Reflections on Two Years of Service to the MAPP Community

Two years ago, we (Irem, Karen, and Felix) embarked on a journey of leading MAPP Magazine. We took over from the outstanding team of Carolyn Biondi and Courtney Daly, with Kellie Cummings facilitating our efforts as the MAPP Alumni Board Communications Chair. Carolyn, Courtney, and Kellie had positioned the publication for a bright future through establishing a regular publication schedule on the Squarespace platform, as well as through high-quality writing that allowed the impactful work of our alumni community and their application of positive psychology to shine through. We hoped to build on the foundation they provided us, and have worked over the last two years to help grow the publication and position it for even greater success in the future.

Continuity and Change

Much of what we inherited remains the same. We still attempt to publish three articles every six weeks, and despite the busy lives of our writers, we are generally successful in meeting our self-imposed publishing dates. The purpose of MAPP Magazine remains two-fold: One, to share the stories of our alumni and their often exciting and fascinating usages of positive psychology to our community; and second, to help spread positive psychology to a broader audience. As part of the “writer guidelines” we share with potential authors, we remind them that while the publication is by, and for, our alumni, it is also on the Internet. Thus, many other people can read what we publish. Indeed, it is not uncommon for a MAPP Magazine article to receive hundreds or even thousands of views. So while we publish to share within our community, we also know we are reaching a wider audience, and try to ensure that each article has something for both audiences. We also encourage each writer to provide some element in their article aimed at application and implementation, geared to either veteran or novice practitioners of positive psychology.

As an editorial team, we also have tried to put our own imprint on the publication. We started a subscriber email list for non-MAPP alumni to alert them when a new edition of the magazine “hit the shelves.” We have also publicized new editions in the various social media groups focused on positive psychology to help amplify the writings of our authors. We have perhaps had the most success with “themed” issues, where we focused on a specific topic for an edition of the magazine. We have published editions on the humanities (Positive Humanities, Revelations and Love, A Case for Lyrics and How They Impact Our Emotions, and The Creativity Circuit); diversity, equity, and inclusion (An Inclusive Journey to Happiness -- And Understanding -- Through Film, Learning for a Better Future: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Book Groups, and Applying Positive Psychology to Race Work - Part II); education (The Saga of the Scrolls: A Story of Hope, Strengths Development in Action, and Positive Psychology in Schools - Making Positive Psychology Accessible to All Secondary School Students); and civic engagement (Using Positive Psychology to Connect in a Polarized World, How Positive Psychology Can Help Us Respond to White Christian Nationalism, and In Pursuit of Happiness and Supporting the Essence of Democracy: Volunteering as an Election Judge). In between, we have had articles on improvisation (Making It Up as We Go: Approaching Life Like an Improviser), job crafting (Bach and the Fine Art of Job Crafting), podcasting (Behind the Mic – Two Years of Better Than Fine) and the positive psychology of science (Opportunities for Practitioners in the Positive Psychology of Science), just to name a few. The opportunity to talk to and work with so many alumni from across the classes has been a true highlight for all of us over the last two years.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Each of us had our own goals and motivations for applying to be a member of the editorial team. For Felix, who had just graduated from MAPP, it was to remain connected to the community while being able to continue his own learning about positive psychology (feeding into his Curiosity strength). For Irem, it was to extend the impact of positive psychology and help people find ways in which they can apply concepts from positive psychology to their lives, and thereby improve their psychological well-being. For Karen, it was to serve the community in a way that allowed her to use her strengths, as well as to get to know more MAPP alumni in the process of helping to highlight their work. All of us have enjoyed the experience and working with our fellow alumni to bring their stories to life over the last two years and have also enjoyed hearing from other alumni who have appreciated reading those stories.

We took over this publication as the world was still mired in Covid-19, but also as new vaccines provided an effective response to the pandemic; saving the lives of untold numbers of individuals and allowing us to reclaim many of the day-to-day experiences we had gone without. This includes, specifically for our alumni, the first in-person MAPP Summit since 2019 and many smaller “MAPP Meetups” around the world. As the world has “opened back up,” we were able to document this in articles that helped show that, while positive psychology is beneficial during turbulent times, it is equally useful in those day-to-day experiences we all yearned for in much of 2020 and 2021.

The term of an editor is one year; however, the publication was important enough to us – and our working relationship was so satisfying – that we all decided to return as editors for a second year. It remains important to us now, which is also why we decided to turn over the reins to a new editorial team to build on our work over the last two years, to provide other members of our community with the opportunity to give back, and to allow the three of us to move on to different pursuits. We are fortunate that two members of the most recent MAPP class (C’22), Abimbola Tschetter and Kimberly Dickman, stepped forward to serve as the new co-editors of this publication. Abi is a business writer and editor based in the Pacific Northwest with her family. She’s passionate about storytelling and is following her curiosity about the power and possibilities in narrative revision. Kimberly is an assistant professor at the Air Force Academy where she teaches Human Sex and Sexuality and Applied Positive Psychology. She is exploring the intersection of these two fields and works to help young leaders increase their knowledge and practice of living a good life. We look forward to their direction and where they will take the magazine next.

In closing, we would like to thank Kellie, Carolyn, and Courtney for the opportunity to serve in these roles for the last two years. We recognized the responsibility to represent our alumni association (and by extension, the MAPP program and positive psychology as a whole) and appreciated the trust you placed in us to do that. We would also like to thank all of our writers who contributed articles to us (and accepted our feedback to them). Finally, we would also like to thank everyone who read the magazine over the last two years. We hope that it inspired you to see how our fellow alumni are using positive psychology and helped keep you connected to one another until we could all be together again for a MAPP hug.

Irem Gunay, Karen Deppa, and Felix Yerace served as the editorial team for MAPP Magazine in 2021 and 2022.