Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

NEERA 2104 first annual meeting was held via zoom on March 15th, and this meeting acts to support of our committees objectives.

1. Coordinate information sharing to facilitate region-wide IPM collaborations and knowledge transfer.
2. Leverage regional expertise to identify and prioritize stakeholder needs, knowledge gaps, and funding opportunities.
3. Facilitate cooperation, team building and multistate research and extension programs .
4. Represent IPM activities, opportunities and needs of Northeast region Land Grant IPM programs to Federal and state agencies and other entities.
5. Collaborate with and advise the Northeastern IPM Center to publicize the accomplishments of all IPM research and extension programs in the region, develop the northeastern region IPM communications network, and maintain a database of IPM programs throughout the Northeast Region.
6. Foster communications and represent Northeast IPM interests to IPM programs in other regions and at the national level

We also identified more specific efforts that will be carried out over the course of this project, including:

* Improved communication with NEIPM Center Staff. The majority of coordinating committee members are new to their roles at their institutions or new to their role as state IPM coordinator, and therefore unaware of many of the roles/services played by NEIPMC. We seek to improve this situation in two ways: 1) the chair will work with committee members and NEIPMC staff to draft a "cheat sheet" of services and contact information for new members, and 2) more time will be devoted to highlighting NEIPMC activities in our next annual meeting

* Improved impact reporting. David Lane (NEIPMC) has agreed to provide leadership in efforts to improve impact reporting in our region, including 1) producing web-based tutorials on impact reporting for IPM coordinators (see link in meeting minutes), and 2) reframe the format of NEERA 2104 state reports ahead of next year's annual meeting. The current format of state reports is determined by each reporting state, so the format is highly variable and there's some confusion about how this report differs from EIP annual reports. David Lane will work with the chair to provide state coordinators with more specific prompts regarding impact in their states, in order to write a more robust impact narrative for the region by the end of this project.