SPA workshop on association management and networking among professionals – feel welcome to participate! (26 November, 14:00-17:15)
Having accountable, transparent, and efficient records and archives management is a challenging task. This task is not accomplished by one records professional alone or by one institution or organization alone. This requires many people and many institutions and organizations. And that’s what SPA’s member associations are all about: Bringing archives and records management professionals together to learn, discuss, share, unite and be inspired. Working together gives us the knowledge and self-confidence to take a leadership role in dealing with relevant issues and provide solutions in our modern digital society.
The SPA mission is as follows: To encourage and facilitate communication and knowledge sharing among the member associations and between the ICA organization and association members.
And one of our main objectives for this current term is: Realize growth of member associations in ICA/SPA and strengthen the network.
When we have outlined the initiatives making us able to reach our objectives within the term 2017- 2020, we soon decided that we should have at least one with the focus on Africa because:
We have few member associations from Africa, but there’s no reason to believe that professional networking is any less important there than everywhere else
The Africa Programme is one of three major strategic initiatives for ICA
The conference in 2018 taking place in Cameroon.
Our goal and wish for the SPA workshop in Yaoundé is to have good discussions on how to run an association. It could be for the purpose of reviving an already existing association, to create a new one, or just boost the co-operation of associations – enhance the importance and necessity of exchanging best practice across borders.
SPA has developed several guidelines on association management work, they’re all available under the “professional resources” on the SPA Website. These would be the outline for our topics:
 Establishing a professional association
 Conducting elections
 Organizing conferences
 Organizing regional meetings
 Organizing training workshops and seminar
 Advocacy and lobbying
Let’s talk about it – in Yaoundé, 26 November, 14:00-17:15!