The Places We'll Go and the People We’ll Meet
Tamar Schlekat, SETAC North America Executive Director
With the start of the new year, and with positive outlook of the global pandemic situation, we at SETAC are energized to once again be planning in-person events. SETAC meetings are a great venue for science exchange and networking that advance SETAC’s mission. To be more inclusive and accessible, all our events will also include a virtual twist moving forward. With that strategy, North America staff are busy helping our colleagues in Europe organize the SETAC Copenhagen meeting while also planning for the NonTarget 2022 meeting in May in Durham, North Carolina. At the same time, the program committee for the SETAC North America 43rd Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is actively working to create an invigorating program, all while we are calling for chairs for the 2023 meeting in Louisville, Kentucky.
Meanwhile, SETAC North America is also starting to plan for the 2026 meeting. Believe it or not, every January we begin the scouting process for a meeting venue for five years later. We skipped that process the last two years since our contracts with venues in Fort Worth, Texas, and Portland, Oregon, were graciously renegotiated for 2024 and 2025, respectively, without financial penalties. The host cities could have potentially charged SETAC over half a million dollars each in cancellation fees!
What Does It Take to Plan a Large Meeting?
Scouting for a venue is a complicated process that SETAC North America has honed over the years. Our annual meetings attract 1,600–2,200 participants. The meetings are typically held in November as that is a less busy time for convention centers, which allows us to offer reduced registration rates. Even though our meeting is in the low season, to meet our scheduling needs (Sunday through Thursday in the first two weeks of November), we must contract at least five years in advance. For very popular destinations, event planners often book up to 10 years out to get preferred dates.
SETAC North America serves members across the US and Canada as well as Mexico, so we maintain that meeting locations should vary. We also try to visit Canada once every five years. (For those of you paying attention, we met in Toronto in 2019, so you can guess where we are looking first). Since our regional chapters help with planning, that also helps us be more inclusive and not lean heavily on the same members year after year.
We prefer locations that embody SETAC Values and our commitment to social responsibility and sustainability. Ideal locations are proximal to partners from all sectors, such as universities, research facilities, as well as regulatory and enforcement agencies. It is important for us to be welcoming and affordable to potential meeting participants from across organizations, and we know proximity sometimes plays a role in allowing them to participate. Negotiating room rates with hotels of various caliber typically provides us a steep discount on convention center rental while, at the same time, allows us to offer a range of convenient options to our members. We really appreciate those who can stay in our room block and help us fulfill contractual obligations, which helps us keep registration rates affordable, though we understand if some cannot. Flexibility to offer accommodations for our differently abled members is also a must in any venue we identify. Finally, we look for a commitment to sustainability when selecting venues and vendors, consistent with our mission. While our list of requirements is extensive, we usually have to make compromises keeping all those factors in mind.
We are conscious that a SETAC meeting and its host city have a symbiotic relationship. The meeting helps uplift their economies and can have a positive impact on their residents. We also try to leave a positive impact on the local communities and bring our values to them by holding outreach programs while we are there. We always consider the safety and security of meeting participants as the highest priority and take precautions where necessary. We do this knowing that most cities have challenges arising from social disparity or political issues. When weighing all our options, we take this under consideration against the benefits they offer.
It is very important to us to move our meetings around to be inclusive of our members who are scattered geographically. We are conscious that similar to individuals, locales are multi-faceted. Just like we do not eliminate cities with social challenges from consideration, we do not discount cities based on current or historic laws and regulations. Ethical challenges, environmental progressiveness and costs are just a few of the elements that must be balanced in meeting venue selection. There are no single right choices. We are aware that some state agencies boycott whole states. However, we hope that SETACers who can afford it, will still join meetings there in support of SETAC and its mission and colleagues and the local communities, even if not reimbursed by their institutions. We hope that our meetings there will have a positive impact on these communities and be a driver for change. Most importantly for meeting participants, we take the task of instilling our values and creating a welcoming space within the conference center walls very seriously and are committed to including virtual components to our meetings to even be more inclusive moving forward.
This year we are hosting meetings in Durham, North Carolina, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We think the Durham venue provides many advantages as a meeting location for our members for several reasons. It is within a few miles of seven academic institutions, including three historically black universities, Research Triangle Park and major operational centers for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences as well as research and development facilities for the pharmaceutical and agricultural sectors. The convention center itself is a block from the areas known as Black Wall Street that has since become a hub for local minority-owned businesses, which we encourage our attendees to frequent. Another perk to our attendees is the proximity of Duke Forest, a working forest and the site of ecosystems services research, where we like to plan excursions. While North Carolina legislature has dabbled in discriminatory laws (like the infamous bathroom bill approved in 2016 and repealed in 2017), Durham municipal laws are very progressive in terms of its support of the LGBTQ+ community. As a matter of fact, Durham was rated 100% in the Municipal Equality Index of 2021.
The host city of our annual meeting, Pittsburgh, is reinventing its industrial roots to become a local and global hub on sustainability. While some may have the perception that this rust belt city is not environmentally progressive, they would be mistaken. Pittsburgh was one of the first cities in the U.S. to formally integrate the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals into its city plans and policies to spark social change and economic transformation through world-class research, collaboration and innovation. Supporting Pittsburgh, and by extensions the remediation and restoration of impacted sites, exemplifies focus on SETAC’s mission. The city focuses on building resilient, equitable and inclusive communities, and has done extensive research, published multiple analyses and created a fund through the ONEPGH Resilience Strategy to address inequality across gender and race. The Pittsburgh Convention Center itself is a pioneer in achieving Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification embodying our commitment to social responsibility. The city also garnered a perfect score in terms of LGBTQ+ community support as a testament to its social progressiveness. It also goes without saying that we hope to engage with the research at Carnegie Melon.
SETAC North America Board of Directors together with the staff always strive to ensure that everything related to the annual meeting, from the venue to the scientific program, advances SETAC’s mission and adheres to SETAC principles and values. If you would like to propose a meeting location for a region you are familiar with and, even better, would like to chair the meeting, please send us your suggestion. We hope that you are just as excited as we are about some of the upcoming events we have planned for you and that you will join us there!
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