Earlier this year, my husband and a research partner of his facilitated an informal discussion (or debate) on this topic: should professional societies exist, and if so, do you need to belong to one?
Without intending to revisit that question, I've been mulling it over for the past two weeks (well, actually longer). Specifically, I've been wrestling with the pros and cons of long-term, intensive volunteering with a professional society. In my case, that has been the Ecological Society of America. I've previously detailed the major time, intellectual, and programmatic investments made there by me and my collaborators. And, so far I've mostly discussed the cons of over-volunteering this way.
But, I'm not really a self-inflicted suffering sort when it comes to volunteering. Volunteering is meaningful and often fun for me. That's probably because most of my life, I've whole-heartedly and intensively volunteered in organizations that met the following criteria:
Potential for growth/change that can make a real difference
Sense of community
Connection to a "greater good" cause (not just the org. itself)
Awesome people who are also committed to working together to make things better
Having a (generally) great time doing this work
You'll notice there are not some of the incentives that might make volunteering conceptually appealing. Mostly, the budgets were...zero. So:
Few physical perks (like no merch/branded gear, no meals, no travel support or travel, etc.)
No financial compensation
Sometimes, not even any public acknowledgement or appreciation
No short-term wins
So, why. the. heck!?
Why did we do such a deep-dive and create an entire member section, extensive year-round programming, a scicomm section in an ESA journal, and loads of programming at the annual conferences? All for free. For a decade!?!
I can't speak for my collaborators at that time, but I'm going to transparently tell you what I got and continue to get from my membership and active (or currently semi-active) engagement with the society, its programs, and its annual conference.
It's possible this post will be the one that actually matters to a lot of readers, because I'm going to dig into the social capital I've accrued and how that has been beneficial to me and people I support.
Straight-up: what were the benefits?
In no particular order, here's what I've identified so far. I may come back and add to this list if I think of additional benefits after this initially posts.
Regularly affirming our sense of self- and collective-efficacy
Heightened visibility for our profession within and beyond ESA
Organizing things (vs. attending them) levels you up into a different level of collegial relationships and low-/mid-level leadership visibility. This has absolutely been true for me.
Minor influence on major decisions within the society (better than no influence at all)
A decade of experience honing messaging around the value of scicomm, people who do scicomm, and ensuring others get scicomm training
Small grants to fund scicomm awards we couldn't get ESA to offer directly
Learning video-conferencing and online project management tools waaaay before 2020 compelled us all to figure it out overnight
Really deep, valuable friendships with a handful of people
Robust, durable, long-term, work-friend relationships with a wide net of people. Put another way, I know a lot of people's names, and they know mine. That means, they're more likely to open my emails right away (even though we might not have seen each other in 5+ years). That means they might think of me for advisory roles on big initiatives, department seminar invitations, or paid training gigs. (And vice versa!) And, we can use our connections to mutually ask for a favor, help someone else make a professional connection, etc.
An invitation to write a regular Writing Science column in one of ESA's journals.
The cachet to propose and build an entire scicomm section in one of ESA's journals, then run it however I saw fit.
The (albeit flimsy) oomph of saying, "I'm Bethann Garramon Merkle, chair of the Communication & Engagement Section of the Ecological Society of America, and I'd like to chat with you about/propose/discuss an idea/ask for your support for our ABC thing/project/effort." In other words, having any kind of affiliation at all helps. That is science and has the gravitas of a 100+-year-old institution can be even more useful. This was especially true when I was first an ESA member. At that time, I was a freelance journalist for a regional, minority-language paper in French-speaking Canada. I was nobody from nowhere. :) Sometimes, I could get people to talk to me or work with me or support our initiatives because the ESA affiliation at least got me in the door.
Networking with folks with common interests at a range of career stages. Make no mistake: your peers/near-peers will become the people who know things, who do things, who control things. I can get inside intel from folks who used to be NSF program officers via text message, because we've worked together on voluntary efforts in ESA. Same for award nominations. Reference letters. Guest speaking invites. Mutual boosting on social media. Research proposal collaborations. Referrals.
