Give and Help Us Take Our Next Great Stride Forward

By ESA President Shahid Naeem

ESA President Shahid Naeem

It’s now February and, as ESA’s President, I realize that my term is almost half over. It is a good time to reflect on our accomplishments from the past few months, while realizing that these have been possible because of the hard work of ESA members over many years.

I’ve been with ESA since 1984, and in that time I’ve seen ESA morph and change along with the times, oftentimes much more than other organizations in our space and usually at the leading edge of innovation. We were tackling issues of racial and gender equity in the mid-90s with the first WAMiE report. We inaugurated SEEDS just a few years later, and even launched Frontiers with the goal of making ecology more accessible. And in just the past few years, while SEEDS continues to grow, we added multiple streams of financial support for Annual Meeting participants—registration grants and dependent care, SEEDS funds, the Diversity and Inclusion Travel Scholarship—and launched the EEE Scholars program under the auspices of the new Diversity Committee.

I feel that we’ve made huge strides, and I want to see us continue to progress. The Equity and Excellence in Ecology Endowment was founded so that we could perpetually fund these kinds of programs and continue to be the kind of Society that, yes, our members aspire to be, but our science needs us to be.

We are on our way to meeting our goal of raising half of the needed $400,000 by the end of 2024. Can you give today and help us meet our immediate goal of raising the next $10,000 by March?

Gentoo penguins in Antarctica | Photo credit: Shahid Naeem