We are excited and honored to serve as Co-chairs of SVP during 2021-22.  We want to thank Scott Solberg for his wonderful service as Chair for the past several years; we also want to thank the members of SVP’s executive board and the Stewards of SVP.  It has not been easy to keep the Society running smoothly during the pandemic but Scott and company have done a fabulous job.

Given the challenges the pandemic continues to pose, and the fact that our co-chairship is only for one year, we have decided to seize on a few modest initiatives. These are aimed at community building, idea sharing, and bringing more students and junior colleagues into the fold. The following initiatives arose (with a few tweaks) from the brainstorming session that occurred at last August’s SVP business meeting:

1. An SVP Webinar Series:  We’d like to have a series of at least 3 webinar-type sessions that could be structured as informal conversations, dialogues, or presentations on selected topics.  The first such webinar took place this past week when Profs. Ruth Fassinger and Barry Chung organized a wonderful tribute to our late, great SVP colleague, Lenore Harmon. 

We are open to your ideas for future webinars. One option would be to have two colleagues each do a 15-minute presentation on a selected topic, followed by a 15-30 minute dialogue with a moderator or a Q&A period with the audience.  Other models are certainly possible. The basic goal would be to have a few live events that would be accessible to as many SVPers as possible, within and outside the US, and that would have both a social and an educational function.  They would also be pretty informal and will, hopefully, help to tie us together through the foreseeable online future.

2. Communication:  We have revived the SVP newsletter as a forum for members to share the exciting things they are up to – newsworthy events, pubs, new projects, etc.  We’d like to get out 3 to 4 newsletters this year. The first installment was sent out this past September. There will be calls for upcoming newsletters, most likely in December, March, and early August.

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3. Member Recruitment:  Finally, we’d like to encourage each SVP member to recruit at least one new member – especially students and early career professionals. Like most professional associations, SVP is greying.  To ensure a healthy future, it’s essential that we welcome into the fold the next generation of vocational psychologists who will keep SVP strong and vital. You don’t need to be a member of APA or Division 17 to join SVP. 

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Please encourage your colleagues and students to join: https://www.div17svp.org/membership  

Please share your thoughts and reactions on any of the above agenda items with us, either back-channel or via the listserv. We’d especially appreciate your suggestions for webinar topics and presenters.

Warm regards,

Bob & Mark
2021-22 SVP Co-Chairs

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Bob Lent, Ph.D.                               Mark Savickas, Ph.D.
University of Maryland                    Northeast Ohio Medical University
College Park, MD                            Rootstown, OH
boblent@umd.edu                          ms@neomed.edu