Tuesday, January 07, 2020
From the 2019 AMAPCEO Annual Report:
Often, life’s lessons are best learned through lived experience. Every day starts with a plan and at its end, we look back with 20/20 hindsight and learn from our experience as to how best to face the future.
The past five years have been among AMAPCEO’s most exciting, with substantial ground gained on so many fronts. Our five-year strategic plan, Roadmap to Building a Stronger AMAPCEO, did just that—it transformed us. Now, our challenge is to maintain consistency while seeking new footholds on our way to the next level.
AMAPCEO’s Board of Directors, in its third full year since our restructuring, continues to develop with District Directors, acquiring valuable experience, and with our veteran Executive Committee, providing strong leadership.
Our Board has proven itself capable of both diverse opinions and cohesive action.
We are very ably supported by our senior management team. With Rob Smalley stepping up to Chief Operating Officer and Jennifer Sherwood to Membership Services Director in the past four months, we have new-found energy. They, along with Finance & Admin Director Angela Stewart, and their various team leads and professional staffing complements, continue to provide us with unmatched service.
As President & CEO, it’s my distinct privilege to represent the membership, and I can assure you that everything we do, we do under the lens of how it will be received by our members. Over the years, our members have made it clear that they want to be represented in the way they see themselves—as professionals. And so, everything begins with professionalism and conducting ourselves at that level with everything we do.
While maintaining that core value, we’ve also been doing our utmost to build a sense of community. First with one another, secondly with other unions and allies, and finally with the public. Our Districts have been a huge success at the local level, with membership engagement at all-time highs. We’ve built formal alliances with public sector unions that see us working on special projects. And, at the public level we’ve accomplished three things. We’ve steadfastly stood for quality public services by speaking truth to power in a non-partisan fashion. We’ve portrayed who we are and the valuable services we provide the public through our “Working for Ontario” campaign. And we’ve used every opportunity to leverage our progress to improve working conditions for every Ontarian.
All of which is what being a community and a union is all about.
As we renew our strategic plan in early 2020, I’m confident that we’ve learned from both the successes and challenges of the past five years, and that as a result, our vision for 2020 and beyond will be a progressive one that builds on what we’ve constructed—and takes us to a new level in real and tangible ways.
There is strength in community—and in community there is strength. Thank you for the roles you play, and for caring about others. Our members are better for your contribution and our community is stronger for it.