Southern California—my home for the last 24 years—is no stranger to rocket launches, thanks to Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara. One recent evening, my breath was taken away as an already-stunning golden-hour sky was punctuated with the brilliant glow from the contrails of a 200-plus-foot-tall Falcon 9 rocket intent on piercing the heavens.

Even though extraterrestrial exploration is a modern reality—and has been, to varying degrees, for my entire life—it never fails to induce grand thinking and amazement at the immensity of the cosmos, a mental state unobtainable when pondering earth-bound pursuits. It consistently invokes thoughts of innovation, creativity and mankind’s potential of the future.

Space exploration is about the big picture—perhaps the biggest picture for mankind. But from a more terrestrial perspective, the big-picture goal of bringing people together to create better individuals, better organizations, better communities, better societies and a better world through meetings and events is no less important, or inspirational. After all, without various meetings and events to brainstorm, strategize, troubleshoot and network, space exploration as we know it would not exist. Meeting professionals of yesteryear certainly played a significant role in the advancements of our society—and you and/or your peers are carrying that torch.

A successful future, however, can’t be constructed in a silo. You need guidance, education, inspiration, support and a community from near and far. As the world’s largest association for meeting and event professionals, MPI’s role is to support you as you reach for the stars. And through MPI you’re able to experience that in so many ways: the MPI Academy’s innovative education, including the extremely relevant AI-Enhanced Event Professional certificate program; The Meeting Professional’s timely and insightful content; the MPI Foundation’s investments in you, often when you need it the most; the voices and opinions of your peers shared on MPItv, the EVENTalks podcast and within your local chapter; and when we come together in-person for events such as the World Education Congress, the European Meetings & Events Conference, the EVENT in Canada, chapter events and, this month, IMEX America in Las Vegas.

Thanks to our strategic partnership with IMEX Group—celebrating a decade of formal, collaborative excellence next year—at IMEX America event professionals are availed dozens of complimentary professional education sessions on Smart Monday, powered by MPI (Oct. 7), plus world-class keynotes throughout IMEX America, all to help you design and execute events of and for the future. And on Oct. 9, the MPI Foundation, with our partner Caesars Entertainment, provides our industry’s best networking event of the year at Rendezvous at Drai’s. Because when we meet, we change the world.