The AAUW National con­ven­tion held June 16–19 in Wash­ing­ton, DC was an ener­giz­ing expe­ri­ence! Com­par­ing this con­ven­tion with the national one I attended in 2005, also in Wash­ing­ton, DC, has me armed with con­sid­er­ably more infor­ma­tion than I pre­vi­ously received. With the new “one mem­ber, one vote”, both elec­tronic and paper bal­lot­ing began before the con­ven­tion for elect­ing AAUW Board of Direc­tors, pro­posed bylaws amend­ments and pro­posed changes to the Pub­lic Pol­icy Pro­gram. The elec­tion results were announced at Saturday’s lun­cheon, with Car­olyn Gar­fein (GA) re-elected as Pres­i­dent and Patri­cia Ho (MA) elected Vice-President. Those who attended the State Con­ven­tion in April will recall Patri­cia Ho was our Direc­tor at Large rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the AAUW National Board. You can view other elec­tion results at the AAUW web­site. The major change I noted between the 2005 con­ven­tion and the 2011 con­ven­tion was that there were more panel dis­cus­sions on major top­i­cal issues as well as more work­shops and spe­cial inter­est group meet­ings. Because legal require­ments for notice of busi­ness pre­clude amend­ments and vot­ing from the floor at con­ven­tion, no time is now taken up with issues that could pro­duce much time-consuming debate over word­ing, amend­ments, etc.

There were ten of us there from Geor­gia but since Pres­i­dent Car­olyn Gar­fein and Board of Direc­tor Mar­cia Capri­otti had some offi­cial duties to attend to, the remain­ing 8 of us tried to sit together as a group for meals and panel dis­cus­sions. This allowed us to share ideas to take to our respec­tive Branches and fur­ther dis­cus­sion on top­ics such as AAUW Pub­lic Pol­icy, Safe Schools: Bul­ly­ing and Sex­ual Harass­ment, Why So Few? In STEM, and Women and Men in the 21^st Cen­tury Work­place. Since there were many oppor­tu­ni­ties to attend work­shops and brief­ings on a wide range of top­ics, the Geor­gia atten­dees tried to split up to gather as much infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble. Some of the top­ics were Shar­ing suc­cess­ful recruit­ment reten­tion sto­ries, Branch fundrais­ing, Mission-based pro­gram­ming, College/university part­ners, and Social media.

Attend­ing a national con­ven­tion with 800 atten­dees is a great expe­ri­ence. I would strongly encour­age every­one to con­sider it in the future. The next AAUW National Con­ven­tion will be June 9–12, 2013 in New Orleans. Hope to see you there!

Lau­rie Shaw, Co-President

Geor­gia mem­bers who attended were:

Car­olyn Gar­fein              North Ful­ton Branch       re-elected AAUW National President

Mar­cia Capri­otti             Cobb County Branch      out­go­ing GA AAUW Co-President

Deb­o­rah Kar­vey             Cobb County Branch      con­tin­u­ing GA AAUW Co-President

Lau­rie Shaw                  Hous­ton Peach Branch   incom­ing GA AAUW Co-President

Sharon Bevis-Hoover      Atlanta Branch               incom­ing pres­i­dent elect Atlanta

Patri­cia DeWitt              Rome Branch                past GA AAUW President

Eve­lyn Merk                  Hous­ton Peach Branch   State By Laws Chair

Karen Peters                 Cobb County Branch      Incom­ing Cobb County Branch President

Bar­bara Stid­fole             Cobb County Branch      Branch Member

Sue Lawrence                National Member-Athens, GA