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Meet our two recipients of this year’s award

Honoring Those Association Volunteers Going Above and Beyond

We are excited to share that we are celebrating two seasoned members of URMIA with this award in 2025. Honoring members who have gone above and beyond in their volunteer service and/or leadership within URMIA while also promoting our mission, vision, and values is the purpose of this award, named in honor of long-time Executive Director Emerita Jenny Whittington.

Congratulations to Susie Johnson, Iowa State University

The Honors Committee was impressed with the nomination for Susie Johnson from Iowa State University in many ways, but specifically, the statement, “Susie is like the URMIA cheerleader. Even before becoming a board member, she was an ardent supporter of URMIA, extolling all that the association does. For years, she has been a frequent responder on the URMIA community conversations - sharing her knowledge and wisdom.” Johnson has been a member of URMIA since 2008 and has participated in almost all annual conferences since 2009, as well as numerous regional conferences. She has been a speaker and moderator for a variety of URMIA conferences and webinars, writer for URMIA Insights, mentor, conference committee leader, and a member of various task forces and regional planning groups - she has pretty much done it all. Please check out the video to see when we surprised her with the honor! Johnson also served as conference vice chair for programming for URMIA’s 56^th Annual Conference in Las Vegas.

The Honors Committee completed its review and selections in July before the board of directors’ election was over, but we look forward to Johnson’s leadership as she becomes URMIA’s president-elect in October at the annual conference.

Congratulations to Matt Tuttle, University of Utah

Our second member receiving this honor in 2025 is Matt Tuttle, from the University of Utah. His nomination included: “Matt got involved with URMIA in 2016/2017 when he nominated to have his home city (Salt Lake City) host the annual conference. Little did he know that he would be asked to be the chair of the conference! Since then, he has served as an URMIA board member since 2019. Matt has been intimately involved and led URMIA's 2024 strategic goal #1 - focusing on membership. Under his guidance, the work that has been done on behalf of members has increased exponentially. Matt is involved in the mentorship program, has served on the Leadership Development Committee, speaks at URMIA professional development offerings, moderates sessions, participates in URMIAcares, and volunteers for whatever is needed at each annual conference. He is one of the first to raise his hand."

Tuttle has attended more than 100 URMIA events and is a wonderful welcoming member who has been a part of many committees including chairing the New Member Welcome Task Force. He was part of the task force creating the popular monthly Water Cooler Conversations and has facilitated many of the discussions along with serving on the task force that relaunched the URMIAmentors program. Tuttle has a special personality that is fun-loving, and he talked about creating an URMIA jingle for years, but we are yet to hear it. He put on quite a memorable video for the board election a few years ago, please enjoy this short video where the Honors Committee surprised Tuttle with his award announcement.