 recorded and you will be able to access them on the website. So please check them out. They were both really wonderful sessions and we're very excited to share them with you. And now I want to go ahead and I'm going to stop sharing my screen and I'm going to turn it over to Alison Riley who is here from the Getty Foundation. Hi, everyone. Let me make sure I am doing this correctly. Can you see my presentation and does it look correct? Okay, great. So it's so nice to be with you here today. I really enjoyed the presentations, the panel that took place earlier this afternoon. My name is Alison Riley and I'm a program assistant at the Getty Foundation. And I just want to thank AIC and ECPN for hosting me today and hosting the Getty Foundation and for giving me the opportunity to speak to you about the Getty's post-bac conservation internship program. So what is this program? This program aims to diversify the field of conservation by providing financial support and hands-on training to individuals preparing to apply for graduate school and conservation. The program started in 2020 and we're very happy to be welcoming our second cohort this fall. The internship is 12 months long and the interns spend the first half of the internship at the Getty and the second half at another Los Angeles Museum. Interns receive a stipend, tuition reimbursement and professional development funds. They are also paired with experienced conservators who provide mentoring to them throughout the course of the internship. In order to apply to the internship, individuals must meet the following criteria. So they must be a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident eligible to work in the U.S. Permanent residents are non-citizens authorized to live and work in the U.S. on a permanent basis, also known as green card holders. Those with DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival status are also eligible to apply. They must also be a member of a group underrepresented in careers related to conservation, museums and visual arts organizations and they must have completed an undergraduate degree such as a BS, BA or a BFA and they must be committed to a career in conservation and possess a strong desire to attend graduate school to further that goal. And lastly, must be able to demonstrate adeptness in conservation, so having some experience before applying. And like I mentioned before, interns will spend the first six months at the Getty in one of the following departments. At the J. Paul Getty Museum, that would be antiquities, paintings, sculpture and decorative arts or paper conservation and we also have a placement available at the Getty Research Institute. The second six months will take place at one of our partner museums, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Autry Museum of the American West, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, LACMA or the Huntington. And interns receive $30,000 for the year. They also receive $1,000 for relocation, $2,500 for tuition support and $1,000 for professional development and they are eligible to enroll in the Getty's Health Insurance Plan. And so just to give you an idea of what happens during the year, interns are paired with a primary and secondary supervisor at the Getty and also at the second museum that they'll be placed at. They have monthly meetings with an academic advisor who helps them with their application for graduate school and make sure that they're on track with all their prerequisites. They're able to enroll in a prerequisite course at Santa Monica College, which we provide funding for and they are encouraged to choose a professional development event like a conference or workshop to attend and we provide funding for that as well. And if you're interested in applying, you can go to our website to get more information. I'll put it in the chat after the presentation. We will open up the application for the 2022-2023 cycle this fall. We haven't determined the deadline yet. Things have been a little crazier this year because of the situation with the pandemic, but we expect the applications will be due in February 2022. And if you're interested in applying, this is what's required, resume CV, a personal statement, unofficial transcripts and two letters of recommendation. So you can begin preparing those even before the application officially opens. And yeah, I'm happy to answer any questions about the program. Again, my name is Allison Riley. I work at the Getty Foundation and we're really excited to have this program available. And I just want to say thank you to everyone who's presented so far because I've learned a lot about what's happening in the field. So thank you. Great. Thank you so much, Allison. That was really wonderful. All right. So I'm going to share my screen again. Okay. So who and what is ECPN? Well, ECPN is a forum and a network. AIC members who are entering the field of conservation, which includes undergraduate students, pre-program individuals, graduate students, recent graduates, and early career professionals. We advocate on behalf of and support the inclusion of emerging professionals within AIC. We assist AIC in enhancing ways to serve members who are just entering the field of conservation and help members as they transition from student to conservation professional. We recommend and provide educational and professional development opportunities for emerging conservation professionals, foster communication between emerging and experienced conservation professionals. So this year, I want to go ahead and thank all of our current officers. I want to start by thanking our chair, Caitlyn Richardson. She has been just an unbelievable leader through an unprecedented year and I want to thank her. The amount of work that Caitlyn has done, as you will see as we go through this, she has just been such a visionary leader and I'm just so honored to have worked with her and very, very much going to miss her. So thank you, Caitlyn, and thank you to the whole team. I can't wait for you all to hear from them, but this team has done a lot this year with some pretty extraordinary circumstances. So you should all be very proud of everything you've done. On our communications team, we've got Hector Berdecia Hernandez and Leila Sabuni. For outreach, we had Makayla Paulson and Ashley Stanford. Professional