The first President's Academy was held at the Salem Conference Center, October 25-28, 2008. This training opportunity was extrodinary and I feel very blessed to have been a part of it.
The President's were asked to pick two trainings to attend during the second and third days of the Academy. These sessions were full day, intense trainings designed to provide as much information as possible to the chapters.
The sessions available to the attendees were:
Chapter Organizing - Attacking Apathy
Collective Bargaining
Communicating with Members
Employee Representation
Political Action
As your president, I chose to attend the "Communicating with Members" and the "Collective Bargaining" sessions. I know you are probably asking yourselves why I chose those two considering that we only have 5 members and communication does not seem to be an issue for our chapter and that we just finished bargaining. First, let me start off by saying that designing a newsletter and website has provided our chapter with an extra means of income. AFT will pay our chapter $20 for everytime we send out a newsletter with an AFT ad in it. They will also pay us $20 per month that our website has an ad in it. This increases our monthly income from $5 per month to potentially $45. This is a great way for us to generate income with little to no cost to our chapter and with very little work needing to be done by our members.
As for the Bargaining session, I was hoping to educate myself so that the next time we head into negotiations I will be more informed and I feel that I did learn new techniques and got some great information.
I want to thank the members of our chapter for allowing me to attend this training. If you have any questions or would like to see the materials from the training, I would be glad to share any and all information I received.