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By Liz Icenogle, CAE, KCSAE Director

Associations play a crucial role in all industries, professions and businesses by providing a platform for collaboration and growth. By bringing together individuals with similar goals, associations enhance work environments and strengthen the skills of professionals doing the work.

This is powerful stuff.  And, as association professionals, we are an essential part of this collaboration and growth.

Personally, I owe much of my professional development to KCSAE, which has provided me with a perfect blend of educational, networking, and leadership opportunities, often before I even realized I needed them.

As professionals, we are leading, learning and navigating through a period of unprecedented disruption. For associations, this means we must be ready for change; it is inevitable. KCSAE, for example, is intentionally preparing for change. 

To do this, KCSAE called on ASAE’s ForesightWorks as a guide when it built, and in January 2023, when it revisited and revised its most recent strategic plan.  This tool makes it easy to integrate environmental scanning within the development process and injects it with strategic intelligence. Ultimately, the result should be professionals that are better prepared to serve and lead within their organizations.   

How Can KCSAE Better Support You?

Speaking of being prepared, the planning process for education and networking events for 2023-2024 are already underway. The various committees, special interest group (SIG) leaders and the board of directors are carefully considering how the association can serve each member and how we can, collectively, be prepared to answer the disruption at our door.  

If you have any thoughts, suggestions, comments or inspiration on how KCSAE can better serve you from content to networking ideas, please feel free to email me directly. I can be reached at Liz.Icenogle@gmail.com.

How can you help KCSAE, you ask?  

Get involved!  Attend events, volunteer (shorter and longer term commitments available!) and spread the word about this local community of association professionals building each other up.  

Invite a colleague or someone you know to an event. The greater diversity of thought, values and perspectives in KCSAE, the stronger we are as a community. The stronger the community, the better prepared we can all be to meet the needs of our members, industries and society.  Who will you invite?

Finally, I hope to see you on June 1 at the Developing Leaders and Brand Ambassadors program with Peggy Hoffman, FASAE, CAE.  During the program, we will learn about the latest research on association volunteering directly from the expert and work through strategies on modernizing our approaches to how members work on behalf of their associations.   

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