To say Allen Ramsey values CoSA’s members, staff, and funders is a bit of an understatement. He readily acknowledges that none of CoSA works without them, stating their engagement is “critical”. He speaks from experience: before his election as president for the 2025-2026 term, Ramsey had already spent a significant amount of time with State Electronic Records Institute (SERI) committee work before joining the board in 2021 (he’s a rare two-termer on the board). Of the CoSA staff, Ramsey says, “They help us make connections and push us to exit our comfort zones and help us build our volunteer leadership skills.”
 
In his current board role, Ramsey is helping lead CoSA through continuing organizational transition. He notes that CoSA successfully launched a new membership dues structure, which is still being evaluated, and remains firmly committed to programming and training that help build the capacity of members, both institutionally and individually. He points to the recent Building Archival Capacity for Keeping Electronic Records (BACKER) and Archives Working Across Remote Environments (AWARE) as examples of such projects, as well as ongoing webinars, monthly state archivist calls and Chatting with Colleagues programs. But funding and volunteers for this work are continual challenges. “Volunteer burnout is a very real issue,” he notes, especially when faced with a limited pool of available people to plan and implement ongoing programs and new initiatives. “We’re trying to become more responsive to the needs of our volunteers,” he says, citing the reorganization of committees into focused, shorter duration working groups and taskforces. “We hope steps like this will make CoSA’s organizational culture more resilient.”

As Ramsey looks ahead, he ticks off several opportunities that will help to meet some of these challenges, the first of which is development of a new strategic plan/framework for CoSA this year. “We have some large projects in the works in addition to planning,” he says. Among them is a project to aggregate years of CoSA research and member-generated data into a single platform where users will be able to access longitudinal data on the growth and development of state and territory archives. Also on the agenda are relaunching the Resource Center and updating the Intergovernmental Preparedness for Essential Records (IPER) curriculum that was originally developed with FEMA funding after Hurricane Katrina.

“We are planning to expand our presence in spaces we haven’t participated in, which will foster new collaborations with allied organizations and programs.” As board president, Ramsey and his successors will have opportunities to represent CoSA in the conversations. “We’ve got a chance to focus on state-level issues by helping our members better understand the importance of advocacy,” he says.

What is Ramsey personally looking forward to as CoSA’s president this year? His response is both simple and ambitious: “Keeping us on a steady, realistic footing moving forward” – that means, in part, listening and responding to members’ needs, and continuing to strengthen CoSA’s organizational foundations with long-term resilience in mind. In keeping with this goal, Ramsey invites members to send along their ideas and offers to help to info@statearchivists.org.