education and training was Kara Teter and Annabelle Kamp. Digital platforms was Natalia Swanson and Marie Des Roches. Our AIC board liaison is Molly Gleason and our AIC staff liaison is Caitlyn Lee. And now I'm going to turn it over to our professional education and training officers. Hello, everyone. So to just briefly introduce myself, I'm Kara Teter. I'm one of the professional education and training officers with ECPN. So for our ECPN sub-site on the AIC website, it was launched in August of 2018. And we work periodically throughout the year to update this website. And so here you'll find news from our chair and information about the liaison programs, links to our interviews, series and other programs, as well as information materials and publications. Can we go to the next slide, please? So as one of the professional education and training officers this past year, we've also dedicated a lot of time to updating the education and training interviews section of the website to include a new landing page with sub-pages for each of our different series. So we have sub-pages for pre-programmed internship mentor interviews, specialty groups, international education, and outreach and public scholarship. And I will pass it off to my co-officer. Thank you, Kara. I'm Belly Camp. I use she, her pronouns and I am the co-officer for PET. And like Kara mentioned, we do a lot of interview series. This year, we started a brand new pre-program mentors interview series, which can be found through the sub-site. So this past year, we posted the first two interviews. Actually, the third one got posted today in this series. So those interviews include Ann Downey, Amanda Holden, and Kate Moran. And Kate Moran's was posted today, which was really exciting. Next slide, please. We also continued work on our specialty group interview series this past year. And we wrapped up the architecture specialty group series with four new interviews. Those included Lucy Middleford, Carolyn Dickensheets, Gilda Gross, and Sarah Holder. And we hope that this series might continue with other specialty groups. I'll pass it along. All right, everyone. Hi, my name is Layla Sabuni. I am one of the communications co-officers along with Hector Berdicea Hernandez, who is unable to be here today. So here is another thing from the sub-site that Kiera was mentioning. So from the sub-site, you can also access ECPN's Wiki page under the publications tab. ECPN's contribution to the AIC Wiki is another wonderful resource for ECPs. Every January, the officers work to update and add the ECPN Wiki page. This year, we added new content to the internship and fellowship pages, choosing a specialty page and career growth page. So make sure to check those out. Additional content can be added to the ECPN Wiki at any time. So if there's something you see that needs to be expanded on or updated, please don't hesitate to reach out to any of us to find out more about contributing. And thank you to all of the ECPs who contributed this year. So another major initiative was to increase access to our informational materials. All of our network promotional materials have been digitized, and ECPN, my co-officer, Hector, worked with Puerto Rican liaisons to translate ECPN's most frequently accessed promotional material into Spanish. General ECPN online community and ECPN online liaison communities were launched between August and September of 2018, and these communities provide a space for ECPs to share resources, seek information and recommendations, learn about exciting opportunities in the field, including lectures, fellowship opportunities, and ECPN programming. General ECPN community is open to all the ECPs, including non-AIC members. However, users will have to create an account with AIC so they can post to the community, and let us know if you have any problems accessing the community. And lastly, communications is in charge of social media, and we promote both ECPN and AIC resources across all of our media channels. ECPN established a quarterly download and review of our Facebook group insights from the ECPN Facebook group, which provides analytics on the Facebook group members' demographics and members' engagement with the platform. Communications officers work to identify associated resources to our annual meeting and podcast series. Analytics from the ECPN Facebook page show that the group now has more than 8,000 members with almost daily posts, comments, and reactions, and I believe I'm going to hand it over to digital platforms. Thanks, Laila. My name is Natalia Swanson. I use she her pronouns. I'm the outgoing digital platforms co-officer. This last term I've been working with Marie DeRocher who is unable to join for us. So I'll be sharing some information about the digital content we've been producing. We've all been collectively producing in addition to what you've heard so far. So the webinar series that we produced in the fall was around this growing momentum in the heritage community for collective bargaining or unionizing. So we partnered with the Philadelphia Area Conservation Association or PACA to do a two-part event. The first one was kind of the who, what, why, and how of unionizing. And the second one was really more a panel discussion that looked at the intersection specifically within the preservation and collection care discipline and how unionizing can meet the needs of the field. And if you've listened to the panel discussion that just happened, you'll know that it's one really viable option for us to address some of the inequities in our field. So next slide. So this is a series on social justice that ECPN partnered with the Equity and Inclusion Committee to produce three webinars around the first was around contested monuments and that explore kind of competing values about how we preserve or remove or really what we do with them. The second decolonizing collections and prioritizing community partnerships was held in December and that really examined the need to dismantle problematic and colonizing frameworks of the of our institutions and collections and how community-based partnerships can help us do that. And the third, conservation is not neutral, emotion and bias in our work. It happened just in February and that explored the principle of neutrality in conservation and discussed how bias leads to many different types of inequities