WATERBIRD SOCIETY MEETING 2009, Cape May, NJ

Conservation Committee issues to discuss at annual meeting

THEME:  How to become an operational committee

I. Chair/co-chair briefly summarize the Committee’s stated goals/mission/past work

II.  Discuss structure of the Committee itself

1) Top-down:

a. Chair and co-chair identify issues that might be of interest (this includes ways to support conservation, legislative issues, potential symposia for annual meetings).  They bring them to the attention of committee members and try to find volunteers to work on them.  Additionally they compile ideas brought to their attention by committee members.   

b. Idea: Committee members all submit answers to a questionnaire that expresses their areas of interest (e.g., endangered species, sea level rise ,toxicology, particular taxa), to help chair and co-chair approach potential members to work on issues (this could be done regardless of the committee structure).  The data is compiled and kept by the chair, or perhaps kept on part of the website (maybe not a public part).  Perhaps other data can also be compiled on people’s strengths/interests/experience (e.g., advocacy, fundraising)

2) Sub-committees

a. We form subcommittees/task forces each with its own head (e.g., conservation support, legislative review, conference symposia, Society website liaison, student support, others).  The subcommittee heads actively seek out 1-2 items per year that they might like to work on (can be ongoing/multiyear), to bring to the attention of the chair and co-chair.  Subcommittee heads can recruit likely members to help work on particular projects but need not assemble permanent membership (project could be craft position statements, come up with strategies for supporting specific conservation projects).

b. Chair and co-chair mainly facilitate communication among subcommittees, help prioritize what the whole committee is working on, serve as liaison to Council (e.g., seeking support for subcommittee activities), prepare sub-meeting at Annual Meeting, and report on Committee’s progress at Society Business Meeting.

3) Other ideas for structure from the members themselves?

III. Addressing Goals of the Committee:

a. How do we fulfill our advocacy goal in a way consistent with our mission and limitations due to our tax status?  (e.g., partnering with advocacy groups has been brought up, can individual members write editorials for the journal, letters to editor).  As noted above do we want a task group for this?  

b. How do we fulfill our goal of providing support to conservation activities, e.g. funding projects or supporting an award, disseminating information to managers? 

c. How do we best recruit students and support  young scientists?  Do we farm out some of this to the Student Award Committee?  Try to shepherd students through publication process in Waterbirds? Give award (not necessarily monetary) to best student paper in the Journal?

d. If we don’t have enough resources/people to commit to all our goals now, should we prioritize and set realistic short-term goals, do we want to go through a prioritization exercise at this year’s meeting?