It’s a year of firsts, and as our industry embarks on the creation of the National Seed Organization (NSO), we’re doing something else we’ve never tried before.
Our 97th annual meeting will take place online for the first time ever. While we are disappointed not to connect with our members in person in Winnipeg as planned, we look forward to offering our annual business meeting and committee meetings virtually this year.
Taking place July 15, the first half of the meeting will feature remarks from President Georges Chaussé and CSTA staff members, along with the usual approvals of minutes and finances. The second half of the meeting will focus on the Seed Synergy Collaboration Project, outlining the next steps and answering member questions.
It was a hard decision to cancel our in-person meeting which was to take place in Winnipeg. At the time, we weren’t sure how the pandemic would play out. Would things be back to normal by July? Should we proceed with planning the Winnipeg meeting or cancel?
We bit the bullet and cancelled, deciding it would be in everyone’s best interests to hold a virtual annual meeting. But how to do that? It wasn’t a simple question to answer. How do you go about turning an annual meeting from something people know and love into a new, untested format?
CSTA’s committees have always been a hallmark of the annual meeting. Since this year’s AGM will take place online, there is an opportunity to host more committee meetings than usual, and in a more accessible format. The committee meetings will take place in the style of a podcast, with an overarching theme of “Past, Present, Future”.
We’ve already kicked off our podcasting adventure with the first episode of The Kernel, CSTA’s new podcast series. We view this as the beginning of a new way of serving members. Even once our regular in-person meeting continue we will continue to use the digital realm to communicate with our stakeholders.
It’s already bearing fruit. We’ve had a great response to our virtual meeting — a lot of new names are popping up on the registration list. People who don’t usually attend our regular meetings are coming out for the virtual version. This can only help us to get more people interested in their industry and getting more involved in it.
Perhaps most importantly, this could be our last annual meeting as the Canadian Seed Trade Association. As we move closer to the formation of the NSO, this virtual meeting could go down in the history books as the last meeting of the CSTA.
We hope you’ll join us for this momentous event!
