October has arrived and so has the 2016-2017 ASID Board. I am honored to be serving as your President for this calendar year. It will be a challenge to live up to the job that our former President, Portia Bundy, has done, but one that I look forward to. We are sad that Portia’s time on the Board is over for the time being, but we know that she will continue to stay close and involved in our efforts. Thank you, Portia, for being a great leader!
Our first official Board meeting is on October 18th and we are welcoming three completely new Board members: Anna Matejczuk, as the ASID New Mexico At-Large Director, Larry Wilson at ASID Membership, and Sheryl Johnson as our Chapter’s Student Representative. I am very pleased to have Judy Romero stepping into the President-Elect position and am looking forward to having her beside me in the coming year. Marisa Saavedra-Gutierrez has moved into the Communications position and has already been hard at work keeping our website up to date and making sure we are keeping our membership informed of upcoming events and CEU’s, etc. Elizabeth Liming will continue this term as Director of Professional Development, and has been doing a fantastic job chairing the New MexiCon event! Linda Armstrong will continue to keep our chapter on target and on budget as Director of Finance.
The 2016-17 Board has as its focus for the coming year, the task of building up our membership by continuing to make an effort to have an open line of communication with our membership. We are striving to bring new and interesting events and CEU’s to all of you. Please go to www.nmasid.com to see what we have planned for the coming year. You can also find contact information for your ASID New Mexico Board members there. We welcome your input and look forward to hearing any ideas you may have to help make our chapter more successful and to build our membership.
As many of you know, we had our inaugural New MexiCon Designer Trade Show this past June 3rd. It was a great success and we had tremendously positive feedback from both our membership, the NKBA membership and from the vendors that attended. Elizabeth Liming along with members of the NKBA Board have been diligently putting together the 2017 line-up of CEU’s for the New MexiCon event and we will be sharing information about the 2017 event very soon.
New MexiCon was, and will continue to be, a direct method of bridging an ongoing partnership with NKBA. We hope that it will also help us to create useful and mutually beneficial relationships with AIA, IIDA and HBA in order to further enrich ASID’s value to our membership. We also have been working on building and strengthening relationships with our Industry Partners. They are valuable resources for all of us, and we will continue to promote them and to include them in our events.
On other business, an important matter has arisen in the last few weeks. Recently, many of you may have seen a call to action in your email in regards to a very troubling issue for the Licensed Interior Designers in the State of New Mexico. On Thursday 9/22, we were notified that we are in jeopardy of losing our State Board for Interior Design, along with several other Boards, likely due to major budget cuts. Steffany Hollingsworth, one of our esteemed ASID members, jumped into action and contacted Jim Brewer, VP of Government & Public Affairs at ASID national to enlist his help. On 9/27, Connie Hines, President of the State Board of Interior Design, was granted sixty seconds to speak at the Sunset Review hearing to plead our case. In spite of a valiant effort by Connie Hines, the information that we gained from the hearing was that we only have 66 licensed interior designers and that does not make for a self-sustaining board. With Jim Brewer’s help we hope to continue to make efforts to save our Licensing Board and we will keep you all updated on what is happening with this issue.
I am very much looking forward to the coming year and to seeing all of our membership at our assorted upcoming ASID events! The Board thanks you all for your continued support!
Sincerely,
Buffy Kline, Professional Member ASID
President, NM Chapter of ASID
president@nm.asid.org
