President’s Message
May 8, 2012
Congratulations to the recipients of the FAPAC/DoD Military Meritorious Award and the FAPAC Civilian Award. The Awards were presented to over 300 attendees at the Military Award Luncheon and the Civilian Award Dinner Banquet on May 3 during another successful conference, a result of the efforts of the Conference Team under the leadership of Grace Spence and Lily Ho. Over 130 students also showed up with a good number of veterans to take advantage of the free access to the recruiters from different agencies and participated in the special student track offered for the first time at the FAPAC conference. Next year we will take the challenge to do even better with anew Youth Initiative at Long Beach.
Thanks are also to our Keynotes Brian Ronholm, Under Secretary for Food Safety at USDA, for the Opening, MG Kelly McKeague, Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and John Berry, Director of the Office of Personnel Management, for the Civilian Award Banquet as well as a host of other distinguished leaders from the federal agencies and armed forces. The attendees expressed their gratitude to be able to learn from these leaders who are willing to share their experiences and their insight on leadership and diversity. The panel on AAPI Women and Leadership drew a great crowd.
FAPAC is launching a Career Development Program (CDP) in June. If you have not signed up to be a mentor or mentee please do so immediately. This represents a major effort by FAPAC to improve the pipeline by assisting our members to move up the career ladder. This is also a tangible effort working with AAGEN under our recent MOU to provide a pool of potential candidate for their SES candidate program in the coming year.
FAPAC continues in the effort to connect to the federal community by visiting different agencies. In the month of May I have a great number of speaking opportunities to reach out to DOE, GSA, DEA and to others to introduce FAPAC and tell them about our new programs. FAPAC is also in the process of putting together a group to market FAPAC especially to the colleges and young professionals. If you can help, please contact us. We are looking for people with skills on the social media and is willing to spend some time doing hand on projects.
Our membership continues to grow making good on my pledge to have a new member every day for the rest of the year. Thanks to our energetic Membership Chair Vanee Kolmolprasert and her team, we signed up 20 new members including 7 life timers during conference week.