Christian Wuerth
First off, I want to wish you all a Happy New Year! It is my hope that the year ahead holds a great deal of success for you and the communities you help to lead.
As an organization, 2024 is a year that holds a great deal of promise for MME. Our Board and our committees continue to work on implementation of the Strategic Plan completed in early 2021. Further progress on the implementation of the goals and tasks in the Strategic Plan will be made in the year ahead. I anticipate that the Board of Directors will take stock of where things stand later in the year and evaluate options for the road ahead.
The foundations for success in 2024 have been laid by the work completed in 2023. We will certainly celebrate them at the upcoming Winter Institute, but I would like to thank outgoing Board Members Mark Heydlauff, James Krizan, Deb Stuart, and Julius Suchy for their continued service to MME and the profession. I am also grateful to all our 2023 Committee Chairs for their work and dedication over the past year. I would like to take a moment to thank our outgoing committee chairs—Brady Selner (Early Career Outreach), Daryl Delabbio (Ethics), and Frank Walsh (Member Success)—for everything they have done in service to our members and the profession over the past year. Thank you for serving these important roles and for lending your talents to furthering our association and the profession.
As the new year begins, many people adopt resolutions as a means to encourage personal growth or change habits. In my quest for personal growth, I am often reading multiple things at once and I have grown fond of long-form articles, short stories, and compilations over the years as they are easy to pick up at random when time or interest allows. In reading articles and newsletters in the past month or so, I have encountered variations of one specific piece of leadership advice multiple times and it has stuck with me. The general idea is something along the lines of this: our networks (professional or otherwise) are one of our greatest assets, but unlike other assets, they are not divided when shared. Rather, they expand—often exponentially and in ways we could not predict. This expansion of a network may lead to personal growth, new partnerships, or innovations we could not have achieved on our own and it is often left to chance.
With our 2024 Winter Institute approaching in a few weeks, my challenge to you is to use the event as an opportunity to connect with someone new or to introduce two people who may not know one another well. The Professional Development Committee has done an excellent job of assembling a great program—one highlighted by contributions from each of our other committees and many of our colleagues—and I hope you learn from the sessions and take some great ideas back home, but if all you leave with at the end of the conference is a scribbling of notes from presentations, you have missed a great opportunity to exponentially grow one of your best professional assets.
I am looking forward to our time together in a few weeks—see you in Lansing!
Christian Wuerth
President, MME
Village Manager, Milford
Christian Wuerth currently serves as the Acting President of MME. He began his career in local government as an intern with the City of Birmingham in 2004 before moving to the Village of Milford, where he has served as Village Manager since 2014. Prior to his career in local government, Christian worked in the nonprofit sector and spent two years serving in AmeriCorps NCCC, a national service program. He has previously served on several MME committees, including serving as the Chair of the Professional Development Committee, and previously served on the Board of Directors for MME.