and all three of these and the union webinars are all archived. So if you want to see them, if you miss them live, then please check out AIC's YouTube channel. So next, following the three social justice webinars, ECPN organized workshops or about 50 conservators came to in the fall it was creating a sorry in the fall was making the ask developing negotiation tactics in the field of conservation facilitated by Ariel O'Connor and the American Association of University Women AAUW and that was transitioned into a free FAIC self-study and then more recently creating a 21st century ethics framework. I think that that was discussing topics that were raised in the social justice webinar series as prompts to evaluate the conservation ethical framework through a critical lens. And of course, if you've been following the annual meeting, then you know that there is a task force of this very relevant discussion that ECPN is pushing forward. And then I think finally I'm going to tell you about the podcast. Yep. So this season, well, this term we made a second season of the podcast conservators from that and climate change. Marie and I, we're almost done. We have two episodes left of the season and we're really talking about the intersectional nature of sustainability work and not only speaking with heritage conservators but environmental conservators, educators, architects, engineers, community relation, all types of people about what it means to create an equitable, inclusive, empathetic, compassionate, sustainable community. So it's yeah, been wonderful. It's almost done. So check it out wherever you listen to podcast if you want to be part of the conversation. And I think that's it. So I'll pass it on. Thanks, Natalia. It is a great podcast. Y'all should check it out. Hello, everyone. My name is Mikayla and I've been an outreach officer for ECPN for the past two years. And so I'm rotating off this year, as is usual. Ashley, my co-officer is also here somewhere and she'll talk to you in a minute. As you may have heard during the poster session, as the outreach officers, Ashley and I are responsible for the ever expanding liaison program, which is a group of ECPs who volunteer to spend some of their time with us each term to foster a supportive community for themselves and other emerging conservation professionals. There are currently four distinct groups, regional, graduate specialty group and AIC committee and network liaisons. Information about each of these programs and the current liaison in each role can be found on the ECPN sub-site that you've been hearing about under programs. You'll find each liaison's name, contact information for them, and you'll be able to see if any positions are vacant and in need of an enthusiastic volunteer like yourself. Volunteering to be an ECPN liaison is a great way to dip your toes into getting involved with the network and with AIC. All of our liaisons are connected via a separate online community distribution list and have an automatic in when coldly milling each other, if ever necessary, as fellow liaisons. This past term there were 63 emerging conservation professionals who served as liaisons across all four programs and some were co-lieison teams. So you don't have to do this alone if you're interested. Ashley and I would like to sincerely thank all of the liaisons who've served this term and for any term. We would have you stand up if we were all here in person, but please introduce yourself in the chat if you'd like and I'm going to do a little clap reaction. Just thanks for all of your time and effort. If you go to the next slide, Jess, our regional liaisons are spread out all across the country. We've even had a wonderful team of ECPs join us this past term in Puerto Rico, as was mentioned. They're just translating into Spanish, a lot of our resources, which is wonderful. They span the country and experience levels within the field of conservation. Some are early pre-programmers and others are graduated students who've been graduated for a while. We're always looking to expand into new geographic regions, especially those that are underrepresented by robust non-AIC regional groups and or are far away from their nearest ECPN liaison. You don't need to be a graduate student or a recent graduate to be a liaison. So if you or anyone you know who isn't a member of AIC might be interested, please send us to them or them to us and we can talk through what the role might look like for you or for them. With everything going virtual, many liaisons took advantage of the ECPN Zoom Pro account to host virtual events for their regions and groups and sometimes for folks completely out of their normal range. Content for these events ranged from art nights and happy hours to virtual interviews of established conservators and lab tours. There was pumpkin carving, the start of a new mentorship program and interrelated content between ECPN liaisons and regional groups, like the Midwest Regional Conservation Guild and the Philadelphia Area Conservation Association. In addition to some incredible programming hosted in Spanish, our Puerto Rico liaisons have also started translating the ECPN resources as well as other resources like from an AgPIC and ETC that are particularly useful to us. All together this group is an incredibly impressive unit and we are very grateful to them for their time and ingenuity and Ashley can take the next. Hi, my name is Ashley Stanford. I've just completed my first term as outreach officer so I'll be continuing for one more term. For graduate school liaisons, ECPN has established relationships with conservation graduate programs in the US and in Canada, shown here are the nine programs represented by graduate liaisons including both AgPIC and several non-agPIC programs. The graduate liaisons help facilitate the flow of information about their particular graduate program from their perspective to you, their fellow emerging conservators. They are here to help whether you're pre-program or graduate of a different specialty or program. Pre-program students are welcome to contact graduate liaisons with specific questions relating to student life and a student's perspective on the curriculum. Next slide. This past term, Micaela and I began the graduate school liaison highlight series where each month we interviewed one graduate liaison to learn more