A New Year
I’m honored and excited to serve as your 2024-2025 Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Foundation Chair. I look forward to working closely with our volunteer board members and donors to serve our fellow Academy members and profession.
During my nearly 40 years as a dietetics professional and diabetes educator, I have found the Academy and its members to be extraordinary allies in my work to optimize the health and well-being of the people I consult in my practice through food and nutrition. In order to give back to the great organization that has done so much for me, I have had the pleasure of serving the Academy in a wide range of volunteer leadership roles and look forward to continuing to contribute as Foundation Chair.
Our Foundation empowers current and future food and nutrition professionals at all levels of study through scholarships, awards, research grants, fellowships, and public nutrition education. The Foundation’s work is impressive!
Students are at the heart of our Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Foundation through our annual scholarship program. Now, more than ever, the challenges students are facing while working to complete their education and achieve their goals are staggering. The number of scholarship applications our Academy Foundation now receives outweighs the scholarships we can award by three to one. In 2023, more than 700 deserving students who applied for a scholarship were unable to receive one based on available funds.
To meet this increasing demand for scholarships, our Academy Foundation launched our Make It a Million Scholarship Campaign to raise $1M dollars by 2025. The goal of this campaign is to enable our Foundation to award $1M in scholarships each year.
We are currently at 74% of our goal and every dollar matters, no matter how large or small and will help us get that much closer to our goal. Please consider kicking our new year off with a gift to this significant campaign.
Lastly, I would like to express my appreciate to Susan Laramee, MS, RDN, FADA, FAND, immediate Past Foundation Chair. Susan, in her passionate way, led the Foundation through a tremendous year. Susan has served the Academy and our Foundation in many different roles, because she cared so much about our work and the future of our profession. Thank you, Susan! Looking forward I am excited about working with our talented 2024-2025 officers and board members. They represent varied areas of interest in our profession and a range of professional experiences. All are tireless volunteers within the Academy and passionate about our profession.
I am looking forward to sharing our successes this year through this monthly message!
Sincerely,
Marcia Kyle, RDN, CDCES, LD, FAND
2024-2025 Academy Foundation Chair
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