What is the mission of an Association?

By definition, an association is typically "a nonprofit organization formed by two or more people to provide the meeting of needs and to defend the interests of businesses that operate in a specific industry or of individuals engaged in a specific profession".

An association should never be used to giving offense to moral sensibilities and injurious to reputation.

The Association should encourage or even support initiatives that aim the interest of its members, to which the Association falls to defend.

Like any organization, an association is composed of people and often, individual interests prevail over collective interests.

For this very reason, many of them forget or ignore the originally established bylaws, and the mission statement is nothing but fine words, abandoned in one of the tabs of the institutional site.

Managing Idealliance Latin America for less than two years, I have met colleagues willing to create something genuinely positive for the printing market.

I had the same positive feeling when I accepted the position of Assistant Technical Director of ABTG (Brazilian Association of Graphic Technology).

Even more recently, I have had a new positive experience in receiving the very positive support to our Flexo Summit event, provided by FTA Europe.

I want to share that there is still hope and that we should always surround ourselves with positive examples.

The printing market is changing rapidly, and a transformation is only complete when the transformer has a positive attitude, free of paradigms and personal biases. What we need is collective and empathy, two characteristics that differentiate us from machines.

IDEAlliance, FTA Europe and ABTG thank you for making me believe that there are green pastures behind the hills.