Spring is in the air! I went for a walk with my dog this morning and was so pleased to hear the sound of birds singing. This time of year always inspires me to get moving both personally and professionally. The construction season will be ramping up any day now and before I know it my walk will turn into a run. It is challenging to keep up with the pace of business today! Everything happens so quickly. It seems that the speed of life causes us to forget about appreciating the little things, like the sound of singing birds.
Appreciation is the theme of this month’s president’s letter. There are so many tasks that happen in our chapter it is easy for us to skim over them sometimes. Two great examples of that are our newsletter and our website. Our website is more current and informational today than it ever has been; you should check it out at www.csi-msp.org. Regarding our newsletter, did you know that it is nationally recognized? Our Communications committee puts forth a significant amount of time and energy putting together our newsletter every month. Diana Nguyen and Bill Enright are the backbone of this effort. I would like to take this opportunity to thank them and let them know we appreciate their efforts. I think it is easy to forget how lucky we are to have so much talent in our chapter because we are surrounded by it all the time. We really have an amazing chapter that offers so much!
Something that happens when you become President is people give you their perspective on our chapter. I welcome the input because I feel like those of us who are really involved sometimes forget that not everyone sees our chapter as “amazing”. For the people that are not as involved, it can be hard to see the benefit of being a chapter member. We print a Members Benefits summary in our award winning roster, it’s on page 12. Not only do we get access to our local information
we get The Construction Specifier and the CSI leader. We also get reduced registration fees for all CSI events and we get reduced registration fees for other complementary local associations like AIA. We get several essential business services as well, like Alliance Partner Discounts. Some examples of that are; BSD Speclink, Arcom Masterspec, and Specware. For complete details, visit www.csinet.org/memberbenefits
In summary, I would say the benefits run a whole lot deeper than that; excellent monthly programs, informative continuing education seminars and so on. But the very best part of our chapter is the people. We have a great bunch of people who are so talented, so committed. They have really made this year fun for me. I hope you will consider getting more involved; the benefit is absolutely there!!
If you have suggestions on how to be involved, please contact me at 612-309-4373.
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