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Facilities Manager | july/august 2014 | 17 PROUD ACHIEVEMENTS Every APPA president has at least one important project that represents the highlight of their administration; some recall several with pride. Put all of those accomplishments together and you have both a history of APPA and a blueprint for a successful association that puts mem- ber needs and development first. Don Mackel makes a distinction between the "most important" and the "most rewarding" impact of his 1992 APPA presidency. The most-rewarding contribution was the culmination of many previous years' work in bringing Australia and New Zealand more formally into the association. What he found most important was "carrying out a mandate from predecessors Bill Middleton and Jack Hug to con- tinue and refine the association's long-range stra- tegic planning process, which has borne huge fruit in a difficult time for APPA and higher education institutions," he said. "My administration devel- oped a plan to deal with carrying out the wonderful work that Bill and Jack produced in their terms—a leap in sophistication for APPA. It was my and my predecessor Joe Estill's job to keep all the plates spinning and ensure that new services aligned with the plan." Mackel, who was at the University of New Mexico at the time, also takes pride in having seen APPA revamp its annual meeting to become increasingly focused on educational resources and enhance its relationship with business partners as a partnership that has benefited both over the years. An expanded training program also stands out for Mackel. Diane Kerby, 1993 president while at Berea College, where she is now head of alumni rela- tions, is modest about her ground-breaking role as the first woman to lead APPA. "You get your five minutes of fame, then you have to do the work," she said. "It was kind of a novelty to be first, but it shows how progressive the association was." She is glad to see more women enter the profession and the association over the years, and to have played a part in their increasing opportunities. Kerby is equally modest about her activities as president. "Whatever I may have accomplished was not just me," she said. "Many people were involved in moving the association forward in terms of edu- cation and professional development." Under her leadership, APPA added to its long-range plan with a focus on "the importance of diversity, not just in gender, ethnicity, and race, but also of types of institutions—it had been about 20 years since the president was from a small college." Creating a focus on developing leaders is Doug Christensen's legacy as 1995 president, when he was at Brigham Young Univer- sity, through pioneering APPA's Leadership Academy. He met with his predecessor, Charlie Jenkins, and "we found that we had great managers in APPA, but few lead- ers. The Leadership Academy moved APPA toward being more balanced." Christensen's presidency was also when APPA developed its first formal vision statement and realigned its mission statement. He also led the move to quantify cost aspects of facilities manage- ment, leading to the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) concept and research, which he calls "a critical piece" of the association and the profes- sion. "We look at ourselves as 'just maintaining stuff,' but we have to turn the corner toward being seen as much more of value to our institu- tions," he said, and TCO is an important part of this process. Dorsey Jacobs, 1988 president when he was at West Virginia University, takes pride in having extended APPA's international reach by bringing Australia into the association. "En- ergy was another big thing—mine was the first institution to bring natural gas vehicles and buy natural gas on the open market," two innova- tions that served as examples to the APPA mem- bership, he said. Pete van der Have, then at the University of Utah, became APPA president in 1997 "in an unusual way," he recalled. "I ran and barely lost the election, but the winning candidate had the bad luck of passing away before taking office. I am the only person not elected as APPA presi- dent by popular vote." Van der Have's goal as president was to make the organization more relevant to more people. "It was very white and very male," he said. "It was not warm to vendors. 'Extend an open hand' was my motto. The association is more diverse now." It's hard for Maggie Kinnaman, retired from the University of Maryland Baltimore, to choose between three significant achievements of her 1999 presidency. She's been involved the longest with the Facilities Performance Indicators, the now- annual benchmarking survey for which she formed the task force that created the Strategic Assessment Model (SAM). "I'm still working on it," she said. "I do the data scrubbing behind the scenes." Kinnaman also ranks serving as co-chair of APPA's Center for Facilities Research (CFaR) as one of her top three achievements, along with serving as editor-in-chief of the Don Mackel Diane Kerby Doug Christensen Dorsey Jacobs