CONTEMPO
Summer 2026
President's Message
Dear CA-AFCS Members,
As we begin another year of CA-AFCS activities, I am energized by the opportunities ahead for our association and for the Family and Consumer Sciences profession. Our strength continues to come from the connections we make—with one another, with our students, with other professionals, and with organizations that share our commitment to improving the lives of individuals, families, and communities.
One of the highlights of my summer was attending the AAFCS Annual Conference in Louisville, Kentucky. I especially enjoyed meeting Susan Weinstock, President and CEO of the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), who delivered the conference keynote address. Her message reinforced how important Family and Consumer Sciences professionals are in helping consumers navigate an increasingly complex world.
Susan spoke about issues that are at the heart of FCS—financial literacy, food and nutrition, consumer protection, artificial intelligence, digital privacy, and the ability to distinguish reliable information from misinformation. She also challenged FCS professionals to see ourselves not only as educators, but as advocates who can bring the experiences and needs of families into broader conversations about consumer policy.
The connection between AAFCS and the Consumer Federation of America presents some exciting possibilities for CA-AFCS. I hope we can explore opportunities to collaborate with CFA in areas such as America Saves, consumer education, and AI and privacy. These are issues our members encounter every day in classrooms, universities, communities, and professional practice.
Here in California, our Executive Committee is also excited about a new CA-AFCS membership campaign, chaired by Doris Barela-Fossen. Strengthening our membership is essential to strengthening our profession. The campaign will place particular emphasis on retaining teachers as CA-AFCS members while also introducing college students to the benefits of becoming involved in their professional association.
College students represent the future of Family and Consumer Sciences. We want them to discover early in their careers that CA-AFCS provides opportunities for professional development, leadership, networking, mentoring, and lifelong connections with colleagues throughout California. At the same time, retaining our FCS teachers keeps experienced professionals connected to the association and creates opportunities for them to mentor and encourage the next generation.
Our connection with AAFCS will continue this fall when Doris and I attend the AAFCS Leadership Summit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Summit will provide an opportunity to meet with leaders from other AAFCS affiliates, exchange ideas, and learn strategies that can help strengthen CA-AFCS. Pittsburgh will also be the site of the 2027 AAFCS Annual Conference, so our visit will give us an early look at the city that will welcome FCS professionals from across the country next year.
I look forward to bringing ideas from the Leadership Summit back to our Executive Committee and membership. Just as importantly, Doris and I will have the opportunity to share some of the good work taking place here in California.
As we move forward, I encourage each CA-AFCS member to consider one simple question: Who can I invite to become part of CA-AFCS? It might be a fellow teacher, a colleague who has allowed a membership to lapse, a university faculty member, or a college student just beginning to discover the possibilities within Family and Consumer Sciences.
Professional associations remain strong when members see themselves not simply as belonging to an organization, but as helping to build its future. Together, we can retain the professionals who have built CA-AFCS, welcome the students and emerging professionals who will lead us tomorrow, and develop new partnerships that expand the influence of Family and Consumer Sciences throughout California.
I am excited about what lies ahead and grateful to everyone who continues to contribute time, ideas, leadership, and enthusiasm to CA-AFCS.
Living Well, Leading Forward!
With appreciation,
Jody L. Roubanis, CFCS
President, CA-AFCS
2026-2028
CA-AFCS Officers
Dr. Jody Roubanis, 2026-2028 President
Dr. Ivana Markova, Past President
Sue Chelini 2025-2027, Treasurer
Soheyla Mohammadi-Gorji, 2026-2027 Secretary
Betty Lamp
AAFCS Officers place ornaments on a tree to symbolize the lighting of the Betty Lamp during the conference opening session.
Karen Athanas
AAFCS Executive Director welcomes "travelers" onto the Mary M. Miller tour boat.
Ohio River Tour
Jody Roubanis, Diane Lewis-Goldstein, LynDee Lombardo and Doris Barela-Fossen enjoy the sites.
From Consumer Education to Consumer Advocacy: Opportunities for CA-AFCS and the Consumer Federation of America
At the AAFCS Annual Conference in Louisville, Kentucky, Susan Weinstock, President and CEO of the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), delivered a timely keynote emphasizing the increasingly important role Family and Consumer Sciences professionals play in helping individuals and families navigate a rapidly changing consumer marketplace.
Founded in 1968, the Consumer Federation of America is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization whose mission is to advance a fair and safe marketplace through research, education, and advocacy. AAFCS is among CFA's member organizations, creating a natural foundation for greater collaboration between consumer advocates and Family and Consumer Sciences professionals.
Weinstock opened with a deceptively simple question: When was the last time a consumer decision felt simple? Today's consumers face more choices and more information than ever before, yet those choices are accompanied by increasingly sophisticated scams, confusing food information, opaque digital platforms, predatory practices, social media misinformation, and algorithms and sponsored content that may not always serve consumers' best interests. Her central message was especially relevant to Family and Consumer Sciences: FCS professionals are uniquely positioned not only to educate consumers, but also to advocate for them.
FCS Education Is Consumer Protection
More than 2.5 million students take Family and Consumer Sciences courses each year. These classrooms provide an extraordinary opportunity to teach young people how to protect personal information, evaluate food and health claims, identify scams, manage money, recognize misinformation, and make informed consumer decisions. As Weinstock emphasized, investing in FCS educators is therefore an investment in the future of consumer protection.
Three areas highlighted in the keynote have particularly strong connections to the work of CA-AFCS: food and nutrition literacy, financial education, and artificial intelligence and digital privacy.
