When I was a kid I grew up on the Space Coast of Florida and you may have seen
the recent celebrations of the 50th anniversary of putting a man on the moon
but when I grew up on the Space Coast of Florida we had a tradition where schools
when there was a launch would ring the bell and us kids would go out on these
hot Florida sunny days and we would watch the space launches as they got
down closer to the time that it was about to take off the Rockets were about
to take off you could feel the ground Rumble and
then you could see off in the distance and the horizon
the rocket ships going up and evening we go home and we would look at on
television the astronauts in space the same astronauts that we had seen go up
earlier that day well that got me thinking about how did we get there I
was a really triumphant point in our American history well the way we got
there was when John F Kennedy in 1961 gave a speech and he said by the end of
the decade we're going to send a man to the moon and bring him home safely and
he opened up a new era for our country now the interesting thing about that is
that at that time there wasn't really a Kennedy Space Center NASA was only about
three years old we didn't have any infrastructure we didn't really know how
to do it but he put a vision out for where he wanted America to go and in a
way we're in a similar position at APA because a couple of years ago our
council of representatives directed that we should have a new strategic vision
for our organization and in the good part of a year we spent surveying
interviewing doing focus groups and really co-creating a new vision for our
association and similar to where we were when our country had a vision but didn't
quite know how to get there but we knew we were going to have to work
differently we know we're going to have to work differently as a PA to get an
achieve our Grand Challenge so that strategic plan that our Council passed
had several elements the first is that we believe that we must utilize
psychology to make a difference on major societal issues that we're facing as a
country that we need to elevate the public's understanding of regard for and
use of psychology that we need to prepare the discipline and profession of
psychology for the future and we have to strengthen and want to strengthen and
maintain our status as an authoritative voice for our field but like our country
we're gonna have to work differently to do that so what I wanted to do tonight
is tell you a few of the things that we're doing at APA to work differently
so that we can accomplish our Grand Challenge everybody with me okay you got
to tell me you guys stay with me okay all right there we go all right so
number one we have to work faster and I'll give you an example of how we're
trying to work faster at APA because we believe that we have something to say
that's important as a field on many of the issues that we're facing as a
country the horrific shootings that we just experienced over the past week it's
a good example of that so we're in the past we may have taken days and
sometimes maybe a week to put a statement out we now do that in an hour
in literally hours getting the psychological research out on gun
violence on trauma and what people can do to come through these horrific events
and it's making a difference because within hours of us putting our statement
out this is the kind of press that talked about the psychological research
that we were citing and in fact as of yesterday we were cited in over 1,000
articles reaching over a billion people around the
with psychological knowledge so working faster helps us to have the impact that
we wanted to have on these major social issues so we're not only working faster
we're working with new partners APA has had a really long history of working
well with lots of different groups but we recognize that we're going to have to
work with a broader set of groups if we're going to elevate the public's
understanding of what psychology is so let me give you just a few examples of
that Association National Association of Manufacturers probably not a group do
you think about when you think about APA but it turns out that this organization
which whose members are corporations like Exxon Mobil and Goodyear and
Caterpillar they have a lot of needs that we as psychologists can address so
we're talking to them about everything from the opioid crisis to how
organizational psychologists can help them improve their performance and in
fact one of the things that we're really excited about is our discussions around
our psychologically healthy workplace program and how the research shows that
organizations that embrace that are actually doing better in terms of their
performance we're working with Farm Aid because farmers in our country have
mental health challenges like the rest of the population but often live in
rural parts of the country where they don't have the infrastructure so we're
working with them to see how psychology can help them and we can help them
better address the mental health needs of farmers we're working with the
National PTA Association helping parents and teachers better meet the mental
health needs of children we're even working with the Surgeon General of the
United States on a variety of issues from the opioid crisis to immigration to
a number of issues in all of these instances we have the opportunity to
talk about the whole breadth of our field one of the things that I
appreciate about the the surgeon journalist meeting is that he was
interested in the issue of stigma and we had an opportunity to talk about the
psychological research on how you reduce stigma and so we're really trying to
show how we can as a field meet the needs of many of our counterparts so
we're working faster we're working with new partners and we're also trying to
work more proactively so let me give you an example APA has almost been the
singular voice trying to ensure that Health Services psychologists are
reimbursed at a fair rate and we do that because we believe in the services that
we provide as Health Services psychologists those of you who are
Health Services psychologists but that work has been primarily reactive a
couple years ago there were proposed rate rate cuts that would have really
devastated the ability for psychologists to participate in the Medicaid Medicare
program and we were not only successful in preventing those cuts but we actually
got a rate increase on testing services that's a good thing
because many seniors depend on those services to get high-quality services so
we're working faster we're working with new partners we're working more
proactively and we're working to reframe issues so that people understand the
full breadth of our field so let me give you a couple of examples or I'll give
you one example artificial intelligence will have a huge impact on our lives but
most people don't think of psychology when they hear sites artificial
intelligence they think about computer scientists they think about engineers
but they don't think of us but it turns out that we have a lot to contribute to
this very important issue their cognitive psychologists who developed
the models on which many of the intelligence systems are designed their
human factors psychologists who work to ensure that the interfaces between those
intelligence systems and people are designed in such a way that they work
well for for people they're social psychologists who are studying issues
like bias and how to make sure that big datasets don't have bias in them and
their clinicians who are working to use this technology to better deliver
services to people so in all those ways and many more psychology has a lot to
contribute we recently had a meeting with a group of high-level executives
from Amazon and Microsoft and other high tech Google and high tech corporations
who are looking at the issue of artificial artificial intelligence in
terms of policy in our country and we had an opportunity to talk about how
social psychology could help address some of their concerns around bias and
big data that's the kind of work that really is helping the public's
understand the contribution that we can make on a whole host of issues and on
issue in particular so we're working faster we're working with new partners
we're working more proactively we're working to reframe issues but we need
all of us to be a part of this effort to take on this grand challenge to change
how our association has impacted the world and so we're gonna need all of us
and I think it's making a difference for two years in a row we have had an
increase in our membership that is after years of decline declining membership
and so I think at our core psychologists want to have impact in the world and
that's what we want to do so I'll leave you with this when I was that kid in
Florida I had no idea that I was sitting on the front row of history and
observing history and in a real way I think that we all are as a field sitting
on the front door or the front row of the history for our new history and a
new era for our field and I can't wait to see the heights that we're going to
go as a field so I hope you have a great convention I hope you have a great
career and thank you for being here tonight