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The inspiration for the AAP Opening General Session came from a children’s theater production.
One of pediatrician Perri Klass’s defining professional moments of 2025 occurred during the Opening Plenary Session of the National Conference & Exhibition of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), in late September in Denver, she wrote in a recent article in Harvard Medicine. “We had all sat down after listening to the Denver Children’s Chorus sing the National Anthem,” Klass, a professor of journalism and pediatrics at New York University, writes. “Susan Kressly, a pediatrician and the current president of the AAP, asked us all to stand up again and scream. Some 5,000 pediatricians, in a giant conference center auditorium, let loose and howled. We all understood why we were screaming — in grief, in outrage, in anxiety. ‘It has not been an easy year for our members,’ Kressly said.”
The growing anti-vax movement has taken a heavy toll on pediatricians, Klass writes in “Pediatricians Adapt to Changing Attitudes Toward Vaccines” in Harvard Medicine. “We are seeing more … angry families, who come into the exam room ‘knowing’ [single quotes added] that vaccines are dangerous, that greedy pediatricians are in league with maleficent pharmaceutical companies.”
Joe Faulder
‘We’ve got one moment where we have 5,000 people in a room..’
“It’s a tough time to be in medicine, to be in science,” Joe Faulder, director of creative services for event production company Projection, told Convene. Faulder, who worked with AAP on its 2025 conference, said that the current environment makes it “almost impossible” to not address this reality “in some way, shape, or form. It just seems like people are coming to the event … exhausted. Doctors, in general, they’re exhausted.”
How to acknowledge their angst while also inspiring and recharging them? Make the Opening General Session do the heavy lifting, Faulder said. ”We’ve got one moment where we have 5,000 people in a room,” he said, referring to AAP’s Opening General Session, “and this is our opportunity to communicate core messages, the value of being a member, of being part of the community. We want people to leave that space feeling uplifted, inspired, positive, and part of something greater than themselves.”
Meaningful Theatrics
When Faulder and the team at AAP first brainstormed about approaches to the opening session, the fact that the Colorado Convention Center’s Bellco Theatre would serve as AAP’s Main Stage became a focal point. “We thought we’d lean very heavily into theater,” Faulder said. “What could we do to build a theatrical experience, to bring in whimsy, humor — and also, some interesting stage play effects to make people feel like they were at a show? We don’t always go that far — the venue lent itself to it.”
One early source of inspiration came from a member of AAP’s communications team who had been to a children’s theater production of Chelsea Clinton’s She Persisted children’s book series celebrating trailblazing women. They all agreed, Faulder said, that “there’s something in that persistence message.”
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It was decided that animals — a bear, wolf, buffalo, and eagle, which have “a lot of spiritual connotations” — would be useful as metaphors for persistence, Faulder said: the stubbornness of a buffalo, leadership of the eagle, and wisdom of the wolf. And the storybook approach would resonate among an audience of pediatricians.
A “really cool, dramatic” simulated thunderstorm kicked things off. “We thought, ‘What have people been going through in this profession?’ It’s like a thunderstorm. It’s difficult. It feels rainy, heavy,” he said. “We did this whole theater thing where the sound started on the left, and it moved over to the right, with the rain passing, and then there were flashes of light and a little bit of smoke. We had these cool little scrims that made mountains behind the stage appear in the lightning. People were like, ‘What’s happening?’ This was our way of threading the needle: Let’s metaphorically show what the membership has been going through.”
During the thunderstorm, the animals were projected on the stage with text to make the metaphorical connection. The text on the screen then moved to: “We get together for the benefit of health and wellness,” Faulder said, and the sun began to rise. “Then, boom, we’re into the show. The eagle swooped across the landscape to introduce the president.”
Production Values
Faulder has seen other organizations skimp on production for their opening general sessions as planners wrestle with budget constraints. However, “this is when we need it the most,” he said. “This is when we need to use those moments to make people feel unified.” Which is what the academy wanted the five-day conference to achieve, he said: “a great sense of community.”
By Klass’s account, mission accomplished. In addition to providing the “cathartic stand-and-scream,” she wrote, the conference “was notable for moments when we applauded like we would never stop. Here are some of the big applause lines for an audience of pediatricians in the fall of 2025: a video of the next AAP president, Andrew Racine, a pediatrician at Montefiore Einstein in New York, saying, ‘Vaccines don’t save lives, vaccinations save lives.’ We cheered so loudly that we drowned out the next lines of the video. And you should have seen the moment when Kressly thanked the AAP infectious diseases committee and called them ‘guardians of truth.’ It stopped the show.”
Events, Faulder said, shouldn’t “shy away from difficult discourse,” even though it requires “more work and more energy” to help shift the audience’s emotional weight. “I think if you ignore it, then you’re sending another message. There’s an opportunity to engage in the discourse,” he said. “If you can engage it in the right way and thread the needle, I think your membership really appreciates it because they’re looking for spaces to be able to have difficult conversations. We all are.”
Michelle Russell is editor in chief of Convene.
Bridging Our Divides
This article and those listed below are part of Convene’s February 2026 issue cover and CMP Series story package.