As I write these words the nomination process is coming to a close and we will soon have a slate of candidates that includes our first two-year term president who will serve 2024 and 2025, a division secretary (three-year term), an early career domain representative (three-year term), an APA Council representative (three-year term) and a student representative (two-year term). Nominations and elections are our opportunity to bring in new leadership, perspectives, diversity, and progress. We have been very fortunate to have a long history of congenial and cohesive board membership and we know that this slate of candidates will bring us new ideas and opportunities.
Nominations are always early in the yearly calendar, and now in my third year in the division trio it seems a little more predictable, but it still happens so fast. This year, for the first time, our changes to the bylaws, approved by the membership, will elect our first two-year term president. Many of us feel that this is great progress and now moving forward we and we are excited see what this brings us.
This next year will also see the unfolding of our institute. To date, Eric Chen and I are planning meetings with that membership and we hope to have more of you join us in supporting this effort. The institute is the place where students, practicum, interns, post docs, early career professionals (ECP) and others can come to learn about group psychotherapy and group psychology. We will grow in numbers if we can provide training in line with our APA-accredited specialty.
This leads us to another achievement from last year with APA acknowledgment of continuing professional education, which means that the division can be in the business of selling educational services. Maintenance of the group psychology and group-psychotherapy-acknowledged specialty includes the provision of continuing professional education. It will likely take us some years to fully assimilate what we have achieved, but all of these milestones are long haul, heavy lift items that have finally come to pass.
In my recent correspondence with Joe Kobos, I was able to lay out these achievements and acknowledge that pretty much everything that he originally thought needed to be done by the division has now been accomplished. Joe is the one who got all of this started and got me involved with Division 49 way back when I first achieved my boards. All of this follows from the aspirations of our division founders and it is good when the long game goes the way you want. It does. in fact. appear that the sun is going to shine on our back door.