President’ s Address
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I am writing this address on“ Black Friday” while my family sleeps in. Instead of shopping we will all be going to the dentist – what can I say? The executive board and I are finally relaxing and catching up a little after a very busy fall with an election and what we decided was a successful conference. For me this is the also the official beginning of my last year as president. On September 1st Jim Hill will take over as president and my 9 years with ILOTA leadership will come to an end – maybe... Who knows what is next. As I start to reminisce about the years, I can’ t help but be especially proud of the work our board accomplished in the last year. The annual report is on the website at this link( http:// ilota. memberclicks. net / message2 / link / 326ba0e8-ce6f-4ac5-a4e8- 18a721ff15c6 / 1). There are lots of details there for you to read. I just want to highlight a few goals that we met and a couple things we didn’ t plan but are excited about. And I want to acknowledge some of the folks that actually made things happen.
We started to collect stories from practitioners about their Best OT Moments. It was a start toward a goal of recording at least 100 stories by the end of next year, the ILOTA Centennial year. We all have great stories – please consider sharing yours- either as a written story, or record it and send the file. We will share them with our members over the year as we celebrate 100 years of OT in Illinois.
When I started as Director of Finance way back in 2009 it was suggested to me that we start an endowed scholarship with AOTF. ILOTA had not escaped the impact of the 2008 financial collapse and I remember thinking( with some panic) that raising the startup funds seemed pretty“ pie in the sky” given we had so little money in the bank and relatively few members. We didn’ t give up the idea though – once ILOTA was on better footing and we started to raise membership we went back to the idea and began to plan what would be my first ever“ capital campaign.” Janet Adcox who took over as Director of Finance has relentlessly pursued this goal, despite some uncertainty, and I will tell you she nailed it in one year. We started by going back over the years and calculating the donations people made to ILOTA using the scholarship option on the membership form. Although that had been there for years, and people had donated for years, there had not been much effort to track those funds. After much time and work Janet established that there had been nearly 6200 dollars donated to the fund. That combined that
Lisa Mahaffey, PhD( c), OTR / L, FAOTA
with a generous donation by Melanie Ellexson and we were on our way. Sometime last winter Janet and I researched how to run a capital campaign, and then sat in a restaurant in Minooka and mapped out a plan to raise the remaining 25,000 we would need to start the scholarship – intimidating for sure. We calmed each other down at one point by saying we would simply do the best we could and if it took a few years so be it …. Well thanks to multiple fundraisers, amazing member donors( thank you if you were one of them!!) and a lot of hard work by Janet and Jenny Dang we have raised all 35,000 dollars and will be investing this year. Our first scholarships will be available in 2019 through the AOTF scholarship endowment program. We will award one scholarship for an OT and one for an OTA, and they will start small, but we don’ t plan to stop raising funds for this. As the basic endowment grows, so do the scholarships. Stay tuned.
As is always the case, we tried some new things at our conference. The conference team, made up of Christy Rojas, Jim Taylor and Jenny Dang, met nearly every month initially and then more often as conference drew near. They decided to move things around a little this year. We have had a pretty consistent schedule for years but it occurred to them if we moved things around we might be able to bring people together to network a little more than usual. Despite being a profession that teaches and believes in balance we tend to work a little too hard at conferences and forget how valuable and important it is to dedicate time to catching up with our colleagues and friends. I think moving the keynote to Friday afternoon and combining it with recognizing wonderful colleagues and members during the awards ceremony and networking reception was perfect. Sue Quinn pulled together a really nice recognition ceremony and how wonderful to celebrate two exceptional students along with three people who contributed a lifetime of work to occupational therapy as a profession and ILOTA. Later in the issue you will read about these five awardees along with our awesome OT of the year.
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