about the student's insight into the program including the application process, interview tips, student life projects, internships, and other helpful tools and resources. These can be found on the ECPN sub-site under liaison news programs. Next slide. ECPN has also established relationships with all AIC specialty groups, networks, and committees and rely on liaisons to facilitate communication and advocate for the larger ECP community. Specialty groups may request liaison help on specific initiatives like content creation on the wiki or other platforms and presenting ECPN updates at the annual business meetings. This past year Chris Knassen, textile specialty group liaison, and Madeline Meehan, conservators in private practice liaison also hosted virtual lab tours with their respective specialty groups. The specialty group liaisons are a great resource for early stage ECPs to learn more about the ins and outs of that particular area of study. Like the graduate liaison highlight series throughout 2018 through 2020, outreach officers conducted interview series with the specialty group liaisons which can also be found on the ECPN sub-site liaison news page. You can learn how they choose to pursue their specialization, important skills for each discipline, favorite treatment projects, and advice on entering the profession and specialization. Thank you. My name is Caitlin Richardson and I'm the current and outgoing chair. I'm going to be talking a little bit about the other aspects that ECPN has been up to throughout the term. The first being AIC News. ECPN was invited to write the lead article for AIC News, volume 46, number two. After a tumultuous year, ECPN officers asked emerging conservators and professionals to reflect on the field and the challenges they face. Emerging conservators discussed the challenge of pursuing conservation in a pandemic. The field's response to social justice movements in the United States, issues with diversity, equity, and access, as well as compensation. ECPN also has two different mentorship programs. The first being the ECPN HBCU or Historically Black College and Universities Mentorship Program. The goal of this mentorship has been to provide students of HBCU's access to mentors in the field of conservation through AIC's Emerging Conservation Professionals Network. The third iteration of this mentorship program launched with two mentor mentee pairs, plus a dedicated Google site to support the program. Based on participant feedback, this year the mentorship program was reorganized with the aim to improve the mentor mentee relationships and emphasize soft mentoring. The mentorship will be adjusted once more for the 2021 term with the creation of a central hub for current and past participants of the DIPC program to connect with each other and conservation mentors. ECPN will still facilitate the one-on-one matches when requested by mentees. ECPN also has a mentorship program which partners with conservators in private practice. In the 2018-2019 term, we created a pilot mentorship program. The goal of this program is to facilitate productive relationships between emerging conservators and more established conservators in private practice. During this pilot program, eight pairs of established private practice conservators and individuals starting or planning to start a private practice rematch. Formal mentorship period began from January to September of 2019. Although the mentorship program was largely a success and we had hoped to hold an expanded program in 2020, with respect to the difficulties and time constraints that COVID-19 placed on our community, especially those in private practice, the mentorship program was placed on hold this past year. But we're really happy and excited to announce that this mentorship program will be returning for the 2021 and 2022 term. Be sure to look out for application information during the summer of 2021. There are a bunch of ways to get involved with all of us in the emerging conservation professionals network. This list is pretty thorough, includes interacting with our posts on social media, adding ECPN as an interest on your AIC profile, encouraging ECPs who aren't members of AIC to make free accounts to join ECPN on the website, connect with the outreach officers, Ashley and I, to learn more about and get involved with the liaison program, contribute to the ECPN wiki pages, both content and edits, watch ECPN webinars, listen to the podcast on our YouTube channel. There's so much content out there, it can be overwhelming, but it's up to you for where you want to start. Each officer is also a font of knowledge and reaching out to one of us directly with questions is highly encouraged and you'll get a lot from that. So I think it's now time for some more excitement and we'll announce the newly elected ECPN officers. So for the 2021-2022 term, our rising chair, Jessica Abel, myself, rotating off of outreach and into the vice chair role, our continuing communications officer, Hector Verdecie Hernandez will be joined by Stephanie Gurdera, my co-officer, Ashley Sanford will be joined by Kayla Nurmi in outreach, Kaylee Ferguson, a former liaison, and Laura Bergman are our two new PET officers, and Marie De Rocher will be joined by Maris Westberg, another former liaison on digital platforms. And we also enthusiastically thank our AIC board liaison, Molly Gleason and staff liaison, Kaylee, for their continuing incredible support and investment in ECPN. Thank you so much and let's have a great term. So thank you everyone and now I'm going to turn it over to our AIC board liaison, Molly, who's going to tell us a little bit about the member designation working group. After that, we'll open it up to questions for Molly and all of us officers. So yes, thanks again for being here and Molly, take it away and tell us about MDWG. Thank you. Well, first, I just thought I'd quickly introduce myself. I mean, I'm the board liaison to ECPN and my official title is the AIC board director of professional education. So one of my roles is to be the liaison to ECPN, which means that I help with communications between the board and your network. I'm on the group email list and committee, sorry, community board, and I try to provide support and feedback as much as needed, although you're an incredibly active group. So I have to say very self-sufficient