Mentorship in and beyond academic concerns
First-name-basis, long-term relationships with top-ranking and mid-level ESA staff (who make the ESA world go round). This can make all sorts of ideas possible (or at least efficiently help me scope the impossibility of an idea). This connection is possible because I'm not cold-calling people who have an absurdly long to-do list.
Orientation and behind-the-scenes views of the way that professional societies work, how they function as ex officio organs of the academic prestige paradigm, and how to leverage that reality in my favor. Think: leadership roles in sections or governance-level committees; first-name basis with "big names" in ecology (which leads to collaborations, reference letters, informal boostering on Twitter or mutual blog supporting, etc.); credibility because influential folks saw our programming grow and be consistently awesome; editorial roles; and yes, awards. All of these are proxies, on our CVs, for whether we are "good" at academia. Piling those up made a real difference when I transitioned into academia. I was already "legible" to administrators and colleagues at my institution, because I'd been doing the service side of being an academic for years.
Put another way, ESA [1] taught me how to be an academic, years before I ever realized (a) that was an option for me or, (b) that I was going to try for it. And, my roles and relationships and the opportunities we created for ourselves within the society, helped me learn to be and demonstrate my competency (or even prowess!) at being an academic.
I didn't study anything obviously leading to an academic career. I never formally trained in ecology (beyond a couple of undergrad classes). But, I've worked in and adjacent to academic and applied ecology for my entire career. I can hang with ecologists such that one of my co-authors asked me last year: Do you consider yourself an ecologist? And, after a wide-ranging conversation, I found myself saying, maybe? And he replied, well, I would say yes! (And this is a guy who has had a long and influential career in ecology. )
What I'm getting at here is that engaging in and investing deeply in some aspects of ESA -- working with fellow members to create those corners and make them amazing -- was essential to what I know how to do today and where I sit in my career now.
And make no mistake, merely paying annual dues or attending the annual conference doesn't get us to this level of reciprocal capacity. I "pocketed" and invested in this social capital by being an overly-active-member for the past decade.
But, as I mentioned last week, it costs around $3,000 a year to go to the annual conference. That's where I first made these connections in-person. That was non-negotiable then. In the more-virtual world we're in today, it would technically be possible to develop strong relationships by being active in an ESA section's leadership without first going to the conference. But, a lot of the activity of a section revolves around planning and offering programming at the conferences. So, you'll miss out on a lot if you do all the planning, but don't go to help deliver it.
That's what's on the table for me in this mini-series: what kind of investment is worth it for what kind of benefits? And, given those calculations are very different for me now then they were in multiple previous stages of my involvement, what's next?
What might hold me/bring me back?
I don't really need those activities or roles in ESA to "validate" me as an academically credible person anymore [2]. I can look the look, walk the talk (just see my CV).
Relationships could bring me back
If my close friends and collaborators still went every year, I'd be digging hard and deep to come up with funding to join them. Given they aren't there (or we go so rarely we're unaware we are there together! 🤦♀️[3]), my calculus shifts.
Compensation
Now, I weigh my life and potential impacts elsewhere vs. contributing free programming or leadership to ESA that I am regularly paid for by other organizations. It's a no-contest, not-going outcome. I was really happy to reconnect with the people I did this year, but there were only a few such folks. Even so, we cooked up at least two ideas for great workshops or sessions. These are the kinds of programming I am really good at planning, and I and collaborators have evidence these trainings really work. But, I can't afford [4] to spend several thousand dollars to offer them for free at ESA 2025, especially when I could start shopping them around to other entities who are likely to compensate me for them.
Organizational investment in my expertise and growth
I know -- there are loads of us ESA members who have valuable expertise. I'm not special in this regard. I shouldn't be the only one who gets compensated, or even gets some travel support. We should all be compensated for what we know and contribute [5]. That's my firm stance. We offer a phenomenal service, for free, to an organization that makes money off of us paying to attend its annual conference and also offer all the content during it.
