I am very excited to be just weeks away from our Annual Conference in Omaha, Nebraska! I do hope to see a strong showing of our Members there to learn with one another, celebrate one another, and have the chance to experience on-the-ground work in yet another terrific host community.
I also eagerly anticipate the results of our ongoing Board Election for open seats in the coming year. It’s been a long time since we’ve had such a robust slate, and I thank and congratulate the Nominations Committee for their outstanding work to ensure this result—Neil Linscheid (Committee Chair), Lisa Gilchrist, Cornel Hart, Jane Leonard, and Josh Newton. If you haven’t yet done so, please use your individual code to place your vote before the election closes on July 10th!
This will be my last Vanguard Chair’s Message–and I’m so pleased to hand it over to our incoming Board Chair, Steve Jeanetta, who will take the helm after our Annual Business Meeting on July 17th. It has been a challenging and rewarding experience serving in the executive officer roles these last three years. While serving as the Vice Chair of Operations, we successfully negotiated a difficult reclamation and transition of our entire virtual office functions, website, digital communications, and social media accounts–largely without staff support. While serving as the Vice Chair of Programs, we successfully hosted our first in-person conference since 2019, starting with a pre-identified location but no secured host or sponsors. And we contracted with a new editorial team for our lead journal, Community Development, and completed a nearly three-year project of revising and renewing our Principles of Good Practice. While serving as the Chair, we contracted with terrific support staff and have made great progress in ongoing professionalization of CDS as a nonprofit organization, including key changes to the bylaws and updates to our Policies and Operating Guidelines. We’ve renewed relationships with sister organizations and begun establishing new relationships with future partners. Of course there are many other successes and advancements that could be drawn out of our monthly Board Meeting Minutes and past issues of Vanguard, but I’ll let these few accomplishments stand as examples. This continuing progress is reflected in our rebounding membership numbers–back to about 300 from an all-time low during the pandemic years, along with the growing status of our journals. All in all, it’s a good time to be a Member of the Community Development Society! Onward!!
As we head into Fall, I hope everyone is getting settled into their routines after an active summer and finding fun and innovative ways to support their work with communities. Where I live in Minnesota that fall can be spectacularly beautiful and offers a nice transition to the challenges of winter and winter can be pretty serious around here. This month I want to talk about a new resource CDS is developing to support your work, strengthen our value to you as a member and increase the profile of our field. We are getting ready to launch a community development job board. On the surface this may not seem too important unless you have a job to fill or are looking for one. However, in a climate where finding skilled workers is increasingly difficult and for those looking for work in CD, having a place to go focused on community development can be important to sustaining the growth of our field.
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,
In service,
Chair, 2023-2024
chair@CDSociety.org
