improve our website. This will certainly be a point of emphasis of Michael Marsiske’s Div. 20 presidency next year, and we look forward to creating a dynamic website for the division.
I hope you are as excited as I am about the upcoming APA convention, and the Program Committee of Allison Bielak and Tina Savla have assembled a wonderful series of events. Among the featured events is the symposium “From Cradle to Grave: Are Early Life Traumas Reversible in Later Life?” (Thurs., Aug. 9 from 11:00 a.m.-12:50 p.m.) that will examine continuity and discontinuity theory via a true lifespan perspective. In addition, I will be moderating “How Has Psychology Prepared You for Aging?” (Fri., Aug. 10 from 10-10:50 a.m.), a panel discussion of how practitioners and scientists of psychology have navigated adult development and aging themselves. Steve Zarit, PhD, will discuss a series of papers in the symposium “New Frontiers in Biopsychosocial Research and Stress Interventions” (Sat., Aug. 11 from 9 a.m.-10:50 a.m.) that will offer exciting perspectives on intervention modalities across the lifespan. On Sat., Aug. 11 from 4 p.m.-5:50 p.m., “A Guide to Best Practices for Running an Intervention” will offer insights into the critical details on how to successfully conduct an intervention. These are just the featured events. The Div. 20 Program preview onlineopens in new window (PDF, 912KB) demonstrates the great depth and breadth of programming at APA again this year.
To all of my friends and colleagues at Div. 20, I wish you a productive, relaxing and rejuvenating summer, and I will see you at convention.