Ontario ABA

By Kieva Hranchuk
Our 2023 Year in Review:
Our current President, Jaime Santana, M.ADS, BCBA happily reports that our association has experienced consistent growth in our membership during the past year.
As we began the implementation of our strategic plan for 2023–2024, here are some highlights of our accomplishments for 2023 as reported by our past President, Dr. Nancy Marchese, Psyc. D., Ph.D., BCBA-D: Strategic Priority 1: Build the capacity of ONTABA to achieve its mission and goals
- Hired and trained our first employee, Laura Amodio
- Starting to track data on volunteer hours
- Comparison of other professional organizations
- Benchmarking for hiring Executive positions
- Draft of new by-laws for ONCA compliance – Currently being voted on by the membership
- Updates on policies including AODA, privacy, and whistleblower. These can be found our website
Strategic Priority 2: Provide leadership and advocate for ethical, effective and safe behavioural services in Ontario
- Continued work with CPO on professional regulation
- ABA working group
- Letter to CPO related to Tiered Service Delivery
- Town Halls Oct 2023 – Night #1 – 275 participants, Night #2—158 participants
- Government relations work including establishing a working group for government relations established. Strategic Priority 3: Enhance services and supports for all ONTABA members, in all parts of the province
- Many events accessible virtually (townhalls, webinars, conference, AGM)
- Workplace Capacity Grant—Business Toolkit with PP-SIG
- Significant updates to member perks
- Locker storage clean up
- Draft of workplace capacity survey
- Updates to website (e.g., perks, jurisprudence resources, user experience improvement)
- Completed an analysis of our association fees and perks that we offer in comparison to other comparable professional organizations. The following two graphs illustrate these analyses
Other Notable 2023 Accomplishments:
- ABA Success Stories campaign
- The Analyst podcast
- 792 attendees at ONTABACon, 576 in person and 217 online! ONTABA celebrated their 30th birthday at this event!
- Successful evening for behaviour analysis event
- Successful Clinical Conversations CEU Event
- Website and benefit updates
Our Plans for 2024:
Dr. Marchese reported that she believes the future of behavior analysis in Ontario is incredibly bright. With over 1800 members, growth of membership continues to be on an upward trend. Members are looking for increased services and supports from the Association. Administrative Assistant and Consultants have been key to offering support, but it is not enough. Board is overstretched and work well exceeds reasonableness for volunteer positions and beyond vision, strategy and risk management. Hiring Executive positions will be key to the future. Updates to our bylaws were successfully voted in by our membership and will come into effect during the 2024–2025 year.
We look forward to continuing to grow our membership, host valuable CEU events as well as our annual conference which will take place in Toronto, Ontario on November 7th and 8th, 2024.
Our most exciting update for 2024 is the achievement of regulation for behaviour analysts in Ontario beginning on July 1st, 2024. Members of the behaviour-analytic community in Ontario have been working tirelessly toward achieving regulation for our professionals for many years and we are very much looking forward to joining the umbrella of regulated health professionals within the province! Our future is bright and our mission remains strong.