2023 Presidential Initiatives: Growing Down as we Grow up

Dr. Daniel Singley

2023 Division 51 President

My vision for my 2023-2024 Presidential year is summed up in the phrase, “growing down as we

grow up.” As a Division of APA, and as a group of people who work together as members and in

leadership, D51 has come a long way since our initial founding in 1995. Since then, our

membership, scholarship, and dedication to making D51 a welcoming professional home have

allowed us to “grow up” by innovating and changing to meet the evolving needs of a society who

has come to think about gender in ever more complex ways. I also see the need for us to “grow

down” by rooting ourself in our traditions and celebrating the relationships that have made D51

such a great group of people and interest groups. Over the past year, we have updated our

bylaws, revised our Mission Statement, migrated to a new website, and even slightly changed

our Division’s name – all with the goal of keeping ourselves current and in touch with

membership and society as-a-whole.

Toward these ends, I’ve worked with D51’s Board of Directors, members, students, task forces, and special interest groups to at once garner more visibility outside the APA through marketing while also focusing on “inreach” projects aimed at helping to better connect all of our membership with each other. For example, a group of 300 members are engaging in the “ten calls” initiative in which they make calls to ten randomly-assigned members with the sole intent to connect - no sales pitch. In March 2023, we held the first Psychology of Men & Boys conference in San Diego, California - the first time in over eight years! We also hired the Division’s first-ever staff member, our Marketing & PR Specialist to help with website maintenance, social media, and managing an annual calendar of events and marketing campaigns. In the name of garnering more visibility for men’s mental health, several colleagues and I teamed up with Dennis Quaid’s production studio to film several video spots which will air on television and go out as focused email campaigns. Finally, we’re working to firm up some administrative processes like documentation and onboarding so that those in leadership positions can better get up and running!

It’s been an honor serving D51 and look forward to the growth I see coming.