Becoming an active member of NACADA provided me with expertise in the field and with a life-time of friends...NACADA was a gift that would keep on giving!
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The early years of NACADA were full of interesting dilemmas, successes, and experiments...Many of the organizational policies, resources, and activities we now take for granted were born out of the needs and concerns that appeared in those early years.
NACADA was incorporated in Vermont in 1979 with 429 members and 18 members on the Board of Directors. Twenty years later, in 1999, there were 5318 members in the Association and more than 50 members on the Board. While not all Board members had voting rights, they all attended the meetings and had a voice in discussions where there was much conversation regarding who should speak and who should vote as representatives of different member constituencies... At the Fall 1999 Board meeting in Denver, President-elect Betsy McCalla-Wriggins (Rowan University) was appointed to chair a Task Force to investigate possible restructuring of the Association to better address these issues.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as institutional interest in academic advising began to grow seemingly exponentially, the need to support those in administrative positions became apparent. In much the same way that the first annual conference and, indeed, the Association itself were the result of a conversation between concerned individuals, so, too, the conceptual framework for the first NACADA Administrators’ Institute was the result of a conversation between advising administrators and the newly appointed Associate Director of NACADA, Charlie Nutt.
