Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2024 - 39

the member benefits are from trainings
to meetups, to job fairs, to professional development.
They have different pieces and
places of what they do at the conference.
When USITT started 65 years ago,
it was only Regional Sections essentially,
as they came together and were primarily
led by businesses and organizational
Members, not individuals as much or universities
or conservatories.
They didn't have a national office.
They didn't have a place for funds to flow
through. So, if they were having a conference
like we did last year in Seattle, then
the Pacific Northwest Regional Section became
the host. The Regional Section had
their own 501(c)3, employee IN number,
and bank account. They had their own internal
mini board structure with board officers
because they had a treasurer who had
to manage the bank account. When people
registered for the conference, it all flowed
through the Regional Section as the producer,
and the Regional Section processed
all of those payments and registrations.
They had a national bank account deal
with dues and that sort of thing. As much
as I love to think of us as a national organization,
which we are, our conference is a
regional event. This is shown in the data of
who shows up.
There are 13 sections at the moment
that are divided up in different ways around
the country, which are supposed to be facilitating
Members in that area and communicating
with each other. Over time, in
the last 65 years, it's morphed pretty heavily.
Several of the Regional Sections, both
from a leadership standpoint and from a
structural standpoint of what they offer,
have become almost entirely academic.
The Student Chapters are good from the
academic standpoint of communicating
with each other. The Regional Section was
supposed to sort of blow that out a little
and allow for more people to communicate
from the membership in that area.
Looking at it from a global standpoint,
these are the folks who are really the boots
on the ground part of the membership.
How can we help facilitate them connecting
with each other better?
We're working through that because
we have ways to connect them; we need to
bring them together to talk about and adjust
the programming that they are doing.
There are people who interact with us as
USITT writ large that may never get to go
to the conference because they've always
The Opening Night Celebration at the USITT Annual Conference & Stage Expo 2024 in Seattle. | USITT.
had a show in March, or the timing doesn't
work, or they just don't have support from
wherever they work. But they can still participate
in training and professional development
and meetups and hirings and job
fairs and recruiting events and have access
to the resources of being able to know
who else is a technical director within 300
miles of them that they can call on for advice
and collaboration.
That's part of the core tenet of what
we should be doing as a member organization.
Trying to send people from a 15-person
staff in a national office out to every
event that's happening around the country
is silly and untenable. We want the volunteers
and the Members to be able to have
those opportunities. So, we've been working
to restructure a little bit what Regional
Section leadership looks like and also how
we can help resource and facilitate them
so that they're more a part of national and
that national is helping to broadcast what
they're doing when there's good things
happening.
So that's a little bit of where we are
with Regional Sections. We will be able to
allow for them to have better communication
with the membership so they can be
connected to each other. It's a great place
if somebody wants to get involved in leadership
in the Institute because Regional
Section leadership is very involved in
things like making programming choices
and voting on awards and award winners
and being involved in activities at conference
as well as around the rest of the year.
Shuron: What changes or new initiatives
have you implemented that have
improved the overall health of the
organization?
Everett: The first big one is overhauling
the membership structure. Again, this
organization is sort of reverse engineered.
It started with a bunch of volunteers who
came together and said, " We're going to
make an association for ourselves and
meet. " What we have had for some time
at USITT is association people that are
trained in associations, membership modules,
marketing, education and training,
show execution, event planning, and sales-all
of those areas.
They sat down and looked at what our
membership structure was, and we took
some data from the various feedback polls
and other reports that we have done with
our Members. The structure didn't resonate
with the current membership. We
had an opportunity to clean it up, streamline
it, and adjust the way that it functions.
Individual membership is going to be
super simplified. We saw we haven't had a
membership increase since 2018 or 2019.
We want to make it minimal, and we certainly
can't match inflation, as we don't
want to do that to our Members, but we
want to make it viable so that there doesn't
have to be a big unmanageable jump later
somewhere, because that's important to
our membership. Then we also looked at
streamlining it in such a way so that you
join as a Member and your anniversary
date will automatically roll on July 1, no
ISSUE 3, 2024 | THEATRE DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY | 39

Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2024

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