The Association That Hopes to Disappear

ISPCAN, Jamaica, and the profession that measures its success by its own ending

I met Pragathi Tummala by accident.

It was a trade show floor, the kind of environment where almost every conversation is a transaction in disguise. People move between booths collecting business cards, exchanging elevator pitches, scanning name badges for titles that might matter later. The unspoken question everywhere is the same. What can you do for me?

Pragathi was not doing any of that. She had stumbled into the aisle I happened to be standing in, and we started talking the way people do when neither of them is trying to sell anything. I asked what her association did. I asked what was hard about it. I asked what she hoped to leave the show with. I was not trying to work. I was trying to listen.

She was the Executive Director of the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect. A multidisciplinary body of around six thousand professionals across psychiatry, psychology, medicine, nursing, social work, education, law, public health, and government. An organization that had existed, by then, for more than forty years. A mission that sits in the part of the world most people prefer not to look at.

We stayed in touch. Over the next several years, the conversations shifted from logistics to purpose. She was less interested in how to run a better meeting and more interested in how to make her association, and her own work inside it, matter more intentionally. Legacy was not a marketing word for her. It was a personal question.

Somewhere in the middle of those years, in one of the many conversations we had about what legacy actually means for an organization like hers, she said something I have not been able to let go of.

My life’s work would be fulfilled if ISPCAN were no longer needed.

I want you to stay with that sentence for a moment, because it is the most honest thing, I have ever heard an association leader say.

Most associations do not think of themselves this way. Most associations, if they are being candid, measure their success by their own continued expansion. More members. More revenue. More congresses. Larger footprints. A governance structure that protects the organization against the possibility of decline.

This is not a criticism of associations. It is simply the logic of institutions. Institutions try to persist. That is nearly the definition of an institution.

But Pragathi’s sentence points at something else. It says that the profession ISPCAN represents is not the customer. The children are. And if the work is ever complete, if a world truly arrives in which child abuse and neglect are no longer the daily reality of millions of lives, then the organization will have done its job and can be allowed to end. The measure of success is not the survival of the association. It is the disappearance of the problem.

This is what the original academy was for. Plato did not gather in the grove of the Academy because he wanted to grow the grove. He gathered because the work of thinking together mattered more than the continuation of the gathering. The academy was a means, not an end.

ISPCAN, at its best, is a modern academy in exactly that sense. A space where a profession gathers to think together about the hardest thing it knows, so that the thinking can become policy, and the policy can become protection, and the protection can, one conference at a time, reduce the need for the profession itself.

Jamaica

In 2019, ISPCAN held its Caribbean Congress in Kingston. The congress was the organization’s entry into the Incredible Impacts Program that year, and it was selected as one of three winners. But the grant, in retrospect, was not the point. The congress was the point. And what it did in Jamaica is worth looking at closely, because it shows what a gathering becomes when it refuses to stop at its own doors.

A joint study by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime and the World Bank had been documenting something almost no one outside the region wanted to discuss. Crime and violence in the Caribbean were rising, and within that broader picture, sexual assault, sexual violence, and domestic violence were on a sharp upward curve. Children were, as they always are, the least visible casualties of that rise. Child trafficking and sex tourism were not abstractions in the region. They were present, local, and escalating.

A conventional congress would have flown in its experts, presented its findings, and left. ISPCAN did something different. The Caribbean Congress was built around two commitments that most professional meetings would not have the nerve to make. It prioritized the voices of young people from within the region. And it prioritized the voices of abuse survivors. Survivor speakers were given the main stage, not as subjects of study but as keynote voices in their own right. That structural decision, about who gets to speak in the big room, changed what the Congress was for. The professionals in the audience were no longer studying a population. They were accountable to one.

The room where young people wrote the policy

The Congress opened not with a plenary session in a five-star conference hall but with a Youth Forum in the Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce, chaired by the General Secretary of the Jamaica Union for Tertiary Students. Forty young people from Clarendon, St. Catherine, Manchester, Kingston, and Westmoreland took their seats. They came from the Office of the Children’s Advocate’s Children Advisory Panel, from the Child Protection and Family Services Agency, and from the Jamaica Youth Advocacy Network. The theme was human trafficking and sex tourism. The format was unusual. For the first half of the day, experts spoke to them. For the second half, they worked in two groups, and they were given an hour to develop action plans to combat trafficking and sex tourism in their own communities.

They did it. They produced plans that named their own parishes, their own ministries, their own media, their own people. The plans were written in the same grammar associations used for policy proposals. Objectives. Activities. Inputs. Outputs. Responsible persons. Timelines. One group proposed a community intervention they called Building Bridges, designed to advocate for expanding the role of Justices of the Peace to conduct community awareness sessions. Another proposed establishing community-based Anti-Human Trafficking youth groups with sibling mentorship built into them. They named local influencers who could carry the message into places a foreign NGO could not reach. They named cultural forces inside their own society that were fueling the problem, including patterns they understood better than any visiting expert, and which no visiting expert would have known to name.

When the Forum ended, two of the participants presented the work back to the wider Congress. The room in which a profession gathered to think about how to protect children was, on that day, a room in which young people told the profession what protection needed to look like. That is not symbolic participation. That is inversion of the usual flow of authority, and it is what associations mean, or should mean, when they use the word legacy.

