Welcome back from summer!

Welcome back from summer! If you, like many park and recreation professionals, are just getting your head above water after the busy summer, we understand. We hope you get a minute to catch your breath and recover from the hectic schedule. At IPRA, we are ready for fal,l and we have so much going on to serve you and make your professional life a little easier for you.

At last week’s IPRA board meeting in Champaign, the board and I were focused on several large projects which all have to do with internal systems and processes. We looked at the annual renewal of our rolling five year strategic plan, our 2017 work plan, revisions to some contracts and vendor relationships as well as revisions to our personnel policies and a proposal, a long time in the making, towards streamlining our plentiful volunteer opportunities. The board continues to move our meetings around the state, this time meeting in Central Illinois and our next meeting in late September will be in the North West Illinois region. At our September meeting we will have our annual board governance educational event where our board has a speaker to talk about trends or macro level issues. This presentation will be on, "Participation Trends Among Sports & Recreational Activities in the US" and our speaker will be Dustin Dobrin, the Director of Research and Information for the National Sporting Goods Association.

Additionally, the Governance Committee is getting us ready for the upcoming IPRA elections for IPRA board seats and IPRA section board seats. The election will be online via email survey October 17-21 wrapping up at 4:00 PM on the 21st. The IPRA board seats up for election are the Central Region and North West Region, though all professional members statewide vote in every election. The section boards have numerous elections and all professional members vote in all section races too.

We have begun working with our border states on a project for 2017 which will be a summit of the state park and recreation association boards and staff coming together to learn from each other. Our sister states and IPRA are thrilled with the opportunity to collaborate together.

We recently announced the mentoring teams for ProConnect2016-2017. The teams this year are in for a great experience. As usual, we pieced together teams taking into account each person’s needs, interests, career track, geographic location, hobbies, etc. to try to provide a great match. The first event is September 21. We have a new speaker coming in this year for ProConnect from North Carolina, Laura Lunsford PhD who is a nationally recognized speaker on high quality professional relationship building who will be featured at our October session. Towards the goal of sharing what we’ve created in this innovative mentoring program, I presented about it to my peers at the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) conference in Salt Lake City in August and to my park and recreation state association peers at our annual retreat in St Louis in July. We are really getting people excited about starting mentoring programs for their associations and in doing so, building IPRA’s reputation to others. As a result of the ASAE presentation, IPRA was featured twice this week in the Associations Now newsletter which goes to 21,000 nationally and I was asked to present for an association alliance at their meeting in Charleston, SC later this year. This program has already won us a national award for innovation, now it’s really taking off as a key part of IPRA’s member benefit opportunities that others want to emulate. I hope if you didn’t apply this year that you will consider it for next year, this is a truly unique program with something in it for professionals at all levels of their careers.

Registration is still open for the Joint Section Golf Outing on September 16 (rain date of September 23) at Tanna Farms. This event benefits scholarships through the foundation. We hope that you will come out and support this fundraiser. 

We are currently accepting nominations for our conference awards and section awards. Information is available online. The application deadline is October 10, 2016.

Debbie Trueblood, CAE

Executive Director