AAAP New Committee Structure
The AAAP Board of Directors proposes a new organization for all of the AAAP Committees.
The change comes from the guidance of a paid consultant during the Strategy Session at the 2023 Fall Board of Directors Meeting. The principal reasons for making these organizational changes are:
- Create major areas of focus to strengthen the partnership between committees and the Board of Directors.
- Realign all committee's goals to match AAAP's vision & mission statements.
- Increase existing member engagement within the committees.
- Encourage new member participation within the committees.
- Improve user experience when navigating to committee pages on the AAAP website.
- Reorganize the responsibilities asked of committee chairs to avoid overtaxing our volunteers
Summary of Changes
- Creation of 4 Overarching Governing Committees for AAAP Inc. The Board of Directors will appoint a chair to manage each division. Suggestions from committee chairs are welcome. The divisions are:
- Membership
- Educational Resources and Outreach
- Food Safety and Animal Welfare
- Infectious Diseases
- Renaming the Auditing Committee to the Financial Auditing Committee
- Renaming the Education Committee to Educational Resources Committee
- Moving the Small Flock Committee to the renamed Educational Resources Committee
- Creation of a Student Engagement Committee
- Moving the AAAP Mentorship, Student Chapters, and SAVMA under the new Student Engagement Committee
- Renaming Toxic, Infectious, Miscellaneous, Emerging (TIME) Committee to Emerging Diseases Committee
- Concluding the Diseases of Public Health Significance Committee due to significant overlap with other committees
Next Steps
Starting now and for the next 30 days, the AAAP Board of Directors would like to hear AAAP member's comments on the proposed changes. All comments will be visible to all members. Comments can be made by scrolling to the bottom of this post, typing your comment in the text box, and clicking the green "post" button.
After the comment period is up, the Board of Directors will view comments from membership and use member feedback to finalize the new AAAP Committee Structure. Upon final approval of the Board of Directors, restructuring will start on January 1st, 2025.
Makes sense to streamline and simplify. Agree with new structure except I feel that the "Therapeutics, Biologics and Bio-Proection" category could be broadly re-named as Disease Control and Prevention and (re-named or not) should be included under poultry infectious diseases.
I support the new proposal, however, I am concerned that the Membership Committee does not have a subcommittee that deals with member engagement. The current Membership Committee has always supported both current AAAP members, as well as student AAAP members, but I feel like this will be lost in the proposed new structure. I would suggest to change the proposed structure to rename the "Student Engagement" subcommittee to "Member and Student Engagement" and then you could include Wellness under that subcommittee. Or, if you want a separate "Student Engagement" subcommittee, you could change the "Wellness" subcommittee to "Member Engagement and Wellness." I think it is important to keep in mind that student engagement, member engagement, and wellness all currently fall under the existing "Membership Committee." So if you create separate subcommittees for any of these topics, you are splitting the current Membership committee and then people will have to attend more meetings if they still want to be involved in all of these activities.
Dr Stayer Food Safety and Animal Welfare are not combined but are organized in the same area.
My apologies for being late to the conversation, but how did Food Safety and Animal Welfare get combined? I am member of both committees, which are both well attended, and each has their own area of concern that do not overlap the other. I do not consider myself reluctant to change, but I don't understand this particular combination. I think the other combinations make sense, just not these two particular vital committees.
I support these changes. This is a "living" structure. If something is not working, we talk about how to best change it.