In 1920, a paper manufacturer’s secretary in New York gathered sixty-seven people into a room and made an argument the U.S. government considered dangerous. That competitors sitting at the same table was not a conspiracy. It was civilization.
He founded ASAE on that idea.
A hundred and six years later, GatheringPoint sat down with Michelle Mason, who runs the organization he built, and asked her to make the case for what ASAE actually does. She said it in one sentence.
Gatherings are not events. They are trust-building machines.
That sentence is the spine of the song you are about to hear. We called it Rubbing Elbows, because that is the method. The elbow, the handshake, the conversation after the session ends, the dinner where someone says something they would never put in an email. That is where trust gets built. That is what ASAE has been organizing for over a century. That is what no algorithm has figured out how to replicate.
The song honors what 50,000 association professionals do every day. The collaboration that moves industries forward. The standards that protect the public. The gatherings that create the conditions for strangers to solve problems together.
Association is a verb. Community is the result.
Emmett Hay Naylor knew it in 1920. Michelle Mason is proving it in 2026. The song is for everyone in between.
The full Michelle Mason Wisdom Bank profile, the companion piece to this song, is at GatheringPoint.news
ASAE’s Gatherer of the Gatherers
A note on method. This profile emerged from a conversation that took an unexpected turn before it officially began. The office tour that preceded the interview turned out to be the interview. What follows is built entirely from what was said, observed, and discovered. Some of what surrounds Mason’s story involves Emmett Hay Naylor, the man who founded A…