and I can't claim any responsibility for all the amazing work that you've been doing this past year. And I also wanted to note that my first AIC leadership position, volunteer leadership position was as I served for two years as ECPN chair from 2011 to 2013. So I have firsthand experience of being an officer on ECPN. And I want to start before I say anything about MDWG, I just want to thank all of the current ECPN officers for your imaginative, inspiring, and all of the informative work that you've done on your programming this past year. Of course, I think we can say at best it's been a challenging year, but yet you've continued to provide and produce high quality, thoughtful programming and content that responds to the needs of emerging conservation professionals. And this is not content that's only relevant to ECPs, it's relevant to the entire AIC community, to me for sure. Just based on the excellent panel from earlier today, looking at the chat, I noticed how many seasoned professionals were present for that panel, not the panelists, but the attendees of the session. And this is true for all ECPN content. So on behalf of the entire AIC board, I want to extend our thanks and appreciation for all that you do for our members and for this organization. I want to also thank all of the ECPN liaisons and everyone who has participated in any of the programming over this past year. And a special thanks to our outgoing chair, Caitlin Richardson, for your leadership over this past year, and to Jess that's able for your leadership on all of the AIC programming and content this year, the annual meeting programming. So I'm going to try not to take too much time, but I did ask the ECPN officers, if I could say a few words, about the MDWG Membership Designation Working Group proposal. Because in addition to my role as ECPN liaison, I also serve as liaison to the Equity and Inclusion Committee, the Education and Training Committee. And I'm now serving as one of the board liaisons to MDWG. I didn't, I can't again claim any ownership over the content or the proposal itself, but providing feedback and trying to make sure that your communities stay connected to all the people working on that proposal. So as you hopefully noticed, the MDWG has shared their second draft of the proposal with all AIC members, and they're looking for feedback. So there's a link that we can throw up in the chat to that proposal. It's in the AIC member community. And there's a lot of components to this proposal, including the essential competencies, the rubrics, and two proposals for continuing professional development. They're looking for feedback. So please, if you can review this content and provide feedback either through their Google form or directly to the email address that they provided, I also put my email address on the slide in case that is more inviting to anybody. I am happy to pass on information. I'm not really going to get into the nuts and bolts of it. I'm looking at our time. And I'm certainly happy to, if anybody wants me to just say an overview of the main changes that this proposal is contains, I'd be good to do that. But what I guess what I'd like to say is I just wanted to make it to clarify how the process will work. Thank you, Kate, for throwing that link into the chat. So once they get all, once MDWG gets the feedback from members, which they're asking for right now, they'll also have these three listening sessions. Again, I've listed the times and dates on the slide. Once they get all that feedback, they're going to prepare a final proposal that will come to the AIC board. And hopefully later this year, and following board approval, we are going to ask all AIC members to vote on the proposal. MDWG has requested that the board and the board has agreed that we would like to invite all members. So I just want to clarify that, not just professional members and all members, including students and postgraduate members, to vote on that proposal. And then aside from that process, the MDWG proposal, the board is also currently undergoing a review of the bylaws. And any changes to the bylaws, both with our independent review and also for the MDWG proposal, will happen at once to streamline that process. I think that was what I wanted to mention. Again, I could go into any of the significant revisions if anybody would like a little summary of that. But again, I'm just here to encourage you to review the proposal again and all those components and to provide feedback in some form if you have any. You can also throw questions into the chat. I may not always be the best person to answer those questions, but I will try to get answers for you. I also can just listen to any, if anybody has any comments or concerns now or later, I'm happy to just listen to them and again, pass them on. So I think that is it for me. Thanks, Kate. Yes. Kate is always the best and always providing all the support that we need. And she's throwing all this important information into the chat. So thank you. So, Michaela, I'm going to pass it back to you unless anybody would like to unmute themselves or ask a question in the chat. And again, happy to field those. Sorry, Michaela. Yeah, I just had a question about, do you know what the likelihood is that the board will be revising the bylaws to allow student and postgraduate members to vote on elections and have, yeah, just equal voting opportunities? Do you know the likelihood of that being voted on? Thanks. Sure. Thank you for that question, Natalia. I am going to have to go back over our latest, like, document that we've been commenting on because there's nothing that's been formally proposed. We've been discussing this as a board. But one of the things we're trying to do with the bylaws revisions is address things like that, and I'm taking note of that specific question, and I hear you. But what we're trying to do is to try to eliminate language in the bylaws that's exclusionary in various areas, including service to the organization, and try to identify where that exists and why it's there and do we really want that there? And so that's a really great example of something that we are discussing. And I can follow up with you two. And I think once we once we get closer to kind of having something a little bit more concrete, there might, I think a lot of these things are going to be welcomed