Dear fellow PAX members:

See Lotus Leaflet - Spring 2011

It’s time to reach out.

For an organization with more than 14,000 members, remarkably few know that we still exist. We post the Pi Alpha Xi newsletter to our website and email it to you, the chapter advisors. We meet once a year at ASHS. But we are caught in the interstices of technology, because the only members we have email addresses for are the chapter advisors, and a number of those chapters are not even active.

Yet email, Twitter, Facebook and e-newsletters (not the word documents or PDFs we’ve been publishing as attachments) are the media used today. We need to be able to use those platforms to communicate with a much larger audience that is involved with horticulture and floriculture. We need to go beyond the university walls.

Pi Alpha Xi has a long and storied history, and could have a vibrant present and future. But I need your help to communicate it. What is happening with the chapter at your institution? What are your activities? Who are the students and what are they doing? Let us know, and I will put it in our newsletter.

Then, please send Dawn Mancini, the Executive Secretary of PAX (see more about Dawn and what she does on page 2 of the Spring 2011 issue of the Lotus Leaf), the email addresses of your chapter’s members so we can contact them and send them news from PAX about what other chapters are doing. Each time you send her a new roster of initiates, be sure to include their email addresses.

I am honored to be the President of Pi Alpha Xi. I and the Board of Directors want your ideas and suggestions about how we can involve a broader community of honor society members that show the best of horticulture and floriculture.

We need your help to move PAX into the 21st century. We need to communicate better. It’s time to reactivate.

Warm regards,

Dr. John C. Peterson
Department Head, Horticulture and Crop Science
California Polytechnic State University