OM, Juiceman, PhilDirt and Other Interested Parties-

Please know that I have been keen on confirming the positive progress of our financial status since we made course corrections in 2019. As one of the seated BoD members at the time, I helped make those changes and it is only reasonable that I followup with seeing how they worked out. I draw your attention to the Financial Report in Issue 150 which reports our year end loss at (101,806). Subsequently we have shown both positive and negative quarterly reports. The exact variance would have to be answered by our Treasurer whom I have encouraged to join this discussion when time permits.

In my queries of "Are the changes we made two years ago paying off?", it has been confirmed (our Treasurer conducted a specific study of the numbers in order to answer me) to the point, if our assumptions at the time were correct, YES they are working. The major difficulty of our assumptions back then, is that we would maintain a certain level of membership x annual dues = positive cash flow i.e. breakeven or a little better. (Keep in mind we are a "non-profit corp.")  The problem is that we have not been able to maintain the membership level that we had assumed. I can assure you that the Membership Committee have recognized that and continue to wrack our brains on how best to improve those numbers. .

I wish that I could say that the problems with the website have been completely cured but they continue to cause Mary to spend an inordinate amount of time making corrections or tweaking things to get everything done. The Website Committee headed up by Director John Gaunt along with AdCo are doing stellar work to improve the processes and I do not wish to diminish their contributions in any way. Time just must pass for the issues to be recognized and a fix made.

Currently, the hours being worked by Mary far exceed our agreement with her. Accordingly, we have hired a part-time helper for over the holidays. The Board is also aware of our need to look ahead when Mary will be moving on and we are faced with replacing her. It is our hope that we can locate a good candidate for her replacement which will mean a time period of on- the- job training as keeping all of the membership "happy" can't be learned overnight!

I hope my response here will alleviate some of your concerns, rightly expressed I might add. From my vantage point, your current Board of Directors are working well together (this was not alwasy the case) to make the best path forward for our Club. 

Jan Meermans, Director, Chairman Magazine Committee   

Deas wrote:

..........Just a side note: there was one ex-BoD member who stood up at the AGM in Iowa and criticized the many BoD members who had not physically attended the AGM. As things worked, there were only TWO active BoD members who could make it to the Iowa National show and the AGM. Knowing some of the members who could not attend and the circumstances that stopped them from attending, I would bet that those who I DO know would much rather have been there in person than trying to work the meeting through video hook-up as had to be the case.

MANY thanks to all who participated and to the ones who could not..............

I would have loved to have been able to attend the Elkader show, but, like fellow BOD members we were unable to do so because of the COVID restrictions imposed by the US government. The same was true in 2020 when the show had to be cancelled. In my almost 2 years as a director, I have only met one of my fellow directors face to face and that was a coincidence when we met back in 2000! I sincerely hope we can get together in 2021. The voice referred to at the AGM in Elkader clearly had no clue about international travel restrictions due to the virus.
As I’m sure most readers will know, all directors are volunteers and devote a considerable amount of time to running our club, often 10 or more hours a week. There are also many members who devote much time and effort to work on the various committees.  
What we need to do as a club is to “grow our membership” if every non-member benefitting from this forum were to join and if every member were to go out and persuade someone to join, our / your club would be in a much better place.
Ask not what your club can do for you but what you can do for your club.
​​​​YOUR CLUB NEEDS YOU !