Milwaukee Section - American Chemical Society the amalgamator

MILWAUKEE SECTION
AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY

Report from the
Long Range Planning Committee

February 26, 2001

The Long Range Planning Committee met at Marquette on February 26th. Chuck Wilkie has agreed to serve as chairperson. Other members present were: Jackie Behnke, Bud Douthitt, Dimitri Gorjestani, Tom Holme, and Tom McLinn. (Alex Hill is also a member but notified us he was unable to attend this meeting.)

The mission of the committee is to facilitate identifying a direction for the section to evolve over the next five to ten years. When agreement is reached on this direction, long term goals and interim milestone goals are to be set and measures compared relative to these goals.

A discussion followed on what function the Milwaukee local section of the ACS should serve for the members in the future. With a membership of about 1000 chemists, we probably have at most ten percent of the membership involved in section activities.

Presently, we have place our greatest emphasis on the monthly meetings with speakers. This once was a forum to bring in speakers to give talks of a highly technical nature. However, highly technical information is now available to most of the membership through other forums.

A second major event is participation in National Chemistry Week. Ideas presented during the discussion were:

• make sure everyone is greeted and made to feel welcome at our meetings.
  
  
• work with members to increase lobbying of government officials to show that there is a science constituency.
  
  
• increase the high school focus for National Chemistry Week.
  
  
• establish a Technician Affiliate Group (TAG).
  
  
• offer training to our members on public outreach such as making presentations at schools.
  
  
• have a local company or institution featured during the social hour of the monthly meeting.
  
  
• restructure the Nominations Committee to be a "committee of the whole" of the section board – everyone should be recruiting members for some form of participation.
  
  
• make a goal to have the section present one new idea each year.

The committee will meet again at 6pm on Wednesday, April 11, 2001.