Happy New Year, Everyone!
I’m one of those people who makes, and occasionally even keeps, New Year’s resolutions, so I thought I would share a couple of the resolutions I made for this year.
But before I do that, I do want to take a minute to send out a huge thank you to everyone who did such an amazing job on the Tour. Trish, along with Gloria & Carrie were really able to recruit and organize an amazing amount of support for the tour. I’m tempted to just list out everyone who helped but I’m pretty sure that it would take up the entire newsletter. I’m not sure folks realize that over 100 volunteers participate in the tour every year! For a neighborhood of somewhere around 300 people that just boggles my mind. We’ve been working with some of the other neighborhoods on how to support each other’s efforts and when people ask us how we manage to pull ours off I always end up saying “Have wonderful, great, amazing neighbors!” Not sure how useful that advice actually is, but frankly it’s the truth. Please join us for a Tour wrap up discussion before Tuesday’s membership meeting (7:00pm) so we can run through what worked really well and any ideas for things we want to try differently next year.
Back to the resolutions. This is it, this is the year! WE ARE GOING TO FINISH REVISING THE BYLAWS! There I said it, you all heard me. Feel free to stop me on the street and ask me how the bylaws are coming along. I promise not to deluge you with the minutiae of current best practices around conflicts of interest for Board of Directors for nonprofits. (Unless you really want to know…) A couple of more areas we also want to address are things like defining more clearly eligibility for voting memberships and the accountability and management of funds. If you’re interested in our current Bylaws they are posted on our site. Gloria, Jim and Bob M. have also put in a lot of effort on this project which will hopefully end soon.
Also, the grant for the Buhl Foundation came through, so you’ll start hearing a lot more from Martha and I about how we can improve quality of life. I have some other goals: sell all the real estate! Organize the filing in the office! But the bylaws and the Buhl grant will be my main focus for this year. Stay tuned to hear more from new and returning Committee chairs for their plans as well.
Finally, I hope to see you all at the first meeting of the new year. We’ll have presentations from the folks who are purchasing the Stables (yay!) about their plans for it, as well as our annual update from Calvary. We’ll also be welcoming the new Board members and thanking Board members who are rolling off the Board or changing positions. Hope to see you all there!
Catherine Serventi
President, AWCC