Newsletter
Volume 30 | 2007 | Number 2
Wisconsin ABA
By Dr. Roger Bass
The Wisconsin Association for Behavior Analysis is like a young, energetic graduate student:
- We are constantly finding issues that we would love to pursue while struggling with the limited resources we have.
- We are coming to appreciate the vast amount of good that we could accomplish with a more informed political environment in our state capital.
- We are attempting to increase membership and participation when distances between us and responsibilities to those who depend on us create unavoidable conflicts.
In short, we are coming to grips with the organizational prerequisites for effective action. We were lucky to have as our first WABA President someone who fully appreciated that from the start: Dr. Corrine Donley. We all owe her great thanks for bringing her administrative foresight to our inception and early development.
WABA’s mission is to advance behavior analysis in Wisconsin. Members come from many areas including education, consulting (especially in the area of autism), college faculty, psych students, experimental psychology, and rehabilitative/vocational psychology. Some of our most immediate objectives reflect that diversity and cover political issues (e.g., funding for BCBAs and BCABAs), political action (lobbying at the state and federal levels), working to improve Chapter-ABA coordination (e.g., ABA President Tom Critchfield was kind enough to join us in a phone conversation on that and other topics), and identifying tactics for improving WABA (e.g., Dr. Jim Johnston graciously did a phone conference interview on how to improve chapter performance). Those activities reflect the key reason Wisconsin’s behavior analysts should join: WABA is a great opportunity to achieve together what we cannot achieve alone.
WABA has a Website at www.WisABA.org and we invite everyone to give it a look. There’s a calendar of activities, great links, a membership form, discussion group, numerous publications that can be downloaded, suggested readings, and more. Look us up and leave a message. We’d love to hear from you.