President's letter 2021

To all SIRA members and interested parties,

As we enter the 2nd year of living under a cloud of a global pandemic, there is growing hope and optimism. Still, we are all grappling with a considerable amount of risk and uncertainty about the future. Helping individuals and organizations evaluate risk and uncertainty, ultimately making better (risk) informed decisions, is the very reason SIRA exists.

Like most organizations' leadership teams, the SIRA Board has had to learn and adapt over the last year. We have taken the proverbial lemons and made lemonade by looking for ways to emerge from this a more robust organization that is better prepared for the future. For example, the all-volunteer Board and SIRAcon 2020 planning committee were forced to cancel the annual in-person conference scheduled for April in Tampa, FL, and switched to a very successful virtual conference in four short months.

With the new Board members coming online in 'Q4 2020, we have started to build a more comprehensive strategy and organizational structure to drive SIRA's mission of promoting effective risk analysis methods and practices. Part of this strategy is to launch a new volunteer committee structure that will help us scale and execute important initiatives but were previously impossible.

Finally, I want to send a heartfelt thank you to my predecessor, Lisa Young, and all of the previous Board volunteers who help build and run SIRA for the past decade. I think I speak for my fellow Board members in saying that we will do our best to continue all of your great work in building a world-class non-profit organization that supports a growing community of risk analysts.

Regards,

Apolonio "Apps" Garcia III, SIRA Board President (and SIRAnaut, Mission Commander)