President's Remarks

In the summer of 2021, NCSPP officially began our year in reflection, endeavoring to create more space for thinking and introspection. With assistance from our partner organization, Early/Mid, our focus this year will shift to metabolizing our recently received DEI Assessment Report. This 15-page document identifies our organization's inherent strengths and opportunities for growth while providing recommendations for cultural and structural change. Our Executive Committee and Board of Directors are using this report as a roadmap to pursue our internal work towards inclusion, diversity, equity, access, and liberation. As a result of our focus, our programming will be limited this academic year. While this is a loss for us and our community, the work continues, considering the ongoing impact of our internalized White supremacy, racism, and additional forms of oppression in our field. We continue to work diligently as an organization to plan for immediate, midterm, and long-view goals towards restructuring and rethinking our organization's stances, policies, and procedures. Translating the aggregation of this year's work into sustained institutional memory will also be critical to restructuring over time.

As a site of discourse on these themes within our community, our year-long Intensive Study Group (ISG) will be the sole program we offer this year. Rupture and Repair: Pain and Possibility focuses on the nature of rupture and repair within the clinical dyad and incorporates the strata of the group and the social. We hope this space will offer an integrative experience to metabolize some of this past year — a year that featured so much rupture, destabilization, and tragic loss, much of it driven by racism, disparity, and inequity. We hope the ISG will allow for deeper analytic thinking for those who will join us in this work. We appreciate the ISG Committee and the number of stellar instructors who are supplying the courses with their expertise and thoughtfulness.

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