by Pam Walden, president-elect for IACRAO (Illinois)
What an exciting IACRAO 2016! We were fortunate enough to have two fabulous keynote speakers- AACRAO’s own Executive Director Mike Reilly, and Founder and CEO of the Public Speakers Association, Tonya Hofmann, at our annual meeting, held Oct. 26-28 in Alsip, IL. Mike brought us updates and news from AACRAO and Tonya brought us all out of our comfort zones a bit and encouraged us to “Be Fabulous!” and share our strengths with others. This fit perfectly into our conference theme “Sharing Solutions to Shape the Future.” The conference always has a costume party, and Reilly dressed as “The Dude” and won a trophy for “Most true to character.”
With strapped budgets, sharing solutions becomes increasingly more important as we find ourselves with less time and money. We were also very pleased to have 17 vendors attend our conference. We typically don’t have quite this many so our attendees had a wonderful opportunity to learn about new products and services by not only visiting vendor booths, but also attending conference sessions led by many of these vendors. A tremendous “Thank You!” goes to our conference planning team and our local arrangements team for putting on a very successful event.