by the members. They're not going to be, I would hope that they're not going to be too controversial because it's going to be more inclusive in general. So that's kind of like a vague answer. But I definitely that is one of the issues that we have discussed. Yeah. Thank you. I'm going to stop sharing my screen. And I haven't been able to monitor the chat. So if there are other questions, I don't want to jump in on top of those or ahead of those. But selfishly, Molly, I would really love if you gave a quick summary of the things that are changing that are that would be important for ECPs. Okay, I'll just look at my notes because honestly, it is a lot. I totally it's a lot. And I understand why it's hard to stay engaged because not only is it a lot, but then it's changed because of all the feedback that they've got that the MDWG has gotten. So so I mean, right, why does this matter to the ECP community? Because this is not the proposal is not supposed to be setting our organization up for a rigid system that can never be changed, you know, over the course of the next couple of decades, that's not the point. The point is to provide some more transparency for how our professional member categories are currently, we have professional associate and fellow as the professional member categories. And right now, it's very, I think it's pretty straightforward for people with a traditional path, meaning, you know, people with a graduate degree, and to apply and to be vetted, you know, in that in the current system. If you have a different kind of degree, if you have a different kind of, if you don't have a graduate degree, and if you are not a conservator, so maybe you work in collections care, but you want to be recognized as a professional member. It's not, we don't have great rubrics right now to evaluate those applications. So one of the goals for the MDWG was to create more specific rubrics and that also involved evaluating the essential competencies again, to expand that to collections care professionals and conservation scientists. So one of the biggest changes is changing professional associate to professional member and then requiring CPD continuing professional development to maintain a professional member status. I have been paying attention as much as I can to the annual meeting presentations and the chat. And people are here who have presented and I've been so appreciative to hear those perspectives. And so has MDWG about even the topic of having professional member categories. So but the charge of MDWG was to evaluate the current system and to come up with a system that's more inclusive, equitable, transparent. So the I'm trying to think of like you asked me what's relevant to UCPs. So I would say that that professional member category and the continuing professional development requirements and system are very relevant. And in fact just today, like hot off the presses, we've been communicating with the content, sorry, with the CPD subgroup of MDWG to talk about in fact having kind of like a test group inviting people who would like to test the current CPD models to see how could I achieve this like because perhaps it would be difficult for people who work in private practice for instance, or to achieve a certain number of CPD credits within a five year period. So I believe that a lot of the concerns have been addressed in the latest proposal. So I will invite you again to look at that proposal and to again provide more feedback in a system that's supportive of professional development but not something that's burdensome or that would have to be costly and that could be, you know, attained by people who work in many different settings. But we'd like to also get people who work in many different settings at many different career stages to test the system for us. So we're creating a way to do that simply and over the course of maybe the next month or two and that I think will be helpful for the MDWG and also for people who test it to kind of get a better sense of like what does this actually mean. So I'm looking at all of you as potential testers when that becomes possible and this hasn't even been announced in the community but I do think that it's something that we are going to do. I mean again it's I think we will probably be posting something very shortly within the next day or two about the intention to do something to like provide a test system. So let's see I'm going to stop there and if you have other questions I'd be I'd love to hear them. Natalia asks can you confirm that the two-year post graduate wait time is being removed and this latest proposal? I'm actually looking at Kate because and I have to pull it up I can't confirm that without looking at it to be honest with you because I have to my understanding is that two years of experience work experience are required but it does not dictate when the work experience needs to happen meaning that pre-program work could be counted toward that total. So it effectively does that but it does not essentially stipulate that. Deborah I noticed you just turned your camera on. I did. Yes just that's correct I forget the exact wording too but it's it is not required to be after graduate school recognizing that many people can come into graduate training having already had some fairly responsible work time. Deborah I'm so glad you're here I didn't see you here and so Deborah is one of the MDWD co-chairs if I had seen you I'm sorry I would have just said. No I'm you did a great job and I just jumped in now because I knew I could answer that question. Great thank you. Thank you Deborah that's really exciting to hear. I have a question um is this sort of modeled on how other professional organizations like AIA for example do continuing education I mean I know their certification is much more intense but is there are you taking inspiration from a different professional organization? I can say we looked at those and we also looked at our members and what our membership we've had several rounds of feedback about this um so you already pointed out one important thing is that AIA and other organizations have certification which for which you have strictly required CPD and they even sometimes call it continuing professional education which we changed that because it's not strictly education um and we what we also heard a lot from people is that