Our current goals of our committee are to welcome and encourage engagement of new members from diverse populations to foster an inclusive community, and
perform functions and implement and sustain policies, programs, and activities that welcome and meet the needs of new members of the Division of Chemical Education. We are in the current process to expand our directive to include all membership. This will be voted on at the next ExComm board meeting.
Our committee has met several times to discuss how we can engage membership in new ways. We have also met with the Division chair, Thom Bussey, and the strategic plan team associated with Goal 1- Engagement and Inclusivity : Strategy 2 - Program and Events to discuss how the NMC can provide more support to the division. Our goals are to understand our membership through analysis of previous surveys and consider how what questions to ask in future surveys. We reviewed the last survey. This gave us multiple ideas about how we can engage with membership to support why one should become a member and what the division provides. We also plan to incorporate more virtual events to allow inclusion of all members especially for those that are not able to travel to the meetings. We also hope to promote professional development events through messaging on social media and newsletters. These ideas will help us work toward all three goals of the strategic plan.
Our last consent report was submitted in February, but experienced technical difficulties. It was resubmitted in June.
We are working on expanding our directive to incorporate meetings socials and virtual events to bring in new members and engage with current members. Virtual meetings will help engage with members who are not able to travel to meetings. We also hope to work with the division to incorporate membership news in the newsletters and social media throughout the year. Beginning after Spring 2026 meeting, we will prepare a new assessment to understand the needs of membership.
No the NMC has not requested money before, but we will for the year 2026.
Our proposed action and request is to change the name of our committee from New Member Committee to the Membership Committee. This action will also change our directive to include all members of the division. These changes include increasing our presence at the fall and spring National meetings and regional meetings along with hosting virtual membership events. We also would like to collaborate with the strategic plan team, for Goal 2 - professional development: Strategy 2 - Programming, to ensure connection between membership and PD events. Finally we will track membership to better understand who we can support and reach out to. These changes in directive all support the strategic plan of inclusion and collaboration.
We discussed this directive at the last two of our meetings with at least 5 of the current members of the committee. We have all worked to make sure the new direction connects with the strategic plan. We will present our request at the exComm meeting in August.