Committee Chair: COD to Vote on ‘Amazing Slate’ of Candidates

First, candidates will attend the AAFP Leadership Conference, April 24-26, in Kansas City, Missouri, and participate in a candidate orientation and development program.

This is the second election cycle in which the Nominating Committee has put forth candidates for three at-large director positions. The committee was created by the 2023 Congress in an effort to create more competitive elections, replacing the longstanding tradition of chapters nominating candidates. 

AAFP News recently talked with Nominating Committee Chair and past AAFP President Reid Blackwelder, M.D., FAAFP, associate dean for graduate medical and continuing education at East Tennessee State University’s Quillen College of Medicine, about how the committee’s work is evolving. 

AAFP News: What was new or different about this year’s process? 

Blackwelder: This year we had an opportunity to consider outreach, whereas last year we did not do any. That first year we were trying to figure out how the committee worked, so it did not look for people. We just took the organic process of considering the nominees who submitted applications.  

This year, after discussion with the AAFP executive staff, we decided a letter from me to all AAFP commission chairs and senior commission members would be a reasonable approach. It checked a critical box regarding nominees being involved within the governance structure of the Academy. 

The result of this letter was profound because it allowed us to have an amazing slate of qualified people. 

AAFP News: What does that outreach effort mean for the process going forward? 

Blackwelder: We now understand outreach has a role. We want to make sure that such efforts identify people with experience in the Academy with a leadership component. That’s a conversation we will be having, but we've not yet decided what that looks like for the next election cycle. We’re still learning.  

What’s exciting to me is that people are putting themselves forward who, without the Nominating Committee, otherwise might not have done so. And those people represent important voices for the Academy, such as family physicians with significant private practice experience, folks who are involved in academic medicine and people who have been stalwart members of their chapters.  

The nominating process has moved from the chapters to the committee, but leadership within chapters is still an important variable. We have not forgotten that aspect, and we won't ignore it. 

Ultimately, the elections are Congress's decision. The charge to the Nominating Committee is to provide the COD with a diverse slate of candidates from which to choose. This is a great group of people, and I'm super excited about what they bring to the table.  

AAFP News: Under the old system, a chapter wouldn’t have put forth two of its members in the same year. This year, you have two director candidates from the same state. It presents the possibility that two of three director roles could be filled from one state. Is that problematic? 

Blackwelder: That’s a great question that this year’s Congress will have to address. The Nominating Committee recognized that to only put forward one of two very qualified candidates from a chapter ran the risk of codifying what had been a longstanding agreement that a chapter had to have a pipeline, and you had to wait your turn to run. We haven’t put a limit on candidates related to chapter membership, and it would be dangerous to do so because that reinforces that chapter pipeline mentality. If the Nominating Committee decided candidates based on that old precept of “It’s your turn,” we would have gone against a core function of the Committee, which is finding the best possible candidates. 

Moreover, anyone elected to the Board should represent the entire membership and not a chapter. That is a hard shift for us as an organization to make because we still have an awareness of these unwritten “rules” that have guided our elections for years. The Congress needs to continue to discuss the variables that are most important in determining the voices they want to move forward to the Board. If the two candidates from Pennsylvania complement each other and bring different and valuable perspectives, you could make a good argument that both of them should go forward regardless of what chapter they came from. 

Part of this process is asking interesting questions and trying to make sure we maintain representation and voices from as many of our membership categories as we can. In large part, it’s the Nominating Committee's job to ask some of these questions through the slate we provide. Congress will provide answers with how it votes.  

AAFP News: You have one year left in your three-year appointment as chair. Are there other things that you want to accomplish before you hand it off to the next person? 

Blackwelder: One of my goals for this next cycle is to be clearer about qualifications so that people know up front if they meet them or not. We’re still working on determining those criteria, but some of them will include awareness, at a granular level, of AAFP governance. People need to know how we work, and that means they have to be involved somewhere. They have to have chapter involvement and AAFP involvement of some type, but we’re not going to be prescriptive. We’re not going to necessarily say you have to have been a commission chair. We’re not going to say you even have to have served on a commission. 

We’re trying to avoid creating unintended biases or hurdles, but rather to find a way to respect and appreciate the work people do in chapters, in commissions and in other roles that show leadership and advocacy for our members and our specialty.  

I also would like to have a set of qualifications for vice speaker advertised that will need to be different than the criteria for at-large members of the Board. Typically in organizations, a person serves as vice speaker before they become speaker to gain needed experience running large meetings. The vice speaker for our Congress needs to have some training in parliamentary procedure. A current difficulty our Academy is facing is that many chapters have lost their Congresses, so we don’t have as many members with that experience. Some chapters are doing their business within their Boards, so some annual chapter meetings have less of a governance aspect than they used to. So, a chapter still may have someone called a speaker, but that doesn’t guarantee they understand parliamentary procedure. The opportunities to learn this role have become fewer. We probably need to consider members who have filled similar roles within their state medical associations if not their chapter. Developing this set of qualifications is a major goal for the committee this next year.

Our Congress is like nothing else. The learning curve is huge. I anticipate that in the next year or two we will have an opening at the speaker and vice speaker level, and we need to be ready to fill those following clear qualification guidelines. 

2025 Candidates