When is awp 2018

The purpose of AWP is to gather together researchers with different backgrounds in order to have an exchange of multidisciplinary methodological approaches related to the analysis of WNRM sector.

Therefore, facilitators specialized in various fields will be carefully selected. A second objective is to disseminate knowledge on WNRM and enhance collaboration between the participants.

The purpose is to support different groups of researchers specialized in different disciplines in order to accomplish a common goal that they have set themselves. Our aim is to increase the research collaboration between participants and to set the basis future long term partnership between the representatives of different institution in EU and in ASEAN. The AWP will strengthen the multidisciplinary research and make the institutions involved in the project more internationalized.

For each AWP, 72 Asian young researchers and 5 Europeans visiting scholars will be selected on the basis of transparent rules and clear criteria.

Indeed, I was. There are many reasons why you would want to engineer a dignified exit for a long-tenured executive. An organization desires continuity, stability, and, in all cases, protection of its reputation. A letter signed by 50 former board trustees and several funders was sent to the current board asking for a reasonable severance for Fenza, who was near retirement age and who had spent nearly his whole career at AWP.

A petition reiterating the call for an adequate severance and signed by over people, including many notable literary writers and arts administrators, was also sent to the board. The board never responded. There was always too much work for too few people, coupled with pressure from the membership for better services.

For a long time, the organization only had the resources to hire current MFA students or recent graduates, in the hope that their love of literature would compensate for their lack of business experience.

This includes myself. AWP had a difficult time competing for experienced personnel in Washington, DC, where most nonprofits paid much higher salaries and demanded far less. It was also difficult to retain staff after they had been trained. No one got rich working at AWP. The going rates for a position like this in the DC region were double to triple that of my starting salary, and most positions for conference directors generally come with a fleet of well-compensated and experienced support staffers.

It is strange to be living paycheck to paycheck when your job requires you to manage a seven-figure budget. Still, this was a dream job. Most of the AWP staff was similarly dedicated and inspired by their work.

At its best, the office hummed with as much literary interest as any English department, but the work was imperfect, and at times we made mistakes. Almost all of the mistakes were the result of inexperienced, underpaid, and overworked staffers trying to do their best. I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to use my mistakes to make better choices. There really is no substitute for experience, however. Some staffers were not good fits and did not live up to their job expectations.

At one time or another, every department at AWP had to address poor performance or disruptive employees, and that was never pleasant. It was not until , when staff salaries increased to levels that consistently insured high-quality hires, that things improved.

By , AWP could hire a larger, more experienced, more capable staff. For as long as I worked at AWP, the board was largely made up of academic professionals. When the projects were smaller and less complicated, the assumption was that it was good to have trustees who came from the institutions AWP served, and there was a time when that may have been true.

Today, it is not. AWP needs a board similar to other literary organizations of this size — a board representing diverse professional experiences and capable of supporting the organization financially, so the burden of raising revenue to expand its mission is not placed entirely on the backs of its membership.

In , AWP went through a governance reform that involved a transition to a more mature board that could provide greater business and fundraising expertise.

For a year the staff urged members to vote to approve the changes, including an initiative to create a self-appointing board that elected itself. The reform passed, but in the five years since, the trustees are still largely academics who appoint other academics to the board. As a result, AWP now has the worst of both worlds: an unaccountable board without the expertise or resources to provide meaningful progress for the organization.

In my experience, too many of the trustees bring little to no relevant experience or benefit to the organization; too many of them use their service to advance their own careers rather than to meaningfully help AWP. So, in , an unqualified, unaccountable board removed an executive director after 29 years of service in a five-minute meeting in a hotel lobby the day after their biggest public event of the year.

More reasonable and experienced minds would have known to work with Fenza to create a more stable transition over, say, six months, and then publicly thank him for his extraordinary work on behalf of AWP.

This board chose a far more brutal and chaotic path. In May, Publishers Weekly posted an article on the controversy in which David Fenza and I were accused of creating a hostile work environment.

Before the article appeared, the staff and board knew that a small cadre of former employees were feeding Publishers Weekly anecdotal and skewed perspectives regarding a situation that was investigated years earlier by the Human Resources Department at George Mason University, where AWP was hosted at the time. The Publishers Weekly article cherry-picked sources while ignoring others who refuted its inaccuracies, including former AWP trustees.

Some of the sources quoted had no firsthand knowledge of the period in question. The article failed to note that grievances for disruptive behavior and poor performance were filed against multiple sources months before they ever made allegations against other AWP staff, including myself, and that at least two former staff members left AWP partly because of conflicts orchestrated by some of the sources.

The article seems to have been carefully parsed as well, as though someone at the journal was uneasy about publishing declarative statements. Several trustees who were on the board during the period discussed in the article — and thus understood the complexities of the previous staff disagreements — were still on the board at the time of its publication.

Fenza made difficult staff changes in , for example, setting the stage for improvements to the conference, including a significant growth in its attendance and programming. The only reasonable explanation is that the current board allowed the biased article to appear without comment because it ostensibly provided them with cover for the egregious way they fired Fenza.

They refuted some allegations, and minimized others. It is also true that these sources declined to go on the record when asked repeatedly if they were willing to do so. They also would not or could not provide me with documentation.

Every single source cited in my story went on the record and provided me with documentation; those requesting anonymity due to fear of retribution provided me with extensive documentation corroborating that they indeed had filed formal grievances against either Fenza or Teresi or both.

In May, the board hired Chloe Schwenke as interim executive director. Schwenke has extensive experience in public policy, human rights initiatives, and international nonprofit management, but she has no background in literature or as an arts administrator, nor has she worked for a membership association. There are several AWP staffers who have more nonprofit arts management experience than Schwenke.

This statement ignores the fact that there are many more established nonprofits, much larger than AWP, housed at universities all over the country. Schwenke additionally suggested that Fenza did not have the authority to sign the Memo of Understanding that brought AWP to Maryland and that he did not keep the board informed about the negotiations over the 18 months it took to make that relocation happen.

Both of those claims are demonstrably false. The idea that AWP moved its headquarters after two decades without the board being heavily involved in the conversations surrounding that relocation is not the only untruth being peddled by the current governors.

We may never know the true reason why the University of Maryland wanted AWP to leave, but the fact that the separation happened at all is bizarre. AWP has its own board of trustees and its own resources. Moving forward as an independent nonprofit, AWP will be better able to serve its members.

My replacement, like Schwenke, had no background in literature, which is problematic for an association of literary writers and MFA programs. I had seen many senior and junior staff leave AWP during my tenure, often with the knowledge and help of David Fenza. None of them had ever been reassigned as a result of wanting to leave. I told Schwenke that I would consider her offer but that I needed to see the new job description; I also said that I would like her to consider offering me a severance instead.

She said that she would do that. On June 19, Schwenke sent me a job description filled with responsibilities already assigned to me as the director of Conferences. The next day, over the objections of the University of Maryland, Schwenke placed me on indefinite paid administrative leave and told me I was not allowed to return to the office. She also sent an email to the entire AWP staff insisting that no one should speak with me unless the contact was cleared with her first.