As the summer ends and the school year begins it can be a busy time for those of us engaged in the work of community development. Maybe it’s the energy people get from taking a little time, connecting with friends and family or sending kids back to school. There’s something about the Fall that gets people going. As you are considering the projects you’re going to take on this coming year, consider giving some of your valuable time to CDS. CDS is largely a volunteer organization so we are limited by the contributions of time that members can provide. We are currently organizing the work of the CDS committees and have opportunities to help organize the next conference, facilitate webinars, create opportunities to engage members, help recruit new members and more. It is a nice way to contribute to the organization, grow your professional network and have a little fun.
Another possibility is to consider hosting a conference. We are currently soliciting letters of interest from people that would be interested in hosting the 2026 or the 2027 conference. Ideally, we want to be in a more southern location since we were in the Northwest in 2023 (Portland), the Midwest in 2024 (Omaha) and we will be in the Northeast (Geneva, NY) in 2025. However, we will consider anyone who wants to showcase their community and the great community development work going on there. If you want more information about possibly hosting a conference, please feel free to contact me or Tammy and we will be happy to walk you through the process.
We are regularly asked to post positions for organizations who are trying to get their opportunities in front of people like us who work with communities and understand how to effectively engage with communities around their development issues. We have simply not had a good way to provide that kind of resource to our members and others in the field that is accessible to both those who are looking to hire people in CD and those in CD who want to explore those opportunities. We have purchased software that will reside on our website that can effectively manage a job board for CDS. Our executive director, Tammy Baxter, has been working on this resource for a couple of months and is very close to having a draft that we can pilot.
To make this work we need your help. We need positions in our field we can post on the job board to make this a resource people will regularly explore as they engage in their job searches. So please let us know if you have positions you want us to include in the launch. To support this effort over time we will be charging a small fee for organizations and offer discounts for members that want to post positions. However, to get things started and build interest in this resource we are going to make it free for anyone with a position in CD to post it to our job board for the first three months after the job board is launched. We are hoping this will prove to be an important resource our members and the field of community development. If you know of employers with jobs to post please have them contact Tammy at director@cdsociety.org.
In service,
