Happy New Year and welcome to 2019! I wish you all a healthy and prosperous year! According to the Chinese Zodiac Calendar, 2019 is the year of the Pig. The Feng Shui Kua Number of 2019 is 8. For the POA, I am looking at 2019 as a year of leadership. Every great organization needs to prepare its current and future leaders for what lies ahead. Some people are born leaders and some people need to work a little harder to get there. One thing is for sure, there is not a single person among us who couldn’t benefit from some training. The best part of this training is that it will carry forward through all aspects of our lives. This will benefit us in our personal lives, our professional lives, and our philanthropic/volunteer lives.This will be a fantastic year for the POA! I can say this with certainty because of the hard work and dedication of our staff, our Board of Directors, and all our volunteers. I would like to take a moment to thank each of you for what you do for optometry and for this great organization on the local, state, and national levels. Optometry was ranked the 23rd greatest job on the US News and World Report list of 100 Best Jobs of 2018. I am sure most of us agree, there is nothing else we would rather be doing with our lives. For me, optometry is the #1 best job I could ask for, but just in case you were wondering, Software Engineer was #1 according to the report.
As you are aware, in Pennsylvania, our legislative cycle is two years. 2017-2018 was a great cycle for optometry. This was thanks to the hard work of our Legislative Affairs Committee, our Keyperson Committee, our Political Action Committee, our State and National Education Committee, all of our volunteer leaders and, most importantly, our members. It was awesome to see our members unite for our profession and our patients as we mobilized the most effective grassroots campaign this organization has seen in years! Thank you, everyone, and job well done! As we look forward to our next legislative cycle, 2019-2020, we will be exploring children’s vision legislation, scope modification, and more.
We have a few more goals for 2019, including improving communication. I realize this seems like such a simple goal, but our organization is vast. We have so many tasks and projects happening simultaneously. With that, it’s a challenge to keep everyone on the same page. Our goal is to increase communication between our members, our chairs, our Board of Directors, and our staff. And last, as an association, we must answer the challenge that was brought forth in the House of Delegates of May 2018. We need to work together to increase our non-dues revenue. We have created a new committee led by Dr. Scott Edmonds to focus on this issue. I will keep you posted as there are updates.
The Table of Organization has been set for 2019 with a great mix of seasoned and fresh leaders. At the November meeting, our leaders and members had an extremely productive strategic planning session. We created many new action plans and have already started to put them into motion. I promise you that I will do my best to serve this organization as your president. However, as we all know, an organization does not get its strength from its president. An organization gets is strength from its members. We have great members doing great work! I may be biased, but 2019 is going to be a pretty fantastic year!
Thank you,
Lori Gray, O.D.
