Farewell from the Foundation Chair

After 13 years on the Board of Directors of PIDS, including the past 2 years as Chair of the PIDS Foundation, I now contribute to my last PIDS newsletter. It has been a tremendous joy to see PIDS grow and mature over the past decade, and we should be proud of all we’ve accomplished, what we are still striving towards, and the impact we can generate in the next few years. 

In our PIDS Foundation work, we tell stories about our people – the undergraduate student who falls in love with ID at their first conference, the medical student catapulted into a research career through a summer internship, or the fellow who gets their first award, through PIDS, that makes them more competitive for their next grant. These stories encourage others to support the work that we do. I encourage each of you to consider how your individual talents, time, and treasure can be used for the advancement of PIDS and child health. 

• Time: None of us have enough time in the day to do all we want or need to accomplish. We are often rushing from one thing to another, hoping to reach some kind of work-life equilibrium. Despite this universal tension, I encourage you to plan how you could commit even 1-2 hours per month working with PIDS on something that is meaningful to you. I promise it will be time well invested. 
• Talent: I’ve learned a lot over the past decade volunteering with PIDS. One lesson I learned early on is that our specialty has attracted some of the most talented individuals I’ve ever met. You are scientists, clinicians, advocates, teachers, communicators, and leaders. I encourage each of you to contribute these talents to PIDS, mentoring others and expanding how we can impact child health globally.
• Treasures: While we talk a good deal about compensation issues in pediatric ID (and rightly so), we should also recognize that we are among the top 1% of earners on the planet. I encourage each of us to consider how we can support causes we care deeply about – local libraries, schools, local relief services, places of worship, symphonies, and, certainly, PIDS. Your gifts are vital to what we do and enable us to secure support from our industry partners more effectively. 

Whether we are inspired most by the words of Anne Frank (“No one has ever become poor by giving”), Winston Churchill (“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give”), St. Francis of Assisi (“It is in giving that we receive”), or any of a multitude of others, many of us have tasted the joy that accompanies the generous giving of our time, talent, and treasures. May we not grow weary in those efforts.

Thank you for allowing me to serve alongside you for the past several years – it has been a joy for me. Therefore, I can’t wait to celebrate a year of giving and partnership at the PIDS Foundation Dinner at IDWeek with each of you. You are what makes PIDS the wonderful society that it is.

Let us continue to press onward and upward,

Buddy