How many of you are planning on attending the American Evaluation Association (AEA) conference in Chicago this November? AEA just closed its call for proposals on Monday, March 16. Hopefully, you were able to submit prior to the deadline. Notifications of acceptance will be announced in July. It is a lot of work to review those proposals, schedule those proposals, and make sure that there is a balance of topics and presentation types across the week.

I hope anyone (everyone) interested in program evaluation and all the evaluation permutations (of which there are many) will make an effort to attend. I plan to be there.

AEA is my professional home. The first meeting I attended was in 1981 in Austin, Texas. I was a graduate student; several of us drove from Tucson to Austin.(Let me tell you West Texas is quite an experience; certainly a bucket list opportunity.) That meeting was a combined meeting of the Evaluation Research Society and Evaluation Network. It had about 200 attendees. Quite a difference from meetings experienced in the 21st century. AEA (the name and the organization) became official with the vote of the membership in 1986. Who would have thought that AEA would be the leading evaluation association in the country, possibly in the world? The membership page says that there are members who come from 60 foreign countries. I have met marvelous folks there. I count some of my best friends as AEA members. Certainly the landscape of attendees has changed regularly over the years. For a founding member, that evolution has been interesting to watch. As a board member and as a past-president (among other roles), being part of the organizational change has been exciting. I urge you to attend; I urge you to get involved.

Hope to see you in Chicago in November.

If you haven’t taken the my survey, please do. It is found here.

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