OK, we know that occupational health and safety is not always one of the nicest or more interesting things to talk about at a dinner party. And no, I am not here to suggest that it become a dinner party topic.
But what I am suggesting is a quick follow-up to an article published in the January 2016 issue of Professional Safety magazine, which discusses the concept of community engagement when it comes to safety and the promotion of safety in workplaces and the safety profession specifically.
Tracey Cekada, Angela Bernardo and Pam Walaski teamed up to bring up some ideas about increasing community engagement in the safety profession. This article tends to follow up on a recent article I discussed, which talked about the growing need to add safety officers and to encourage more outreach among the younger generation since the safety profession is getting older and we are losing more peole to retirement than we are able to fill with new people.
![[Image courtesy of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Flickr via a Creative Commons license]](http://www.safetymatterstoday.com/wp-content/uploads/Presentation-by-NASA-Goddard-Space-Flight-Center-e1456774589861.jpg)
[Image courtesy of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Flickr via a Creative Commons license]
Holding a local professional development conference in your state or region can be a huge boon. This is an opportunity to do outreach outside of your local ASSE chapter by providing opportunities for education, networking, and even pulling in college or high-school students who might want to learn more about the profession through booths, seminars or job fairs.
A conference can be just a single-day or aa multi-day event, which could depend on the number of chapters in yoir region and the type of facility you may secure. There are a lot of things to consider, in terms of catering, floor space, the types of speakers or presenters, the theme of the event, how much networking would be incorporated and if there will be product and company booths set up.
No matter what kind of conference you choose to host and plan, it will never work if you don’t have a mission in mind. Don’t just set one up and hope regional safety professionals and vendors will show up. You will have to determine within your chapter what is your biggest challenge – it is getting to know other professionals and sharing ideas and comparing notes about safety? Is it a lack of continuing education opportunities? Is it the need to recruit new safety officers into the profession and into your chapter? This is not to say that your conference should only have one track, but there should definitely be an overarching theme or goal and the conference should be planned in the direction of achieving that goal.
Set up your seminars or presentations in such a way that the majority of attendees will be able to attend, or will want to attend. Having conflicting sessions in two or three different rooms ca affect the quality of the experience, unless you are able to provide all the presentations multiple times during the conference so attendees don’t have to miss one presentation just because they think another presentation is better-suited for them.
And the quality of the presenters or speakers is vitally important. Always do research about the topics you want presented and find a regional “expert” about that topic who has a reputation for being well-versed and can provide useful information. Having a presenter who is engaging and somewhat entertaining is a nice touch, especially if you can find someone who has a reputation beyond the region and even to a national level to really add some pizzazz to your conference – especially if you can make that person a keynote speaker where you encourage all attendees to participate.
If you want to do outreach to a younger generation, it might be a good idea to try setting up a venue that is on or near a college campus in your area, and reach out to some instructors or department deans about this event and encourage students to participate. You could also have the venue near a high-school campus and encourage high-schoolers to take a “field trip” to a particular session of the conference that will help educate them about occupational health and safety.
Now matter how big or small your ASSE chapter is, putting together such a conference (either as a chapter or in conjunction with others in the area) can prove valuable in increasing awareness of the profession and bringing workplace health and safety into the front of mind within your community. For the sake of our profession, this is a sacrifice of time and effort that will not be in vain.