At the outset, I will be charitable and point out from my limited experience as a PSIA/AASI Intermountain Board of Directors member, that the activities of the board are very poorly understood. There are perhaps several contributing factors to this inconvenient truth, but less well understood are the activities of the office staff and a very small group known internally as the IMD Executive Committee.

Quick, can anyone (outside the IMD staff) name the IMD Executive Committee members?

I suggest that the president might be a good (correct) guess on the part of most people; as all of you would (should!) know from the recent e-blast and from the web page, Rich McLaughlin was recently reelected to a second term as president.

The other members of the committee are Kent Lundell (again, as you would know from the recent e-blast, Kent was elected for a second term as the IMD representative on the national board), Mike Thurgood (also recently re-elected by his BOD peers for a second term, with administration responsibilities), and finally, Evan Ricks with responsibilities for communications.

With startling and refreshing honesty Evan recently announced that he would be unable to meet the time and resource commitments that the board and communications positions imposed, and would not run for re-election.

First, we should all offer Evan our sincere congratulations for he has recently been called as a bishop for his church, with continuing responsibilities for his Kelly Canyon domain. Being modest by nature, Evan would be embarrassed by your congratulations. I encourage each of you to embarrass Evan!

Second, we, as members of the IMD community, need to better understand the roles played by our representatives — if you don’t understand something, I encourage you to ask your representative. I will further suggest that the communications role is perhaps one of the least well-understood positions, and Evan deserves our thanks for his considerable efforts (and not inconsiderable patience).

The communications role is in fact a defined role, and it has a job description:
The Communications Vice President shall be a member of the Board of Directors. The Communications Vice President shall be responsible for all publications of the Division.

Unfortunately, the job description runs to two sentences, the communications role expanding not only between the lines, but across several (unwritten) pages! Very few people outside the board of directors (and Evan’s family) would know that Evan took responsibility for the position when the previous incumbent abruptly resigned. He took the responsibility when nobody else would, even as he recognized that his home resort and his experiences with a relatively small group of 15-20 members placed him outside the bulk of the membership, leaving him feeling a little “disconnected” from both the general membership and the IMD Office staff.

But Evan also had to contend with a turnover in the office staff — we lost our resident webmaster and we lost a key mechanism for communication through mailings, the operations calendar, and the web site. Evan persevered, he adapted, and he responded to the very best of his ability. For this we should each be very, very grateful to Evan.

Evan recently confided that during his term if he barely understood the range of the board activities before he became a representative, his role on the executive committee was completely overwhelming at times. Rather generously, and quite typically, he gives credit to the office staff and to his executive committee colleagues for their help and their understanding in what was a very difficult tenure.

I wonder if anyone has any idea just how much time and energy is expended in the communication role in launching a very successful bidivisional Spring Clinic at Sun Valley, Idaho in 2016. It is hard enough just working through the logistics of an IMD Spring Clinic at a local resort!

Evan deserves our sincere thanks for his selfless and incredibly patient efforts. I encourage each of you to reach out to Evan, to deliver your sincere appreciation of all that he did on your behalf, and to wish him the success he deserves in his new role as bishop of his domain.

Charles Rodger is a PSIA/AASI Intermountain board member and new communication V.P., email at us01220@gmail.com.

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