2.2 min readPublished On: March 17, 2015Categories: Leadership

This past March 4 – 6th saw three AIASMC component officers’ first attendance to the annual Grassroots event in Washington D.C.: Chapter President, Eric Holm, Vice President, Margaret Williams, and myself.

Grassroots — for anyone not in the know — is the event where components (state and local Chapters) annually gather to rally about the issues that are most important to the architectural community. This is the time where distillation of all the subjects brought to the table around the year by members on the national and local levels, and the three* most important topics are agreed upon for lobbying by AIA to our representatives on Capitol Hill. This years solidarity subjects were (not in order of importance):

  • Student Debt — AIA wants to provide relief of student debt for architectural graduates, or at least reduce their interest rate of outstanding school loans. One scenario would be offering government-level interest rates, especially in cases where public architecture work is being performed by these new graduates.
  • Historic Preservation — Reinforce the importance and continued funding of historic preservation on the state and national level.
  • Resilience — Pushing for higher, more stringent building code across the nation, citing California as an example.

Although a snow flurry on Thursday, March 5th, inhibited a lot of visits to representatives’ offices, including our San Mateo County Representative Jackie Speier, yet we were able to latch on to San Francisco’s visit to theirs: Nancy Pelosi. After all, the rallying issues were the same, and our sister Chapter to the north is pretty saavy on the visit protocol.

Because Representative Pelosi was also out due to the weather, a young staffer (originally from San Jose, Calif.) met with our two Chapters and took to heart the issues we brought (we’d agreed upon earlier to let San Mateo County talk to the Resilience issue).

Eric Holm, President (AIASMC) and Margaret Williams, Vice President (AIASMC) in Nancy Pelosi's office., March 6, 2015

Eric Holm, President (AIASMC) and Margaret Williams, Vice President (AIASMC) in Nancy Pelosi’s office., March 6, 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leadership and Legislative Conference

Small and large workshops, and several presentations explored the AIA’s agenda and the future of the profession. One of the issues that received a lot of coverage was the ongoing Chapter realignment talk. National is beginning an evalaution scale on how well Chapters deliver services to their members — more to come on that.

Eric Holm, President (AIASMC) and Margaret Williams, Vice President (AIASMC).

Eric and Margaret in workshop mode

We rang the bell, but the Obama's weren't home — or they just weren't answering!

We rang the bell, but the Obama’s weren’t home — or they just weren’t answering!

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