Founding chapter convening — Southeastern regional launch

The Southeastern region will host the first regional convening of IES United States this fall, bringing founding chapter presidents from Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida together for two days of facilitation training, curriculum review, and structured dialogue.

The convening is led by Regional Director Ray Roh, who has overseen the Southeast since the branch's formation. Its purpose is practical rather than ceremonial: chapters that begin well tend to keep running, and chapters that begin without a method tend to dissolve within a term.

Sessions will cover the mechanics that make an ethics chapter work — how to frame a case so that it admits of genuine disagreement, how to intervene when a discussion collapses into consensus or into performance, how to keep records that let a chapter measure its own progress, and how to recruit members who will still be present in March.

A significant portion of the program is devoted to the Society's intergenerational commitment. Regional advisors will model the practitioner conversation format that chapters are expected to run at least twice per academic year, in which a guest describes a decision made under real constraint and students interrogate the reasoning rather than the outcome.

“A chapter is not a room that has been booked. It is a standard that has been agreed to, and then kept.”

The convening closes with each chapter presenting its year plan for regional review — a deliberately uncomfortable exercise, and one the region intends to repeat annually.

Additional regional convenings for the Northeast, West Coast, and Central regions are being scheduled for the 2026–27 academic year.