As I am writing this article; Allison Walden, Steffanie Bonner, Margaret Wish and I are returning from the AFP International Leadership conference in Kansas City, MO.  We attended with our friend and incoming President of the AFP OKC Chapter, Jo Jones. It has me in a reflective state of what our own Eastern Oklahoma Chapter has done the past couple of years and what it is doing now (and in the future) after meeting with other AFP Chapter leaders across the United States.  One word comes to mind - CELEBRATE! 

Sometimes I find myself going after the next goal, the next donation or the next major gift, but when do we take a moment and celebrate what we have already accomplished and have done well? In like-size AFP Chapter meetings, we found other chapters taking notes and asking how we did what we did in Tulsa? A lot of the more metropolitan cities and chapters were asking for our contacts to see how they could replicate what works for us!  I am telling you this friends because even though the year isn't over, we have to celebrate what we know how to do well in Oklahoma, and do best in the Tulsa and Bartlesville areas in Eastern Oklahoma.  We achieved for the first time ever, the Friends of Diversity award. We moved ourselves from a Ten Star award chapter to a Ten Star Gold award chapter based on meeting best practices internationally. We have for the first time a satellite chapter with our friends in Bartlesville, OK; and not many other chapters nation-wide have a model like this.  We have great educational programming, webinars, training in ethics, and have a CFRE training coming up that other chapters can only imagine putting on! We have some of the best philanthropists around which help us celebrate our half day conference at NPD as well as celebrate the award winners at the NPD luncheon on Nov. 6th.  We brought in one Int'l Speaker, Stephen Pigeon, in partnership with Oklahoma Center for Non-Profits and the OKC AFP Chapter; and we are bringing in Tom Ahern, nationally known for the NPD conference. As we celebrate, we are recognizing what we are doing correctly in our profession, and it helps us to grow to see what else we need to accomplish.  

Please join me and our local AFP Board, if you haven't registered yet, at the NPD Conference and Awards luncheon this November 6th at Southern Hills Country Club! Let's continue to celebrate and sore even higher in remaining year and 2016.