The past week and all that was the 2013 AIGA Leadership retreat has left my mind drunk on knowledge, hungover from bubbly inspiration, and my liver slightly damaged. Jokes aside, this was such an honor and opportunity for me and some of AIGA Colorado’s Board Members to better grasp why AIGA as a whole is phenomenal because of all of the parts we play. There’s too much to cover so I will try my best to keep it short and sweet.

The Retreat was kicked off by Ric Grefé and the national staff and board with an update on membership and financials, and I was impressed by how well structured AIGA is. Let me break down some dollars and sense:

• 36% of Membership goes back to each chapter to support programming needs and member assets
• 23,000+ members with a hope to grow to 50,000

Membership was a big topic of discussion as AIGA enters its 100th year as the nation’s largest association for designers. Learning of the humble beginnings where the original 14 members didn’t have enough space or chairs for their inaugural meeting so they literally rolled their office chairs throughout the streets of NYC just to meet and begin the discussion of how design can impact, sustain, and improve the lives of our fellow Americans.

One of my favorite exercises driven by Ziba tasked groups of commingled chapter members to exchange programming ideas, best practices, and asked us the following question, “if you were to run AIGA, what would you do differently and why?”

We all joined AIGA for a reason, do you remember what yours was?

Most consumers or in our case members “buy” in, not because of the product but rather the user and why that user bought in the first place. I joined because I got Syriac-ed (if you were an AIGA Colorado Member you’d be lucky enough to know what that means)!

P.S. I Wouldn’t change it for anything in the world because my role as a member of AIGA has drastically increased my ability to make change for good in the community I live and work in and I couldn’t thank AIGA Colorado more…

Next year marks 100 for AIGA and our own Chapter’s 25th anniversary, we are honored to be hosting the next Leadership Conference but there is so much to do to prepare! There wasn’t a break out session, lunch, or general session where other chapters weren’t gawking over our board structure, our leadership, our phenomenal results in Colorado so we don’t have to get on the map, we need to live up to our legacy!

If you are thinking about joining our creative community of AIGA Colorado just read the following list, if at least two of these sound like you then join us a member and be the change:

• We seek work that is intrinsically rewarding
• We make stuff often and therefore fail often
• We have little tolerance for bureaucracy
• We expect to be fully utilized and constantly optimized
• We consider open source tech is ours
• We think networking is sharing
• We Exist on Meritocracy

Shout out to all of our friends out there who attend, enjoy, and enhance their lives through our AIGA Colorado programming, JOIN US.

We are oneAIGA and we exist on Meritocracy.