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    Letter from the AFTNC President

    June 12, 2018
    June 10, 2018
    AFTNC President, Dr. Sheila Addison
    Dear members,
    First, I want to welcome the new members who have joined us this spring during our spring membership drive and our recent training events.  We are glad to have new folks join us!
    As a reminder, many long-time members have not renewed their membership in some time. With the transition to our new website this past winter, accounts for the AFTNC site have needed to be re-created.  If you do not have a login that works here, then you may not have kept your membership current.  Please consider re-activating your membership at this page, which will allow you to join either through October 1 of this year (our annual membership renewal date), or, at a discounted rate, through October of 2019, meaning no renewal for 16 months!
    Second, please be aware that we are now sharing information through a variety of channels.  Our listserv, which is hosted by Google Groups, is a list where we can all communicate with one another.
    We also have our regular announcements of upcoming events posted via our mailing list, which is hosted at MailChimp. If you haven’t seen one of our beautiful, full-color updates, please make sure that president@aftnc.org is whitelisted in your mail client, and that you or your provider are not blocking emails sent from mailchimp.com. Only about 40-50% of members opened our last several announcements – are you missing out?
    We are also now using Facebook as a way to grow our audience. You can “like” us on Facebook and we will certainly welcome “likes” and “shares” of our events as we post them.  We have invested a little in Facebook advertising for some of our recent events, and are seeing if this helps us grow.  You can also share things to the Facebook page or comment on posts.
    So:  the listserv is a place for us to talk amongst the membership with one another.  Our mailing list is a place for you to receive information from us directly.  Our Facebook page is a place where you can like, share, and discuss our events, or share posts of your own.
    With the re-design of our website, we did include a discussion board/forum (you must be logged in to access that page). Right now it is in its infancy. One suggestion has been that we use the listserv only for referral requests and resource postings, and take discussions to the website forum. While I would like to encourage posts and discussion there, I am keenly aware that people are more and more gravitating toward having their conversations centralized in one place and I don’t want people to feel like there are too many places to keep track of.
    If someone is interested in trying to make the board active, I would gladly appoint a chair of Outreach and Communication and give them free reign to do so.  I am currently focusing on planning, advertising, and executing events to get interest in our group going again and do not have the bandwidth.
    —-
    Third, the issue of posts to the listserv have recently come up as a subject for debate. I apologize for taking some days to reflect and compose a response, but I wanted to be thoughtful and responsive to all involved.
    There are several concerns here to be balanced:
    1) Providing opportunities for all of us to expand and deepen our skills, grow our practices, and promote the field of couple and family therapy
    2) Keeping us connected to one another and engaged with one another’s work
    3) Making the email that people receive manageable and relevant
    4) Keeping posts appropriate and collegial

    Concern 1: Providing opportunities.  AFTNC used to be in the business of providing many of these opportunities. Since the recession, like many small professional groups we have lost members and momentum, and our training calendar dwindled to nothing.  We are working to revive this, which is why you are now receiving regular invitations to upcoming events.

    In the meantime, people have continued to build their own networking and training opportunities outside AFTNC. Many of these combine individual and systemic frameworks, and individualistic and systemic practitioners, in part no doubt due to the history of merging the two into one MFT license in California.  While I want AFTNC to maintain its identity as a strong advocate for systemic, conjoint therapy work, the reality is that many of us have connections in multiple “worlds” and find that they all have something to offer.  Few of us have the privilege of insisting on an exclusively “classic MFT” focus for our teaching, clinical work, or networking.

    This connects to Concern 2:  Keeping us connected.  AFTNC is, among other things, a place for like-minded practitioners to meet and support one another.  The loss of regular training opportunities has also meant a loss of regular community-building.  We are hoping that more regular events can once again provide some of the “face time” that I imagine many people miss, but online discussion is another way to help us bridge the inevitable divides of scheduling and geography (Even CAMFT doesn’t try to unite the whole Bay Area in its interest groups, but we persist!)

