Dear Div. 31 Members,
Happy spring! I was pleased to be able to see the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., during the spring consolidated meetings and now have daffodils (or jonquils) blooming in my yard. Div. 31 had a great Practice Leadership Conference (PLC) this year. We presented our annual awards at the awards luncheon.
The award for outstanding SPTA was given to the Missouri Psychological Association. MOPA has been active in educating their lobbyists on psychological issues, holding strategic planning meetings, increasing communications with their membership, forming a 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation, adding a diversity chair and early career psychologist (ECP) chair as voting members of their board, and enjoying significant legislative successes.
The diversity award went to the Arizona Psychological Association for their work on holding an annual LGBTQ Pride event and highlighting the negative impact of separating families at the border among several other events.
The award for early career psychologists, now named the Sallie Hildebrandt Memorial Award, went to the New Mexico Psychological Association. This award includes a $750.00 prize! The New Mexico Psychological Association has done excellent work on recruiting ECPs into membership and including ECPs in the association.
Finally, the award for the outstanding SPTA employee went to Stacy Greene Bratcher of the Georgia Psychological Association. She has done an outstanding job there since being hired as the director of communications and then assuming the role of executive director nine months later. Her accomplishments are many and varied; she is well deserving of this award.
For this coming year I plan to implement toolkits for SPTAs to use in their work with the emergent fields of telehealth and interjurisdictional practice along with a toolkit on integrative care from Robin McCleod. For the foreseeable future, these will be among the top topics for SPTAs and psychologists. A sizeable amount of information has already been collected but there is more information to be collected and new information emerges almost daily. These toolkits are designed to assist SPTAs in their work on these topics. I am forming an ad hoc committee to work on telehealth and interjurisdictional issues such as legal regulatory standards, HIPAA compliant platforms, collecting state initiatives, state legislative and regulatory standards, etc. If you have any interest in working in the exciting area, send me an email.
The restructuring of APA continues. Many of you are familiar with the Committee for the Advancement of Professional Practice (CAPP) as the committee that worked closely with SPTAs. But CAPP has been sunsetted and their tasks are being divided among other APA entities such as the Committee of State Leaders (CSL) and the Board of Professional Affairs (BPA). There are many moving parts to this restructuring and many ideas about how APA will emerge. You will be seeing APA Services, Inc. in many communications, this is the restructured APA Practice Organization. The various “silos” of practice, education, public interest, etc., are being merged. There are several other changes that have occurred that I don’t have space here to describe. I urge you to be mindful of communications from APA that will be an excellent source of information concerning these changes. Div. 31 is working to keep the interests of SPTAs in the forefront of these changes.