Joan Eisenstodt, chief strategist of Eisenstodt Associates, LLC, is no stranger to awards—she's been inducted into the Convention Industry Council’s Hall of Fame,, recognized as an Educator by the PCMA Foundation for Lifetime Achievement, and earned the International Association of Conference Center's Pyramid Award for sustained contributions to IACC education.
Now she's done it again: She just became the first non-IACC member to win the Mel Hosansky Award for Distinguished Service since Mr. Hosansky himself. Congratulations to Joan for this honor, but more to the point, thanks for all the work, advice, teaching, learning, prodding, moderating, facilitating, mentoring, and championing Joan has done and continues to do for this industry and, if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say likely thousands of individuals within it. And I know just how passionate she is about the role of conference centers in the meetings industry, so this is just right on so many levels.
According to a press release, she said as she received the award, “This is the ultimate! Particularly since it’s named for somebody who had more integrity than anyone I’ve known in hospitality. I see the award as reflective of Mel’s value and contributions to this industry segment, and that’s particularly meaningful to me.” She also expressed hope that “IACC conference centers would continue to be true to their mission, that they would be places where true learning would happen.”
Congratulations to Joan on winning this award, which is a special one to us here at MeetingsNet. While I never had the pleasure of knowing Mr. Hosansky, I did get to work with his daughter Tamar Hosansky, when she served as editor of Medical Meetings.
Oh, and did I mention that ahem, our publisher, Melissa Fromento, also won IACC's Pyramid award this year? I don't want to blow our own horn too much, but Melissa has put her heart and soul into the IACC Thought Leader Summit since she facilitated the first Summit in 2008 (she chaired the 2010 and 2011 Summits as well), and served for four years on the Annual Meeting Conference Planning Committee. How good was this year's summit? I wasn't able to attend in person, but the thought-leader summit my colleague and I attended virtually was dynamite (here's our writeup of that session if you want to check it out for yourselves).