including people within MDWG that it may not be possible for me to go to a workshop I run a private practice etc etc or I'm in an isolated area so the list of opportunities that are proposed is very broad and what I love is that it's divided into three categories and it's encouraging people to do activities in all three categories so one would be teaching and dissemination one would be learning you know which can be any number of things including self-study for something you're passionate about or need for some specific project and the third is outreach and service so all of all of those of you who are ECPN folks you've got a CPD right there that's a really wonderful thing to be doing. This is great because I am not practiced and really talking about the plan a lot I've participated in a lot of the conversation so this is this is great Jess I just saw that you unmuted yourself. Oh I was just going to thank both you and Deborah for coming in talking about this I think it is really important and it is very dense and as you've mentioned there have been multiple rounds of feedback and I think people can get a little lost in that but I think it's really important for us and I appreciate both of you spending some time on it with us today so I was just going to open it up to see if there are questions about ECPN in general I'm looking in the chat I don't see anything right now but if there are you know we're all here to answer them and if not we can transition into a social hour so I guess I'll just leave it open for a minute and we'll see if anything comes in and then we can move on to just more casual social time. I'll just point out to Kate just reposted the link for the MDWG documents and also put up earlier the link to the recording of the business meeting from Friday where Nancy Pollock and I did a little presentation on this where we tried to summarize everything so I have a question for the well like I mean since I haven't been fully injected into the board yet but in your discussions have you talked about or reflected on how you know the ECPN community can keep sort of go back to meet each other in person and enjoying you know physical spaces together but also keep the virtual connectivity going after you know we all move you know move on past pandemic lifestyles. I think that's a really great question and I'm going to deflect it to outreach um and oh Galen wait you had your no it's just gonna do the same thing yes yes 100 yes I think it's really important it's the same kind of conversation of having a virtual component be involved with the annual meeting uh things because we know you know as you saw from that map there's like a really large swath of the country that's missing in terms of representation and having uh virtual events I think from some of our liaisons this year really brought people who either don't have access to cars or just don't have a liaison in their region or are like the only one of two or three emerging pre-programmed students um yes mm-hmm we're keeping the zoom pro account as far as I know for the rest of eternity thanks Kate and um and yeah we're gonna encourage I think moving forward we've written it into the like toolkit for the outreach officers that that exists and that encouraging liaisons to use it is a great idea because you can always have it up to stream people in and involve them in things that they can't be there physically for and I think other initiatives and planning opportunities done by other uh board ECP and board members will also make use of that function because yeah getting together in person makes a happy hour a little bit less awkward but um panelist events and things like that can really easily be done and we've gotten kind of good at it I think so as long as y'all keep showing up we'll keep doing them and I will say that a lot of our programming and I'll let um digital platforms talk about this if they want to but a lot of our programming if not all of it is um usually available online outside of the AIC community and our hope is that this meeting and the panel that we just did will be able to be released once the meeting is over on our YouTube page so that it is accessible without having to be a member of AIC so um I think that's always been a really great thing that ECPN has been able to do is sort of operate in and outside of AIC. I don't have a question I just want to think um all of the ECPN officers for a great term it's been really amazing getting to work with you and I want to congratulate all the new officers that I see on this um virtual happy hour um I want to particularly thank Jess, Kate, and Molly for all of their hard hard work and making everything that ECPN does possible. I was going to say I'll flip that around just since I have captive audience to say thank you to ECPN uh I am a liaison to a number of groups within the organization and um with the risk of sounding biased ECPN is one of my favorites because of the incredible thought and programming that ECPN creates do in no small part obviously to the leadership of all of its officers but a special thanks to Caitlin for her incredible hard work over the past two years as vice chair and chair so definitely a virtual round of applause and obviously thanks to Jess for organizing some really incredible programing at this meeting in addition to being incredibly involved with the meeting overall as well as Mikayla so big support to all of our officers who've gotten further involved in AIC I think it really speaks to how involvement with ECPN can lead to deeper involvement with AIC as an organization but certainly within the field meeting colleagues networking I've been thrilled to see a number of ECPN officers now go on to really incredible positions and really incredible volunteer leadership so it is truly my honor to work with all of you and I'm looking forward as always to the next ECPN term as well. Thanks Kate um I'm gonna read we did have a question come in so I'm gonna read it and anybody feel free to jump in um if you are interested in maybe becoming an AIC member but are in the post baccalaureate slash pre-program area are you a student question mark or associate question mark um that's the first question so I well I can answer that um you at this point sorry you fall into the um wait let me reread that but are in the post baccalaureate slash pre-program area are you