Diversity Part 2

What should the message about diversity be? I mean, we need to recruit some leaders, because we currently have basically myself & the 1st VP & then a bunch of Board members who don't want to step up into VP & Presidency, or have already done so. A quick look indicates we have 4 Board members whose terms expire with this fiscal year. One cannot be renewed because her job prevents her from attending ANY meetings. Another is a past president, but I wouldn't mind seeing him replaced. The other 2 should be reupped without discussion.

We have 2 committee chairs with Board experience. One filled my seat when I stepped up to 2nd VP last year. The other is doing great work with her committee. She might be considered officer material, but some would resist that & I suspect she will as well. We have to find someone to step up to 2nd VP because I doubt the person in that office now will continue into next FY.

Enough on that, although there should be a plug for leadership opportunities in the message somewhere. I joined CSI for 2 reasons - meet product reps & learn more about construction. I've done both. The exciting thing about Baltimore CSI, as opposed to some other chapters, is we are roughly equal in industry & professional members who regularly attend. By percentage of membership, we are heavily weighted to professional members - 136 to 48. That is a huge statistic to recruit new industry members. However, we seem to be missing the constructor boat. I can't think of many contractors that are members who regularly attend. Statistically, we have a dozen or so members that list their occupation as something like CM, contractor or subcontractor. That's way too small.

Maybe, we've conquered the age diversity, gender diversity & to a certain extent race & religion diversity. Let's target occupational diversity. Call a contractor, developer or CM & invite them to a meeting.

Head Start on Dec

My presidency has been marked by a mad dash to make the "President's Message" shoot out quickly so the newsletter can be sent out before the next meeting. I'm trying to break that by getting a head start this month.

Had a couple of conversations with various people at Region Conference that centered around diversity. One person bemoaned the amount of "gray hair" that attends most of the Region & Institute events. I told her its most likely because its very expensive to travel & younger people have neither the time (away from families) or the money to do it. She wasn't buying. To her, CSI is an aging organization. I pointed out to her that I am Chapter President at 36 & our Board has several members around that same age.

Another presenter of 1 thing or another talked about the diversity in CSI membership & how the richness of our organization grows out of that diversity. We have many types of diversity at work - gender, age (old & young), race, backgrounds (education, trades, skills, areas of our country), type of work we do (design, engineering, building, sales) and religion (our chapter has Catholics, Protestants, Jews).

There's a President's Message there somewhere! I need to keep it down to one page this month!