National Multicultural Conference and Summit (NMCS) will be postponed by a year, with the next NMCS happening January 2022, instead of January 2021.
Division leadership has been in background discussions with the NMCS team. NMCS occurs once every other year, on or around the MLK Day weekend, as a collaborative action of several APA divisions. The last NMCS was in 2019, and the next NMCS would have been January 2021. Because conferences have long lead times, the NMCS team reached the point over the last few weeks where they had to either commit to January 2021, or cancel/move the conference. They relayed this to leadership teams from all the involved divisions on May 1. At that point, several options were raised (essentially, to move to January 2022, to move to April 2021, to skip to January 2023, or to do a virtual conference), and each division was given a rank-order vote.
After this, I surveyed Executive Board members, and received great and very consistent responses; we ranked the top priority as January 2022, with reach out to another conference that would typically occur near this time, to avoid any negative impact on them. There was wide concern that April 2021, was too soon and too many issues with undertaking virtual.
We have been informed that the final decision, after votes from all the divisions and the NMCS leadership team were all considered, is to move to January 2022.
There are several associated impacts, which I want to make you briefly aware of:
- At this point we foresee the NMCS schedule permanently shifting, so the next NMCS after that will be 2024.
- Our Division Midwinter Meeting (MMW) would have been at the NMCS location at the end of NMCS. At this point, our plan is that MWM will be virtual, because we do not predict we will know enough about the travel situation soon enough to make a decision to go live, and also we are sensitive to financial pressures, including private practitioners who have income loss and faculty who are dealing with significant budgetary constraints. There will be more to come about this.
- This is a long way off, but MWM 2022, which would normally be in Washington, DC, will be at the NMCS location in 2022.
There will be more to come, but I want to thank all the many division leaders who provided input into this conversation, and our goal is to continue to work to connect our division family in this surreal times and to empower our members who are doing good in their local, regional, national, and global communities.