Matthew Barnard, S.E. 
SEAOSC President

Thank you for your continued support of SEAOSC! We cannot thank enough our Members and sponsors who continue to make this Association and our community special even during the craziness of 2020. There are so many great things happening within the Association: 

• Fantastic collaboration between the Association and our Student Chapters with SEAOSC members speaking during meetings at Cal Poly SLO and UCLA.
  

• We just finished a very successful joint meeting with ICC where there were 200 RSVPs. Great job by our Existing Building Committee!
  

• We have a special Policy Breakfast event on Oct. 20th where we will be engaging with our local legislator offices; sponsorship opportunities are available!
  

• On Nov. 5th, SEAOSC will be participating in the AIA Leadership Breakfast Leadership series as the featured guest. Look for an announcement with additional details.
  

To keep empowering all these great collaborations, we need your help. 

While we started off the Summer with a rapid renewal of memberships, our pace of renewals has slowed. Please engage your friends, co-workers, and others who need to be part of our community and ask them to join or renew. Need talking points? Reach out to the SEAOSC Office at seaosc@seaosc.org. 

Combined with our membership renewal challenge, our traditional program year has been turned upside down. On Oct. 7th, the Board elected to embrace a virtual program year until at least June 2021. We are revising our calendar and will focus on our 2021 Virtual Leadership Symposium (thank you WiSE!), our Career Fair and Scholarship Night plus having a reduced number of virtual events. Keep an eye on our LinkedIn account, website, and your email for breaking news updates on the calendar. With the change in the calendar, a small team of Board members are revising our sponsorship program. The revised sponsorship program will also be published soon on our website. 

2020 is a tough year for us all. On Sept. 27, I personally lost a friend and mentor. Terry Dooley, PE and founder of ACE Mentoring – LA passed away. The world truly lost one of its heroes. Terry inspired a generation of us to get involved with local high school youth in neighborhoods throughout SoCal and inspire them to join the architecture, construction, and engineering industry. He showed how one person could fundamentally make a difference through a love of design and construction and create a pipeline of new diverse talent who will shape our built environment for years to come; he will be missed. 

I am proud to share SEAOSC and ACE Mentoring will be collaborating going forward. On Oct 25, SEAOSC through our Diversity & Inclusion Initiative will be giving an introduction to Structural Engineering to the hundreds of ACE Mentoring Students. In 2021, SEAOSC is planning on collaborating with ACE Mentoring with their annual All-Schools Event where the ACE Mentoring Students compete in a pasta and popsicle design-build competition. Do you want to make a difference in our SoCal community that improves the pipeline of diverse talent interested in our industry? Get involved with our Diversity & Inclusion Committee and support our collaboration with ACE Mentoring. Email Laura Basualdo at lbasualdo@degenkolb.com to get involved in the Oct. 25 event or Lorena Arce at larce@lindapter.com to get involved with our Diversity & Inclusion Initiative.