Elizabeth Brabec is a Professor andDirector of the Center for Heritage and Society at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She also served as past Department Head in the Department of Landscape Architecture and RegionalPlanning at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at Utah State University. She presently serves CELA as the Director of Region 7, and served as the Track Chair for the History, Theory and Culture track of the national conference, from 2007 to 2014. With a Master in Landscape Architecture from the University of Guelph, Canada, and a Juris Doctor from the University of Maryland, she founded and managed the landscape planning firm, Land Ethics, Inc. in Washington, D.C. and Annapolis, Maryland. She was also an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, School of Natural Resources and the Environment.
The role of Regional Director is a conduit between the member schools and the CELA Board. In an effort to make this process smoother, as the Regional Director for Region 7, I would like to spearhead the creation of an electronic list and newsletter for all of the regions through an online portal such as Constant Contact. Correspondence with member schools and faculty has been hampered by the lack of an accurate email list, a list that includes individual faculty as well as Department Heads. List services, such as Constant Contact, can make the process of maintaining an up-to-date and active list easier and more functional.
In addition to the regular duties of the regional director, serving as a conduit of information to and from the CELA Board, and managing regional issues, I would like to implement one specific initiative. Individually, we are all being asked to regularly report our accomplishments to various on and off-line entities. I would like to streamline this process for the Region 7 member schools in a web-based portal or even a Google doc form. For each news story or accomplishment, this can take the form of an informative tag line, short narrative if desired, and a connecting URL to other news stories that member schools or others have written. The idea is not to increase workloads, but to collect and re-use things that we are already doing. Sharing our news and accomplishments is an important way of connecting with our peers in the region and nationally.
This thought, could of course be transferred to CELA as a whole. Once the email list has been created, my primary goal would be to work with the CELA leadership to add an information and accomplishments portal to the website, that will allow member schools across the regions to simply enter information at will, information that can easily be transferred to the newsletter.
The benefit of these two improvements in the CELA system is that it makes communication seamless between the CELA leadership and its members, as well as allowing subsequent CELA regional directors to build on this platform and engage in additional tasks that move the organization forward.