    While I can’t speak to what opportunities there were for online connection in the past, in the decade-plus I have been in the Bay Area, I have seen relatively little traffic on our mailing list.  The newsletter has been on permanent hiatus for lack of volunteers to compose and compile it. As I mentioned above, we built a forum into our website, but it needs investment from members if people want to make it worth a regular visit.  In the meantime, we have this list where we can share our activities with one another, ask questions, and offer resources, so we know we are not working alone.

    Concern 3:  Managing email. Many of us, myself included, are members of multiple organizations and many mailing lists. A nice feature of Google Groups is that you can choose to receive “digests” – either a daily summary of all posts to the list, with links so you can read more, or a summary every 25 posts or so.  We are a fairly low-traffic group usually, so I don’t recommend the latter.  But if you want to put yourself on “digest,” go to http://groups.google.com, click on “My Groups,” and find “AFTNC” near the top.  At the right you should see a drop-down box that may say “Every new message.” Click on it, and choose “Send daily summaries.” You can also choose “Don’t send email updates” if you want no mail at all, but still be able to check group posts if you go to Google Groups.  If you want to unsubscribe, choose “Leave this group” all the way to the right.  We will miss you if you go.

    That said, I agree it is important to have a framework for the mailing list.  Since joining the Board some years ago, and assuming the President-Elect role in 2015, I have not encountered the policy Robert-Jay referred to in his most recent email.  I have never been a part of a Board meeting where a mailing list policy was discussed. Perhaps it is part of the institutional knowledge that has been lost as longer-time members have drifted away.  One step I have been taking during my Presidency is an effort to reduce that knowledge loss by documenting meetings in notes held in a joint Dropbox or Google Drive, and consolidating info on the “inner workings” of the organization in documentation that can be passed on as well.  Currently, we have no President-Elect for me to pass that knowledge on to, a problem we will return to in future communications.
    Many Facebook groups and mailing lists have adopted guidelines limiting promotional postings to a particular day, often a “Marketing Monday.”  Going forward, I will ask that posts promoting events or trainings be limited to Mondays.  (This may be more incentive for members to switch to “digest mode” since Mondays may have a flurry of individual posts.)  I will also reserve the right to ask members privately to limit their posting frequency, or to not post advertisements that are completely unrelated to the field of couple and family therapy.  Consider, though, that as systemic practitioners, we out of everyone should recognize that no individual is an island, and no couple or family is without its individuals.  Though a training on “working with Muslim clients” (for example) may not explicitly reference couples or families, hopefully it is is clear to our membership how this might be valuable in our systemic work.
    At the same time, I would like to invite members to use this tool MORE – to post clinical questions and curiosities (de-identified, obviously), to share items of interest related to couples and families, and to connect with one another for referrals and consultation.  Right now we are a far-flung, disengaged “family” with very little culture holding us together.

    Concern 4: How we relate. On the one hand, as a believer in person-to-person relationships and the value of avoiding triangulation and secrets, I welcome discussion out in the open.

    On the other hand, I see the irony in creating a lengthy email thread that began as a concern about email volume.

    In the future, I would ask that if you are concerned about a post to the mailing list, please reach out to me directly, or to AFTNC in general.  My personal address is below.  From here on out, president@aftnc.com should reach someone, if not me once I am out of office.  help@aftnc.com should always go to multiple Board members.  I will be glad to talk with you back-channel, and if needed, clarify policies with the poster.

    I would also like for our list to be a place where we treat one another like family, although I know that per Whitaker, we are all scapegoats sent out to battle for our own family’s culture, and I certainly don’t want to replicate the way MY family talked to one another.  My preference would be for us to approach one another with curiosity and friendliness, with a “gentleness model” of relationship perhaps reminiscent of Gottman’s findings on successful marriages.

    I welcome any comments or questions, private or public, in response.

    Look for upcoming announcements from me of more events, and solicitation for interest in offering your own expertise to the membership!

    Dr. Sheila Addison, LMFT
    AFTNC President, 2017-2019

    Filed Under: Uncategorized

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