Food, Nutrition and Consumer Literacy
Consumers increasingly receive nutrition information from social media, where influencers may promote restrictive diets, questionable supplements, and claims that are unsupported by scientific evidence. Weinstock challenged FCS professionals to help consumers distinguish credible evidence from misinformation.
FCS educators can translate complicated food safety, nutrition, labeling, and food policy issues into information families can actually use. CFA specifically expressed an interest in working with FCS professionals on food safety, labeling transparency, and nutrition access, noting that educators can become important community-level champions for sound consumer policy.
Turning Financial Knowledge Into Action
Another natural connection is America Saves, a CFA-managed campaign designed to help people save money, reduce debt, and build wealth. Rather than concentrating only on financial knowledge, America Saves encourages practical behaviors such as setting savings goals, establishing automatic savings, creating emergency funds, reducing debt, and developing spending and savings plans.
The program provides free educational materials, webinars, toolkits, savings challenges, and activities that schools, colleges, nonprofit organizations, employers, financial institutions, and government agencies can incorporate into their programs.
This presents an especially strong opportunity for CA-AFCS members working in financial literacy, higher education, secondary education, community programs, and Extension-related settings.
AI, Privacy and the Digital Consumer
Perhaps one of the most urgent portions of the keynote concerned artificial intelligence, privacy, scams, and online consumer protection.
AI-generated voices, deepfakes, sophisticated online scams, counterfeit products, confusing privacy settings, and the collection and use of personal data are creating consumer challenges that did not exist—or existed on a much smaller scale—only a few years ago. Weinstock emphasized that FCS educators can teach students how to evaluate online marketplaces, recognize warning signs, verify sellers, protect payment information, understand digital privacy, and identify scams.
But she challenged the profession to go one step further.
Because FCS professionals work directly with families and communities, they see the real-world consequences of fraud, predatory lending, digital misinformation, privacy violations, and financial insecurity. That experience can inform policymakers. FCS professionals can serve as a bridge between the experiences of consumers in their communities and the policymakers developing laws and regulations.
Opportunities for CA-AFCS and CFA Collaboration
The keynote provides CA-AFCS with an opportunity to turn these shared interests into action. CFA specifically welcomed collaboration with FCS professionals through state and local advocacy, educational campaigns, and research.
CA-AFCS could explore several collaborative initiatives:
- Develop an AI and Consumer Protection Initiative. CA-AFCS could work with CFA's Director of AI and Privacy, Ben Winters, to offer a webinar or professional development session for California FCS educators on AI scams, deepfakes, privacy, online consumer protection, and responsible AI use.
- Create classroom-ready AI and digital literacy resources. CFA's consumer-protection expertise could be paired with the instructional expertise of CA-AFCS members to develop lessons, discussion activities, case studies, or fact sheets that California FCS teachers could use with middle school, high school, and college students.
- Expand participation in America Saves. CA-AFCS could encourage members and FCS programs throughout California to participate in America Saves Week and incorporate America Saves resources into personal finance instruction throughout the year.
- Collaborate on food and nutrition literacy. CA-AFCS and CFA could jointly provide educational programming addressing food labeling, ultra-processed foods, food safety, nutrition misinformation, and evaluating health claims encountered through social media.
- Connect California classrooms with consumer policy. CA-AFCS could invite CFA experts to speak with students and educators about current consumer issues and demonstrate how public policy affects everyday decisions involving food, housing, financial services, technology, and privacy.
- Bring the FCS perspective into California consumer advocacy. When CFA is addressing consumer issues affecting Californians, CA-AFCS could help provide the educator and family perspective through surveys, member expertise, public comments, research, or examples of what FCS professionals are observing in their communities.
- Feature CFA experts in CA-AFCS professional development. CFA representatives could participate in future CA-AFCS conferences, webinars, Contempo articles, or district programs. In return, CA-AFCS members could help CFA better understand how emerging consumer issues are affecting students and families in California.
Moving From Education to Advocacy
Perhaps the most important message from the keynote was that Family and Consumer Sciences professionals should not view themselves simply as educators responding to changes in the marketplace. They can help shape that marketplace.
Weinstock described FCS professionals as educators who translate policy into practice, trusted community members who understand what families are experiencing, and advocates capable of bringing that knowledge to policymakers.
For CA-AFCS, collaboration with the Consumer Federation of America could provide an important way to put that vision into practice. A logical first step would be to reach out to Ben Winters, CFA Director of AI and Privacy, to explore an AI and consumer-protection program for California FCS professionals and students. From there, the partnership could expand into financial literacy, food and nutrition policy, digital privacy, consumer education, research, and advocacy.
The partnership is a natural one: CFA brings consumer research and policy expertise; CA-AFCS brings educators, practitioners, students, and direct connections to California families and communities. Together, the two organizations can help consumers become not simply better informed, but better protected and empowered.
Note: Susan Weinstock provided Jody Roubanis with a copy of her keynote from the conference, with permission to share with the California Affiliate of AAFCS. This article was drafted from this copy.
California Delegate Dinner
In place of an LA District meeting, all the delegates from California met for dinner including Dolores Robles, Sandy Carpenter, Doris Barela-Fossen, Jody Roubanis, Diane Lewis-Goldstein, and Ira Goldstein.
2026 EEF FCCLA Scholarship Recipients
Ben Hernandez, Piner High School
Yaretzi Salazar, Pioneer Valley High School