Dear Community,
On behalf of the Eating Disorders Recovery and Support (EDRS), we wish to welcome you all to 2019. For many of us, we are well underway into the year with work and being with our loved ones. We do wish to reflect on 2018. We held our annual conference with over 100 attendees and honored Dr. Kara Fitzpatrick, PhD; Dr. Deb Burgard, PhD, FAED;  Jackie Holmes, M.Ed., LMFT;  Dr. Pam Carlton, MD and Stephanie Brooks, MPH, RD, CEDRD for their dedication and many years of work in this field. We were able to distribute 14 treatment scholarships for people suffering from eating disorders. This success is due to your contributions to EDRS and more importantly your commitment to the field of eating disorders and those suffering with this illness.

Today we are here to celebrate the new year and new opportunities it will bring. This will require some changes to EDRS and we are embracing these changes to have a bigger impact in this field. For this year, we will not hold our annual conference. We will bring back the annual conference for 2020. We are focusing 2019 on building internal organizational systems and exploring fundraising options for EDRS growth and expansion. We are excited to see where this expansion will take us.
 

We also wish to support community work and projects to help those suffering from eating disorders particularly community work that involves serving underserved communities with eating disorders. We are already collaborating with folks on this work and wish to hear from you and your community work. Everyone suffering from an eating disorder deserves healing. Everyone suffering has a right to treatment and yet treatment can be difficult to access. We are committed at EDRS to make treatment more accessible. There will be learnings and we ask that you learn with us in community as we embark on 2019 together. I would like to recognize our EDRS Board Members: Marcella Raimondo, PhD, MPH - President; Liz Woodruff, PhD - Vice President; Lindsey Wert, LMFT - Treasurer; Karen Schneller, MFT, CEDS – Co-Secretary; Natalie Makardish- Co-Secretary; Danielle Colborn, PhD- Board Member; Theresa Carpinito Kira, PsyD - Board Member; Board Support: Christina Weiss, LMFT, MPHC; Board Founders: Michelle Minero, MFT, EDRS Co-Founder & Haleh Kashani, Ph.D., EDRS Co-Founder.

 
Thank you
Marcella Raimondo, PhD, MPH
EDRS President