Council Benefits

There are several benefits to becoming a council member.

Networking

• Meeting people in similar positions from academic institutions face-to-face.
• Meeting corporate representatives who provide various products and services to academic institutions.

Conferences

• Visiting institutions and experiencing their campuses and buildings through campus tours.
• Hearing speakers and engaging in discussions of topics relevant to academic and research institutions.
• Participating at the Annual World Workplace where programs and exhibits highlight both academic and commercial fields.

Newsletters and Communication

• Quarterly newsletters distributed to members along with an annual membership list.
• AFC Website available for the latest information on the conferences, officer contacts, and projects.
• AFC Listserv to inquire and obtain information on a specific topic or to discuss how an issue is being handled at another institution.

Self-education and Job Improvement

• Helping to establish norms across different educational institutions to aid benchmarking for our own.
• Seeing and hearing about issues experienced at our own institutions that are not unique but often common across the country and world.
• Learning new things and acquiring new tools and techniques to help perform our jobs better, often placing us on the leading edges of developing practices and concepts, helping us to be leaders instead of followers.
• Being exposed to the kind of research that is being done for facility management, which can contribute to what we are doing for our schools and universities.
• Changing the pace of our lives via attending the AFC conferences which seem to have a rejuvenating and recharging effect to the fast paced-driving-move ahead behavior most of us experience on the firing- line at our jobs.
• Reinforcing our personal and interactive skills through the self-help learning sessions that are often part of the AFC conference presentations.
• Having opportunities to express "what's on our mind" in open sessions, often with helpful feedback from conference participants.