What happened after

A Congress is not an event. A Congress is a catalyst, or it is a Ceremony. The Kingston meeting was a catalyst, and the evidence is in what happened in the months that followed.

More than one hundred individuals from the region joined ISPCAN as members after the congress. That is a measurable shift in the infrastructure of child protection across the Caribbean. Each of those members walked home with access to a global network, a body of research, and a set of best practices that had not been available to them a week earlier. In a field where isolation is one of the largest structural barriers to progress, that access is not a membership benefit. It is a lifeline.

Local agencies, emboldened by the Congress, began pressing for legislative action. A sequence of statutes moved forward in Jamaica, including the Child Care Protection Act, the Sexual Offences Act, the Offences Against the Person Act, the Domestic Violence Act, and the Trafficking in Persons Act. The Congress did not write these laws. But the Congress was part of the ecosystem in which they became possible. It had given the issues a public stage, a scientific grounding, a survivor’s voice, and a coalition of domestic agencies willing to keep the pressure on after the international delegates had flown home.

This is what the book means by a modern academy. A profession gathered, thought together, and the world around it shifted in ways that the profession alone could not have produced.

The speaker prep room

Months later, Pragathi was asked to tell this story on stage in Houston.

The context matters. She had been invited to speak to the meetings industry itself, to an audience of people whose job is to build conferences for a living. It was a professional audience speaking a professional language, and the ISPCAN story is extraordinary enough that a deck full of numbers would have been, on its own terms, impressive. The statistics were the proof.

I remember walking into the speaker prep room the day before and seeing the deck she had prepared. It opened the way almost every association deck opens. With the history of the organization. With what ISPCAN does, when it was founded, who it serves, the size of its membership, the scale of the problem it confronts. It was a good deck. It was the deck anyone in our industry would have built. And it was exactly the deck that would leave the room impressed but not moved.

I told her what I had come to believe after years of watching presentations like this.

People need to feel first and understand second. If they do not feel it, the numbers will not land. If they feel it, the numbers will carry weight they could not have carried on their own.

She listened. She did not push back. She did not defend the deck she had already built. She went back to her room and stayed up through the night rewriting it.

The next day, she walked onto the Houston stage with a presentation that no longer opened with her organization. It opened with a child. It opened with Jamaica. It opened with the people she had gone there to serve. The statistics were still in the deck, but they were second now, and they landed differently because of it. She delivered the rewritten version in her own voice, the warm, careful, unhurried voice of someone who had been doing this work long enough to know what it cost. When she finished, the room was quiet in the particular way rooms go quiet when an audience has been moved rather than persuaded. You could feel the difference. Persuasion leaves people nodding. Feeling leaves them still.

The same design, at two scales

I have thought about that Houston talk many times since, and not because of what it did for the audience that day. I have thought about it because of what it reveals about how Pragathi runs the organization.

The rebuilt presentation and the Caribbean Congress are the same design at two different scales.

The Congress did not open with experts presenting on trafficking and then, toward the end, invite a survivor to add a human layer. It opened with young Jamaicans in Montego Bay being asked what protection should look like in their communities. It opened with survivors telling the profession what the profession was there to understand. Feel first. Understand second.

The Houston deck did not open with statistics and then, toward the end, add a human story. It opened with the human story and let the statistics arrive afterward, into a room that had already been prepared to receive them. Feel first. Understand second.

A leader who structures a presentation that way structures a congress the same way, because the underlying conviction is the same. You cannot persuade people into care. You have to let them feel the shape of the thing first, and then offer them the evidence as a way of honoring what they have already begun to understand.

It is not a communications technique. It is an ethic.

Vilnius and beyond

The lessons from Kingston became a template. In 2025, at the ISPCAN Congress in Vilnius, Pragathi went further. She created the Rise Up Policy Forum, a fourth day attached to the Congress and dedicated entirely to turning country-level pledges from the 2024 Ministerial Conference on Ending Violence Against Children into action. Sixty-three government delegates. Two hundred and seventy participants. Sixty countries. Opened by the Lithuanian Minister of Social Security and Labor and the UN Special Representative on Violence Against Children. A gathering designed not to produce papers but to produce policy.

None of this was inevitable. It was built, event by event, by a leader who had stopped treating her own association as the goal.

I often think about the sentence Pragathi said to me.

My life’s work would be fulfilled if ISPCAN were no longer needed.

It is a sentence that rearranges what leadership means. It is also, quietly, a sentence about love. You cannot say something like that about an organization unless you love what it serves more than you love the organization itself.

Every profession has a version of that sentence waiting to be said. Pediatric oncologists who would like to be made obsolete by a cure. Public defenders who would like to live in a country that no longer needs them. Physiotherapists, as we will see in the next chapter, would like a population that moves enough in childhood to never require their clinical care in adulthood. The question is not whether the sentence exists. The question is whether the association is willing to say it.

The associations that are willing are the ones that become Academies again. They become places where a profession gathers not to celebrate itself but to examine itself, and to put what it knows into the service of the world outside the room.

The ones that are not willing are the ones quietly squandering the tradition they inherited.

ISPCAN chose to say it. In a Congress hall in Kingston, in a speaker prep room in Houston the night before a talk, in a policy forum in Vilnius, and in every design decision in between, you can see what happens to a gathering when that choice has been made.