ZHA Leadership Changes and Accomplishments
The Zebrafish Husbandry Association is growing! We are happy to report that our membership numbers have grown by over 60% in the past two years. We’re working hard to provide even more value for your membership, and to elevate the field of zebrafish husbandry worldwide.
To continue our pace, we feel that we need to expand our executive. Currently, we run our non-profit with just five members of our Executive Board. We are all volunteers, and we do our best to complete tasks outside of our “day jobs” but it’s been a tough mission for the current and past board members. In addition, we want to provide additional support to this amazing community as we continue to grow our membership.
For the 2023 election period, we would like to begin restructuring the executive board slightly, with the addition of two additional Board members, to complement our current five. This odd number would help to ensure successful voting on meeting matters, and would help to ensure we can still reach quorum in our monthly meetings.
Here is how our Executive Board structure will look like for 2023:
President: Josh Barber (was elected president-elect for 2022, becomes President the following year)
President-elect: up for election for 2023
Vice President: Joan Hedge
Treasurer: up for election for 2023
Memberships: up for election for 2023
Industry and Association Partnerships: up for election for 2023
Social Media and Outreach: up for election for 2023
This year we have done a lot of work to ensure our non-profit is up to date on paperwork and taxes, and we are working into the next year to further develop our written policies and bylaws, as well as provide better training on non-profit executive governance.
We also continued our Annual T-shirt Design Competition and Fundraiser, the Zebrafish Advancement Fund, the organization of free Monthly Webinars, now with certificates of attendance issued to all attendees, and started hosting the Danio Zoom Friday online meetings. ZHA has also been working hard to introduce our community to many new people in the field. We had representatives at several conferences (WAS, CALAS, FELASA, AALAS) and we are organizing the first ZHA European Meeting, to take place in London, UK with the option of online attendance to ensure that we include a worldwide membership.
We are looking forward to developing new projects in 2023, always keeping in mind ZHA principles of inclusiveness, community engagement, education, collaboration and publication.
We hope that you’ll consider joining the Board this year. It can be a great way to learn more about how a non-profit organization is operated, and you’ll help your colleagues by being part of an amazing resource for zebrafish users everywhere.
Thank you,
The ZHA Executive Board
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