As we embark on a new year, ACBS is looking back at 2016. With over 8,000 members worldwide, ACBS has been busy in 2016. We hosted our largest conference in Seattle, Washington, USA in June, appointed a new JCBS editor, and witnessed some major breakthroughs in RFT research. The community is vibrant with over 3,000 people on our professional listserv, and many members actively working within our numerous Chapters and Special Interest Groups throughout the world.

In 2017 we look forward to welcoming everyone to Seville, Spain, in June. We also will continue our very popular Student SIG Webinar series (thank you Student SIG!), and to build the Chapter and SIG Resource section of the website. The organization is growing in many ways, and you can look forward to learning more about the services we are providing throughout this year!

To view the ACBS 2016 Annual Report and learn more about the organization and what the Board was working on in 2016, please login to your ACBS member account and download the report attached to this webpage.

Please strongly consider getting personally and professionally involved with the mission of ACBS by volunteering here:

https://contextualscience.org/volunteer

Wishing you the best,

D. J. Moran, Ph.D.

ACBS President

As we embark on a new year, ACBS is looking back at 2017. With over 7,400 members worldwide, ACBS has been busy in 2017. We hosted our largest conference in Seville, Spain in June, published Volume 6, Issues 1-4 of JCBS, and surpassed the 200 RCTs threshold as a community. The community is vibrant with 2,000 people on our professional listserv, and many members actively working within our numerous Chapters and Special Interest Groups throughout the world.

In 2018 we look forward to welcoming everyone to Montréal, Canada in July. The organization is growing in many ways, and you can look forward to learning more about the services we are providing throughout this year!

To view the ACBS 2017 Annual Report and learn more about the organization and what the Board was working on in 2017, please login to your ACBS member account and download the report attached to this webpage.

Please strongly consider getting personally and professionally involved with the mission of ACBS by volunteering here: https://contextualscience.org/volunteer

Wishing you the best,

As President of ACBS, I am delighted to share an update on our activities and successes over the last year, and more importantly, the initiatives we are planning for the future. 

Looking back

There is much to celebrate and be proud of in 2018. ACBS is a remarkable organisation and our annual report is a show stopper. Here are some highlights: 

• We are a community. We have almost 8,000 members worldwide who contribute values-based dues. We also have committees, special interest groups, and the elected board, all working as committed volunteers with passion and vision of advancing science and practice. 
• The World Conference was in Montréal, Canada in July. It was attended by 926 people. We had a fabulous line up of international speakers, members of ACBS, and guest speakers. Best of all was the vibe as the members came together to share their vision. Did you know many key talks at our conferences are recorded? See the videos here.  
• Our journal, JCBS, is alive and thriving. For the first time, we now have an  impact factor of 1.216. Did you know ACBS members get to read the journal for free? 
• The community is vibrant with nearly 2,000 people joining in discussion on our professional listserv. Join the listservs here. 

Looking to the future

2019 is set to be a year of expanding our vision and opening up new opportunities. 

• In February, the ACBS Board spent a weekend planning the 3-year strategy to galvanize our organisation and help our community thrive. Over the past few months facilitators have worked to gather the views of members and the board, working hard to turn that into strategy to guide our action. Stay tuned. 
• In June, we'll have the World Conference in Dublin, Ireland! We all know the Irish are legendary in their hosting of events, so this isn't the conference you want to miss. 
• ACBS Voices will be a new podcast that will share the tales and tall stories of ACBS' committee, SIG, and board activities. Episodes not to be missed. Details soon...
• Register for new opportunities. We will be calling for applications for talented people to fill a few vacancies on our committees soon. Working on our committees is a wonderful learning and growth opportunity. Please consider getting personally and professionally involved with the mission of ACBS. Join the gang and get involved here. 

The organisation is growing in many ways, and you can look forward to learning more about the services we are providing throughout the year!

Warmly,

Louise Hayes, Ph.D.
ACBS President

As we embark on a new year, ACBS is looking back at 2019. With over 8,300 members worldwide, ACBS has been busy in 2019. We hosted our largest conference in Dublin, Ireland in June, published Volumes 11-14 of JCBS, and the board supported the establishment of the ACBS Foundation. The community is vibrant with nearly 2,000 people on our professional listserv, and many members actively working within our numerous Chapters and Special Interest Groups throughout the world.

In 2020 we look forward to welcoming everyone to New Orleans, USA in July. The organization is growing in many ways, and you can look forward to learning more about the strides we are making throughout this year!

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Please strongly consider getting personally and professionally involved with the mission of ACBS by volunteering here: https://contextualscience.org/volunteer

Wishing you the best,

Dennis Tirch, Ph.D.
ACBS President

At the close of perhaps the most impactful year many of us have ever known, I am writing to you from just south of Boston, listening in the darkness to the sounds of the ocean. The stars are bright and clear tonight, with Orion the hunter, followed by Sirius, the bright blue dog star, overhead. It is cold; the grass is brittle with ice. The windows glow with warmth behind me. I have been honored to work as the President of the Board this year. I am blessed with committed colleagues who love ACBS, who put in many hours weekly to support it, to help us as an organization grow in our wisdom and support of our members, to reflect honestly about where we can grow. I am lucky. Not all of us are so lucky.

