By Terri Will, MBA, RDN, LDN
The Northwest Pennsylvania Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (NWPAND) has 55 members living in 17 counties including Erie, Crawford, Mercer, Lawrence, Venango, Butler, Warren, Forest, Clarion, Armstrong, McKean, Elk, Jefferson, Indiana, Potter, Cameron, and Clearfield counties. One of our greatest challenges is getting members together across all 17 counties. This year, along with our fall and spring continuing education events, we gathered together in April in three different areas for networking events. These events took place at St. Marys, Indiana, and Erie, PA. A board member from each area organized the event times and location and connected local RDs, DTRs, and students together to talk about current jobs, struggles in the workplace, career guidance, and just catching up with each other. This provided a great opportunity to meet new friends and see old ones as well. We were also able to reach out to some of the students in our district in hopes that they may be interested in becoming more involved within our district.
A member survey was conducted to determine what our members would like to see more of (and less of), and how we could better meet their needs. We will be discussing this at our educational event on May 18th during our membership meeting and our members have given us some great feedback that we hope we can put to good use in the near future.
As public policy is at the forefront of our profession, greatly affecting our futures, we were able to meet with one of our local legislatures with more plans in the near future. Our goal being to reach out to members in our district and get them involved in speaking with their legislatures and getting to know them and ensuring that they are aware of the importance of the nutrition professional.
Our goal is to continue to grow as an organization and to find new ways to reach out to our large membership area. We are learning ways to utilize social media along with other mechanisms of communication via other technological tools that may allow us to share educational opportunities without having to travel 3 hours from one side of the district to the other.
