APA 2019 convention Div. 37 Board Meeting

Present: Amy Damashek, Jenelle Shanley, Jennifer Kaminski, Mary Ann McCabe, Paula Fite, Stephanie Block, Mindy Willing, Christina Rodriguez, Sonia Rubens, Spencer Evans, Colleen Cullinan, Summer Chahin, Liz Gershoff, Tom Gross, Earl Tuner, Mirian Ofonedu

The 2019 Midwinter Meeting Minutes were approved.

President Amy Damashek

In lieu of a presidential address, Amy hosted a data blitz session at the convention, which aligned with her presidential theme, “Promoting Resiliency in Low-Income and At-Risk Families.” Amy and Mary Ann identified two ECPs to disseminate the InfoAboutKids.org website content via social media. Amy has been participating in a CODAPAR-funded project spearheaded by Div. 44 (Psychology of Sexual Orientation). The project is titled, “A New Agenda for the Psychology of LGBTQ Youth and Emerging Adults.” They held a preconference that included several keynote speakers who discussed relevant issues as well as time for group brainstorming and discussion about actions to take. Christy Olezeski was one of the keynote speakers, focusing on transgender youth! Amy and Lisa Gennetian have been in communication with Springer and with APA to find a way to make it easy for our members to access electronic and print copies of Advances. We have a method for people to access the print copies for a reduced price; members need to use the discount code “Division37” upon checkout. For free electronic access, APA is helping us to set up a link through our website.

Paula Fite, Treasurer

Major spending for the division is happening here at the conference. Generally, we are on budget or under budget with expenditures.

Mary Ann McCabe, Representative to APA Council

Council met. Important victory — Immigration Policy Statement: presented on Tuesday night; Mary Ann raised concerns about it not focused on child mental health policy, ACES, toxic stress. APA staff worked through the night to create a section on child mental health policy, ACES, toxic stress with refugee/immigrants; went up for vote Wednesday and it was approved in 24 hours!

APAGS has been working on fine-tuning a policy to give students the ability to vote at APA (i.e., for president, board directors, and membership bylaws). People are concerned mostly that master-level graduates can be members but cannot vote for five years — this was controversial. A friendly amendment included both master’s level graduates and students being able to vote after one year (vote on Friday).

National Academies: Need to decide if Div. 37 is going to continue sponsorship. Continue to believe with future possibilities and the new co-chairs, members rotating in. Possible to explore if new Forum staff will accept Div. 37 sponsorship. Benefits of being involved: 1) In the early years, there were scholarly workshops, with Div. 37 members invited to speak; 2) Champion the mission of Div. 37 within the forum. Unsure of direction of forum or benefits of the future. Mary Ann will ask if they would accept our proposed sponsorship.

Sonia Rubens and Spencer Evans, Social Media

Div. 37 is up and running on social media. We have many posts on the various platforms. Trying to come up with ways to ensure we continue generating diverse content to reflect diversity of division membership. Ideas to generate more content:

• Board Member of the month—chance to designate time for each member for sending two-three posts that month to reflect policy, research, articles relevant to division.
• Fellow Spotlight—students take leadership of this and highlight certain fellows and publicize actions and major publications over the last few years.
• Submit content to Google Drive to make it easier for social media chairs to decide what is shared on social media.
• Collaborative idea between social media team and membership presented to group—in membership renewal email, offer raffle for free one-year division for anyone who likes the social media about renewing membership.

Notion passed to go forward with raffle.

Christina Rodriguez, MAL: Advocacy Coordinator

Physical Discipline Toolkit in process; compiling them for end of year to roll out for early next year. New citizen psychologist award—no submissions yet. Deadline coming up. Clarification: The award is for someone who does advocacy work outside of their actual career with the community.

Jennifer Kaminski, Past-President

Awards and officers are listed in the agenda book report. Missed the dissertation award; it did not get on list, so no nominations for it. Award for completed dissertation ($500 honorarium). Board voted on whether to provide additional time for solicit nominations for the dissertation competition or let it pass this year. Motion passed for Jennifer to extend the deadline for the award to September 2019.

Mindy Willing, Membership Chair

Unfortunately, membership numbers have gone down relative to last year. We are now down 6 percent in overall membership as compared with December 2018 (yet APA membership is up overall). New member phone calls will continue. Email nudge attempting to transform listserv subscribers into members did not seem to work, possibly because of the time of year it was sent out. Will wait one more month to see July numbers to confirm whether the burst worked. Removing non-members from the listserv (i.e., limiting listserv to members) may make more people become members. Could potentially send out another nudge at a better time (e.g., November; closer to renewal time). The board should also note that listserv subscribers and actual members are two separate lists.

Earl Turner, President-Elect

Provided an update on the Task Force on Advancing Social and Emotional Development of Black Boys through Research, Advocacy, and Community Engagement. The members were recently announced in The Advocate and members will have a meeting following convention. At convention, members planned to have an informal meeting at the ECP Social Hour. Possible outcomes from the TF may include a webinar and a congressional briefing. One possibility for the briefing will be on ACE’s and implications for youth. It was discussed that the division has some funds available to co-sponsor a briefing.  Possible collaborators for the briefing included APA Public Interest Directorate and the NPSC. 

Craig Fisher, APA Science Relations Office

New Chief Advocacy Chair (Kathleen McGuire). Working to increase dissemination of research and advocacy. Covering issues of IO psychology and others. New Journal coming out soon. Legislatively: Increase of budget deal for funding.

Mirian Ofonedu, MAL: Task Force Coordinator and Diversity Activities

Forwarded the new SIG description to the executive board members for review prior to convention and encouraged board to provide feedback soon. Also shared the SIG description with past board members, Anita Thomas and Joaquin Borrego, and received feedback from them. Will incorporate feedback and share with the board. There continued to be conflict in programming scheduling especially with collaborative programs. This year, the Walk-a-Mile program day and time conflicts with a few of the division programs. Unfortunately, we have no control over when collaborative programs, such as Walk a Mile, are scheduled as APA-CPG schedules those separately. Program chair and board members will continue to stress this concern to the convention office as it can be a disincentive.