ACBS is growing. We are growing steadily more diverse, with members around the world, from many cultures and nations, from different professions from coaches to public health scientists to evolutionary biologists, from marginalized to privileged groups. It is exciting to me that our organization may become a scientific home for so many different perspectives, for as we become more varied, and as we flex our thinking, we will richen and deepen our work.

But we are also experiencing growing pains. We continue to grapple with how best to amplify the diverse perspectives that make up our community; we continue to build our infrastructure to support our scientific and clinical goals; and we have had to be flexible to find our way through 2020. It has been a challenging year around the world. Yet, true to our nature, our community has stepped up, has reached out, has marshalled our resources to support those around us as we make our way through the COVID-19 pandemic. Many in ACBS have been creating resources, offering their time pro-bono, and reaching out in support of our colleagues and communities. If you are one of our members who has done this, thank you. Thank you for representing us well, and thank you for your generosity, time, and for sharing your expertise.

Now at the beginning of 2021, as the year turns towards the light and begins the slow and quiet shift into a new season, it seems a good time to reflect on how this time has changed us and has forged our community into something new.

Little did we know.

Little did we know that 2020 would be a year that would bring fires and floods around the world, the steady loss of biodiversity, unrest in many countries, and to top it off, we are in the middle of a pandemic that has resulted in mass lockdowns and over 2 million deaths.

Little did we know how short our time would be with each other. We have suffered many losses in our families, in our friends, to COVID. 

Let’s pause for a moment and breathe. A good friend of mine sometimes reminds me that we can only take steps from where we are – not from where we wish to be. So let us take some steps now, as we are, together. And let us look back to see how far we have come.
 

Lisa Coyne, Ph.D.
ACBS Board President
 

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With 2021 behind us, we continue to wrestle with the reality of a global pandemic and the myriad challenges it has presented. Many -- if not all of us -- have had pain and loss. These trying times have required us to adapt and to grow in ways that we might not have anticipated under ordinary circumstances. Now more than ever, ACBS is striving to evolve in such a way that we might be an organization worthy of our members, ready to meet the challenges of the coming year.

And we have indeed evolved - ACBS is now a community of 9,200 people representing over 100 countries. For the second year running, we held our annual World Conference online with record attendance: 1500 attendees from 69 counties. Our hope was to make this conference the most accessible to date by including offerings in both Spanish and Portuguese and by offering reduced rates for members from low and middle income countries (LAMIC). In addition, ACBS created a number of new resources for our members, including video recordings of the 2020 World Conference, many of which are available in Spanish.

Also of note this year, several ACBS chapters - India, Poland and Türkiye - hosted conferences that were culturally tailored and designed to be accessible to members of LAMIC and other communities. Our Awards committee created a new award intended to support work that advances diversity, equity and inclusion in our community. The strategic teams that are entrusted with carrying out the work of our four pillar plan have made commendable progress, including three major projects and several upcoming papers. Finally, the impact factor of the Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science (JCBS) more than doubled, going from 1.523 to 3.092 in just one year.

Looking forward, we hope to make 2022 a year of connection -- expanding our work and creating new opportunities for our members. In June of 2022, we will host our World Conference in San Francisco, California. At this writing, we are working to make at least some offerings available online as we move toward an increasingly hybrid model for our annual conferences. We will also be calling for applications for talented people to fill a few vacancies on our committees and to work with our strategic pillar teams. We are always looking for passionate people who want to help shape the future of ACBS. Please consider getting personally and professionally involved with our mission. You can explore opportunities here.

Miranda K. Morris, Ph.D.
ACBS Board President  

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Throughout the year, the ACBS board worked on a variety of projects and initiatives. Some highlights are included below:

• The board held an open call and appointed new chairs for the Communications, DEI and Developing Nations Committees
• A new Lead moderator of the ACT for Professionals listserv was appointed
• Board members held a “Meet the Board” get-together for ACBS members (two meetings were held to accommodate international time zones)
• The Conference Strategy Committee (CSC) and the board worked together with the ACBS staff to hold the first hybrid conference in San Francisco, CA, U.S. (both in-person and online) and continues to work hard to help make our next hybrid conference in 24-28 July 2023 in Nicosia, Cyprus a success
• The CSC is undergoing changes to its structure and the board continues to solicit volunteers interested to help serve in this very important committee overseeing our annual conferences. 
• Through the ACBS Research Development Grant, the board provided financial support for 4 research projects that advance the field of CBS with the support of the Grants Committee
• The board approved financial support for English language editing supports for JCBS
• Progress of the ACBS pillars (Centering Science, Competency, Digital, and Empowerment) is continuously reviewed and monitored
• The Centering Science pillar is developing into a standing committee, the Scientific Strategic Council (SSC)
• The new ACBS website project is underway- a company has been hired to migrate the website to newer software, as well as improve features for usability
• A new JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) initiative was launched 

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