In this issue
Membership report
As we start fall 2015, we find APA in an interesting space, with a potential of membership declining across all divisions. Looking at membership for our division, we are slightly behind where we were in August of 2014, though we seem to be adding members every month. We hope to continue to entice active, previously active and new members to join as we move through the end of 2015 and into 2016. With the potential decrease in APA memberships, our hope is to pull members to the Society for Humanistic Psychology, as APA membership is not required. In borrowing words from one of our new student representatives, I am hoping that this will be a year to recruit new members, to retain our previous members and to revive our membership with new ideas. Below are some of our plans for the upcoming year:
Student Ambassador Program
We continue to develop and change our student ambassador program. We continue to aim to have students from each humanistic program focus on our mission, goals and finding active students.
Student Representatives
Student representatives have been on our board for a number of years; however, they are getting more encouragement to have a greater voice. At present, we are working to have the student representatives actively engaged with both the Student Ambassadors Program and the student population as a whole. Our hope is to eventually have a system where students are more engaged with their ambassadors, who then can bring student issues and perspectives to the student representatives on the board.
Continued membership push and membership activation
In the previous year, members allocated a greater share on their apportionment ballot to Div. 32, allowing us to have another member on the Council of Representatives for the 2015-16 year. We hope membership continues to generously apportion their votes to the division so that the existential-humanistic perspective continues to have a prominent voice on the APA Council. We are continuing to work to come up with ideas of ways to entice members to join our division.
Our society (~8,500) and student (~2,350) Facebook membership pages have continued to grow. These sites have become great resources for articles, resources, job postings and grassroots efforts.
Early Career Psychologists
We are continuing to work to find ways to provide opportunities for early career psychologists (ECPs), including working to provide mentoring and opportunities. I will personally be attending an ECP-focused breakfast at APA 2015 to work on creating new ideas and more opportunities for promoting the development of our early career psychologists.
Life Status Task Force
There is currently an APA task force that is looking at both the impact of life status members (whose fees are generally waived) as well as ways to allow these members to both be active and continue to receive services (such as journal access).
SHP-TV and Media
Donna Rockwell and Justin Karter have put a lot of hard work into creating SHP-TV, a YouTube channel to post both historic and contemporary videos of a humanistic and existential nature. We see this as a great step in sharing information for both personal and academic use.
We are continuing to try and find ways to serve the members, so if you have suggestions, comments or anything you'd like to discuss, do not hesitate to contact me.
Membership Committee Members
Trisha Nash, PhD, chair
Richard Bargdill
Krissana Sharon