Prospectus
MEMBERSHIP NEWS & UPDATES
VOL. 47 | ISSUE 2 | 2021
Letter from the President By Viola Kanevsky, OD
Once in a while I slow down, take a break
from my frantic life, and count my blessings. In terms of my professional life, the blessings are manifold. Certainly, optometry has allowed me to live a comfortable, well-balanced, and satisfying life. I’ve been told many times that AOA members tend to earn higher salaries than their non-member colleagues and I’ve often shrugged off this statement as a “chickenor-egg” type of conundrum - do they earn more because they are members OR are they better able to afford the dues BECAUSE they earn more? I did a lot of thinking about what I personally want to accomplish in my year as president and I kept coming back to strengthening and increasing membership. In my opinion, no matter what we do, if our members don’t see the benefit of belonging, then our little echo chamber will eventually cave in on us. So I returned to my conundrum. Am I really more successful and satisfied because I am a member of the NYSOA? What is it about membership that drives success? Of course, happiness is individual but as a rule, humans in general, and optometrists in particular, are gregarious beings. There is safety in numbers. Cooperation is an evolutionarily stable strategy. I read an interesting Penn State study by Rebecca Bliege Bird, et al., examining cooperation by using the practice of sharing catches after lizard hunts among Martu hunter-gatherer women. The most successful hunters shared the meat with all, strengthening their reciprocal bonds
COVID-19 Resources The NYSOA and AOA are committed to supporting and serving members during the COVID-19 pandemic. Please visit our resources pages online and contact us with specific requests or questions. NYSOA COVID-19 Resources: www.nysoa.org/covid-19 Latest updates from the American Optometric Association: www.aoa.org/covid-19/covid-19-latest-updates New York State Updates: coronavirus.health.ny.gov
and distributing the burden of resource scarcity risks. This trustbuilding activity served to solidify the long-term interpersonal networks that function to reduce unanticipated risk. This seemed to me a very apt description of my experience over my 30 years as a member of the NYSOA. My most successful fellow members have shared the meat of their individual experiences and flattened my learning curve over the course of my career. Their collective knowledge allowed me to adapt faster, skip making my own painful mistakes, attain success more rapidly than my non-member peers who had to fend for themselves. Particularly during the height of the COVID crisis, we called each other almost daily and shared strategies for survival. We reduced and managed our risk as a team. I believe that at the end of the day, our team not only pulled through, but actually outpaced the industry. So yes, being a member has made me more successful. Bolder. More competitive. Less lonely. Being a member has made me happier. There are many big and small benefits available to members and certainly every OD should explore and utilize them, but the biggest benefit of all is the ability to network with a group of elite colleagues eager to share their resources with their pack. I look very much forward to gathering with my pack at Corning, next month, for what promises to be an amazing conference, and though it may be smaller than anticipated due to the surge in Delta Variant infections, it will be a seminal event upon which the Association will build an amazing future. See you in September! Sincerely,
Viola Kanevsky, OD, President, NYSOA
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LEGISLATIVE UPDATE........................................................ 3 COUNSEL’S CORNER.......................................................... 3 2021 INNOVATION VISION CONFERENCE REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN! .......................................... 9 COSMETIC CONTACT LENS FITTING DURING COVID-19... 12 THANK YOU TO OUR BUSINESS PARTNERS..................... 15