Candidate Statement: Mick Zais Declares Candidacy for American Philatelic Society President

Dear APS Members,

I’m announcing my candidacy for President of the American Philatelic Society in the coming 2016 election. I’m running because I believe the APS, while facing challenges, has significant opportunities to grow membership and expand member services. To this task, I’ll bring 45 years of diverse leadership and financial management experience.

For the past four years, I served as South Carolina’s State Superintendent of Education, overseeing policy for 1,250 schools, 51,000 teachers, and 720,000 students, while managing a budget of $4.0 billion.

For ten years, I served as President of Newberry College in South Carolina, a liberal arts, residential, undergraduate institution founded in 1856, with an annual budget in excess of $20 million. During my tenure the College almost doubled enrollment, constructed new facilities, and more than doubled its endowment. During the last three years of my tenure, the College was nationally recognized by U.S. News & World Report as one of “America’s Best Colleges.”

For 31 years, I led organizations of increasing size and complexity in the U.S. Army, culminating in promotion to Brigadier General. My assignments included Commanding General of all U.S. and Allied Forces in Kuwait and as Commanding General of Operation Provide Refuge which brought 4,000 Kosovo refugees out of Macedonia for settlement in the U.S. I was also the Pentagon’s Chief of War Plans.

My entire professional life has been dedicated to leadership through service to others.

Since the age of eight, I have collected stamps from around the world. Over the past 15 years, my focus has been on stamps and postal history related to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point as well as the U.S. Army stamps of 1936-37. Next year will mark forty years of continuous APS membership. In 2013, I was elected to the APS Board of Directors as a Vice President. Most recently, I served as Chairman of the search committee that found and hired the APS’s new Executive Director.

As your President, I will be a force for change. This means I will work to reverse declining membership by building new outlets for growing our membership and reaching out to more diverse groups. I’ll work to strengthen the partnership between the APS and the 30 World Series of Philately regional shows, our 195 specialty societies, and the hundreds of local chapters across the U.S. I’ll also work to enhance relations with philatelic organizations in other countries and to grow the number of international members.

Most importantly, I’ll work with our new Executive Director, the dedicated staff, the APS and APRL Boards, and the leaderships of many other philatelic organizations, large and small, to build a stronger hobby. Working together, I’m confident we can improve the business operations of the APS while enhancing services to our members: including our StampStore, sales circuits, expertizing, education programs and fundraising to complete the world’s premiere philatelic library.

The success of the APS depends upon the health of our hobby; and the health of our hobby depends upon dealers who find and provide material to collectors. As President, I will dedicate myself to strengthening the partnership between the APS and the professional philatelic community.

In the months ahead, I look forward to meeting more of you, learning about your experiences, and hearing your ideas about how we can work together to build an APS that will last for generations. To this end, I would welcome your ideas for the future of the Society at the addresses below. It would be an enormous honor for me to serve as your President. I respectfully ask for your vote in next year’s election.

Mick Zais
1642 Tanglewood Road – Columbia, SC 29204-3308
mickzais@gmail.com