A Letter from the President
Let me be the first one to welcome you to the start of another year for the West Michigan Chapter of ASSE. Personally, I am very excited for what this year has to offer for us all as members of this wonderful organi-zation. This year will continue to be very challenging for all of us, as our time and money is even more valu-able now, than ever.
I would like to take a moment to introduce myself, for those of you that don't know me. I currently work for Johnson Controls as a Health, Safety and Environmental Engineer and have been there for almost three years now. I have been an active board member of the West Michigan Chapter for a little over five years, and served on the program committee for a couple years before that. I am married to my wonderful wife, Lindsay, and we will be celebrating our fifth anniversary this October. We also have a son, Drew that is al-most two years old. Prior to JCI, I worked at Herman Miller for a little over four years.
We have again assembled a very talented and dedicated team of board members with a couple new faces, and some familiar faces coming back to us from as far away as Jordan in the Middle East. You will see all of the names listed on the second page in this newsletter. I encourage you all to take the time to meet and speak with all of them, as we are always excited to get feedback from you.
Our program schedule is also listed in this newsletter for you. We will continue to target the third Thursday of the month, for the ease of planning. You will also notice that we are getting back to a more technical meeting schedule to focus on the "Engineering" aspect, as after all we are in the American Society of Safety Engineers! We will also add in some Environmental topics that should be useful to those of you with envi-ronmental responsibilities, and still apply for the Safety Specialist as well. In addition to this more technical focus, we are going to move the meetings around a bit to some different locations to hopefully make it more convenient for people that work near the Lakeshore or downtown. If your company would like to sponsor a meeting, we still have a few months that do not have locations nailed down. We are just asking for a meet-ing room with A/V capabilities and we can have food brought in, (it just wouldn't be a WMASSE meeting without good food :-). If the sponsoring company would be willing to pick up part or all of the tab for the food, that would be great as well, but certainly not a requirement.
In addition to the monthly meeting schedule, one of my goals for the year will be to increase our visibility and value to the communities that we live in. We will accomplish this by holding events that focus on "giving back" through volunteer events such as fixing worn down playground equipment making it safer for our chil-dren, holding a blood drive or sponsoring a day to work on a Habitat for Humanity house. If you have addi-tional ideas or suggestions for these types of events, please let myself, or another member of the board know.
I also want us to focus on you, the member. The first part of this I already mentioned, by holding meetings that are both valuable and conveniently located. We will also provide opportunities for you to gain CEU's and training that will benefit you in your careers, like CPR certification as one example. We will also focus on providing opportunities for our 24 (and hopefully growing) student members by providing meetings at lit-tle to no cost, and giving them the forum to meet and network with those of us in the industry that can po-tentially provide information, advice and internships.
Lastly, I want to take a quick moment to promote the 100 year anniversary of the Society coming up in 2011. The celebration will culminate at the PDC on June 12-15 for "Safety 2011" in Chicago, IL. The theme this year is "Your Safety is Our Business. Your Future is Our Mission." Registration opens up in December, and the goal for this year is to have over 5,000 attendees. See the Society website for more details: http://www.asse.org/education/safety2011-teaser.php
Thank you for reading, welcome and let's all have a Safe and Prosperous year!
Jamie Bauer
