By Renee Hoekstra, CVS – President, SAVE International
It’s already August, summer and summer vacations are in full swing and I’m no different. However, with the August e-newsletter I wanted to share some great news. The stats are in and our 2019 Value Summit was a great success in so many ways! This is because of all of our great attendees, presenters, instructors, planning committee and staff. The pre-Summit, Summit and post-Summit attendance was also at record highs. All of this is going to be great for SAVE International and give us additional income to continue to support an increase in marketing and outreach efforts. If you didn’t make it this year, wait until next year – it’s going to be even better. New Orleans, as a venue, will be wonderful and the 2020 Value Summit planning committee is gearing up to get started with more educational events to continue to support our certification process. If you’d like to be a part of next year’s Summit planning committee, contact your new Director of Conferences, Tammy Dow, at tammy.dow@aecom.com.
Speaking of certification, the SAVE Certification Board is diligently working out all of the kinks of our new certification process. We know that change can be difficult, and we are definitely experiencing growing pains and frustrations. We just ask all of you to have patience with us. If you are experience difficulties, please make sure that you reach out to the SAVE business office at info@value-eng.org to let us know what is occurring so that we can continue to improve, what we believe, is going to be a much more streamlined certification process. The Certification Board would love help if you would like to volunteer. It would be great to have you be a part of the solution and help us to have the best certification process we can have!
We’re also very excited about the completion of the VMBoK. As you know, we’re in the final efforts to have the VMBoK vetted and the amount of effort that has been provided by the Education Committee and all the volunteers has been unprecedented. Everyone has done an unbelievable job thanks to the direction and efforts of our Director of Education, Rob Stewart. This document is going to help us to “Spread the Word” by giving us a well written Body of Knowledge that will help to share our vision, means and methods with the world. I would like to personally thank all of you who have offered to be a part of the review and editing process.
We’ve started our efforts to build better relationships with our government partners. During the Summit in June, several of the SAVE Board members met with the U.S. Corps of Engineers (USACE) and began our discussions to develop a partnering agreement between both organizations. This partnering agreement is going to outline what our two organizations can do together, as partners. As you all know, we can achieve more together. We will be finalizing this agreement and will have an official signing of it in the future. This will be the beginning of what I am hoping to be a trend for many of our other government partners.
Additional efforts to aid our government partners is to build a tool box to help them be able to build strong VM programs within their organizations. We have a special committee, headed up by our Director of Marketing & Communications, Anthony Dunhams, to begin to identify and then build a tool box that will meet this need. If you would like to get involved, please contact Anthony at anthony.dunams@arcadis-us.com. Our Board members are always looking for help and support. Let’s make it official and continue to “Spread the Word”.
As we creep closer to Fall, we are going to keep marching forward to make SAVE a premier organization. Each and every one of you are an important part of our organization. At the risk of repeating myself, which I will be doing in every e-newsletter, SAVE needs your help. SAVE is only as good as our members, so please volunteer. I know that we are all very busy right now with work, our profession and at home. With more and more things demanding our interest and efforts, don’t forget that it is important that we all focus on a strong balance to stay healthy and positive.
Print 
PDF