Our IIDA OH KY Advocacy team attended the 2019 IIDA Advocacy Symposium in Boston in September. We had a great start to the Friday morning with a quick tour of the Boston State House and jumped right in to the amazing programming HQ coordinates for us. Our keynote speaker, Arline Isaacson gave us a tremendous wealth of knowledge to pass on to our local members to really become civically engaged in our communities. Followed by our fearless leader, IIDA Executive Vice President and CEO Cheryl S. Durst, Hon. FIIDA gave us insight to who are, what they do and what legislators want to hear from us.
During our afternoon sessions, we were thrilled to find out and proud to announce that at this years 2019 IIDA Advocate of the year goes to, our very own, OH KY VP of Advocacy Chealyn Jackson! The IIDA Advocacy community was there to congratulate her on a year of many advocacy successes. Chealyn has been working diligently with HQ, our Lobbyist and design community to get our voices heard. She planned and excited a wonderful advocacy workshop for our chapter in May. Congratulations Chealyn! Our chapter is lucky to have you carry on the advocacy torch.
There was a final Q&A session with a few lobbyists from across the states. Our very own Matt Whitehead was there to represent our efforts and inform our fellow design community what has worked and not worked for our advocacy within the state of Ohio.
We hit the ground running early Saturday morning with IIDA’s Director of Strategic Sales, Tracey Thomas. She helped us drill down to the importance of knowing your audience and how each person will react to your message. The afternoon session were vitally important with various panel discussion with other advocacy teams in the different chapters within the different stages of advocacy.
Congratulations again to Chealyn and make sure to reach out to your local advocacy coordinators with any questions you may have.