2021-22 CASFAA President’s Message

It is with great pleasure and excitement that I welcome you to the 2022.  As you may be aware on January 1, the CASFAA presidency transferred from Stephanie Williams to myself.  I am very excited to take the reigns of such a great association and I am looking forward to working with and for you for the remainder of this year.  To ensure that we continue to meet our main goals and priorities I will be working closely with Stephanie and the board to ensure a seamless transition.  We have so many great things in store for our membership this year and I wanted to make sure that these are outlined quite nicely in this summary.

My three main priorities for the remainder of this year are as follows:: training, connecting, and building.  The groundwork for these three priorities has been set by our previous Presidents and the CASFAA Boards but it is imperative that this information is not lost and is built upon.  Over the past couple of years CASFAA has really explored opportunities for our membership to become engaged and to learn more about financial aid.  As we transition back to working in-person CASFAA has leveraged itself by developing and providing digital content to its membership.  I want to ensure that we continue to explore how CASFAA can provide meaningful professional development opportunities to all of our membership.  By teaching our membership I hope that CASFAA can become even more informed and engaged when working with our stakeholders.

Our stakeholders are also very important and it is imperative that they continue to see us as an engaged organization.  Working with our Past President I expect to connect and build on the work of our past executives to ensure that we move CASFAA's priorities forward.  Over the past 4 years I have seen excellent work done where some of our policy positions have been explored and implemented.  To learn more about CASFAA's priorities please visit: https://www.casfaa.ca/_Library/docs/CASFAA_Policy_Positions_Brief_2020-21-_external.pdf 

My previous two priorities lead to my third, building.  What am I hoping to build?  During my tenure we will need to start thinking about completing our current strategic plan (https://www.casfaa.ca/Strategic_Plan.html) but also developing our next Strategic Plan.  With a trained and engaged membership, and established connections I believe that we can start to envision where we see ourselves beyond 2023, and that will start in 2022.  Our Strategic Plans have helped to guide our organization, set measurable and attainable goals, and I want to be able to to do that for CASFAA.  There are many great opportunities that have been built but I know that we will be able to build more into our plans.  This is such an exciting time for our organisation and I am looking forward to working with the CASFAA board to explore where we will be headed.

Josh Levac
CASFAA President 2021-22