a student I mean I think that the answer is if you're in school if you're enrolled in a university whether at the pre-program or bachelor versus master's level that we consider that to be a student um and associate as it stands right now is what we were talking about a minute ago with the working group something that you can apply for and that no no okay just why did anybody let me answer you you seem so confident ready to answer I was like okay she's got this well I was going to the the fact that it's going away yeah Alison I know exactly what you mean that's part of the reason why we're considering the change of term to professional member is that we have the membership categories we currently have associate is considered the base level of membership which is very confusing when compared to professional associate um this is definitely a situation in which I believe you would still fall into the student category especially if you are in a pre-program area where you were actively attempting to get into grad school or pursuing further education especially in conservation that's definitely something where I think student is still absolutely the correct category for you associate is really for even after you have graduated there's even a postgraduate level of membership that is for the years or so after you've graduated from grad school so we have a lot of options and additionally if you're having questions about what membership level is right for you or potentially you know concerns about how do I pay my membership dues please contact our membership team I put the email in earlier in reference to MDWG which is certainly where you can reach them but if you email membership at cultural heritage org you can speak with any member of our membership team especially our membership manager Ryan Winfield he is always happy to discuss what is right for you how would we make this work for you um and Caitlin has posted some a really great answer about the benefit of being a member versus just using ECPN resources and I would say obviously ECPN does a great job of trying to reach as many people as possible with the knowledge that a lot of people who may be interested in joining ECPN aren't necessarily ready to commit to the field at all let alone to the level of feeling like they belong in a professional membership that being said I absolutely do encourage membership as a way to get better access to scholarly journals to a number of member benefits and it's a great way to begin to network with people have access to professional spaces and potentially further your career in that direction so and as always feel free to reach out to the membership team I'll drop that email in the chat again um to help kind of walk you through that process we do have a membership benefits page and I'll link to that in the chat as well um but hopefully that helps answer that question a little bit great thank you Kate for clarifying um and I that's all the questions that we have for now wait wait more okay will time constrained membership categories like postgrad be changed to reflect the fact that oftentimes a postgrad fellow will not find a permanent job in one year and need an additional year in this category forgive me if this is already possible it was unclear to me when reviewing it's typically a situation where it has been a year in the past but I think this is a great question to bring up to our membership team we've noticed obviously a huge surge in student memberships over the past few years it's been something that we've noted as a membership trend which we think is great and it's really showing that there's a lot of dedication within the student community to engaging with AIC as an organization but I think this is definitely and Molly this is also a conversation that I think would obviously end up going to not just our membership team but the board to consider but I think that's a really great point and I think it's important for us to be considering the shifting landscape of the field as we look at our membership categories not just in terms of professional membership but also in terms of our dues and it's those kinds of things that aren't specific in the bylaws that have like there's we're able to more nimbly make changes whereas things that are in the bylaws require a vote a member vote and and actually like we have to hire you know we we can't just do that every year so there's a cost associated and it actually doesn't look good for organizations between changing their bylaws so frequently so there's lots of reasons why we are being strategic about any bylaws changes again that's unrelated to the postgraduate thing I just wanted to mention that that membership category doesn't exist in the bylaws and I'll leave that oh sorry Malia I cut you off I was just going to also say you noted that it was kind of unclear to you when renewing definitely reach out if you are noticing anything about your dues orders dues orders the way they have to work through our database is funky to begin with so sometimes like if you need to make changes in what specialties you're involved with or if you're seeing something strange about your order or even just have questions about if that's the right membership category for you please always reach out it's so much easier to fix that on the front end than kind of where you like pay that and then be like well I don't know if that was really right or like we have a conversation later it's like oh you should be a student member of like that's a lot more work to kind of go and try to go back and fix it after the fact so when you get that invoice or when you get that renewal email always feel free to reach out right from then all right well it is just past six o'clock so without any more questions I want to say thank you to everyone and I think do we have time for breakout rooms maybe 10 or 15 minutes if anybody wants to stick around we can do smaller breakout rooms for the next 10 or 15 minutes give everyone a chance to talk in a more intimate environment than just this big zoom um so again thank you all for coming and um hopefully we'll see you in person next year thanks all and thank you again to Allison uh Riley who spoke to us from the Getty Foundation and thank you to the Getty for supporting all of the programming you've seen today if you've been with us the whole time truly appreciated