I also totally recognize there's a circularity to this. We see it clearly in the exploitation and parasitism of the pay-to-publish model we bemoan in academic journals.
Of course, our contributions could be seen as necessary acts of reciprocity within a self-supporting, mutually beneficial community. I love that framing. It's what got me into this work with ESA. It's what kept me doing this work for a long time. The trouble is that the academic prestige paradigm gets in the way. Most of us working in human dimensions encounter inertia or active resistance that makes it eventually (or sometimes immediately) impossible to perceive our work as reciprocal. Without a concerted, long-term commitment and investment on the part of ESA, the relationship will continue to feel lopsided. (And, I have loads of concrete ideas about how this could be resourced and implemented. If ESA wants to develop a process for compensated consulting with members on it, I'd be happy to participate. I'm confident many other currently ambivalent members/lapsed members would, too.)
My hope
I'm not holding my breath for any of this change. But I really wish it would happen. I'd like the organization to support my continued membership. My work in ESA has been fulfilling (despite all the hurdles). I've learned a ton over the past decade. I've had opportunities, made connections, and contributed in ways that matter on an individual scale (see my list of benefits above) even when they don't make a substantial impact on the organization itself. It's time for this work to be collective at the organizational level, though. That means we can't just expect it to happen (or make it happen) in in member-driven interest groups that operate too deeply and lightly within the society to actually change it.
How about you?
When's the last time you were actively involved with a professional entity that wasn't your employer? How has that supported your professional and personal growth? Do the benefits that you gleaned from that effort still feel relevant now? Is it time for you to do something else?
NOTES
[1] And the Dynamic Ecology blog! That is a vital road map if you're trying to understand early career decisions in academia.
[2] And, let's be very clear, my identity as a straight, White, cis woman was always a quiet advantage over being perceived as at least marginally credible. That I am ferociously self-confident never hurt, either (see previous sentence for at least some explanation of that attribute).
[3] I actually missed seeing a couple of people who were in Long Beach, but I didn't know it!! That's a kernel for another day's musings about how our coordination around conference-going (at least in ESA and scicomm) has unraveled since the disintegration of Twitter. (And how few of us are going with any regularity.)
[4] I'm not actually saying this from a very high horse, even though there is absolutely privilege associated with merely being an academic. I'm the lowest paid faculty in my department, which is administratively justified by me not having a PhD and not being a "true scientist" or some such nonsense. I don't have/didn't get start-up funding. As a non-tenure-track faculty member, I don't have the same job security, and volunteering for the good of academia doesn't (not a shocker!), actually make your position more protected. Working for free on conference programming for a society's main, annual fundraiser pulls me away from the paid work of my job and the unpaid, nice parts of the rest of my life. This is a calculation I have to make.
[5] A clarification (added after this exchange on the Dynamic Ecology blog): The compensation I’m talking about is for providing consulting-level services to the organization itself, or when members develop longer-term programming that becomes a real asset for the organization. The occasional special session at the conference isn’t in the same category. I think it’s reasonable that programming at the conference is a volunteer activity…to a point And there’s also the reality that some folks get paid elsewhere for what ESA traditionally expected for free. I’m happy to report there's been some shift toward some compensation in some areas of this in ESA, after 10 years of some of us working toward it. A lot of our efforts on this front were informed by being “nontraditional” ESA members (e.g., employed not in academia, but in industry, government, NGO, solopreneur, and freelance sectors). Our calculus had to be different because our funding models are/were different, and many of us paid out of pocket (and could only barely afford to). Our needs from and contributions to conferences/ESA were also somewhat different: not only exchanging scientific ideas via talks, but sharing (and sometimes selling) services and expertise that were valuable to fellow members and the society itself. There’s no right or wrong here, necessarily. Just a reality that many of us want from ESA, or see potential in ESA for, some things that aren’t typical because we aren’t as typical as the traditional focus of the org. For a long time, it felt worth it to work toward creating that space for ourselves. Now, I’m not so sure, and I’m sad and conflicted about it.
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