Corresponding Secretary Report
June 2009
I am very sorry to miss the 107th Annual Reunion at Seaside, Oregon. By all indications this reunion is going to be well attended and well remembered. Congratulations to District 12 and all of those who worked so hard to bring this together.
I will start my report with our membership. We presently have 724 Annual members and 248 Life members for a total of 972 members all together. We still have 64 annual members who are considered to be in arrears. I do continue my efforts to contact these members and hopefully by the time we send our address list to the publishers of the next OWL many of them will have paid their dues.
In response to the President’s Spring Newsletter asking our membership to notify the Corresponding Secretary if they would prefer electronic WFA correspondence as opposed to paper, we have had 40 members who have signed up for the electronic option. I personally think that is a reasonably good response. Many of those have asked that we start it sooner than the Spring of 2010.
Larry E. Wing, our Assistant Treasurer has been very helpful by going through his reports and sending email addresses to myself and Raymond. This is not an easy thing to do and Larry has gone above and beyond. So, here lately he not only sends me the dues’ reports but I also get a separate report with email addresses of those who include them. I thank Larry for all of his help. It has made it so much easier to contact our membership.
Raymond and I continue our project to resolve the mystery of those members who are unidentified in our database. It takes a long time sometimes to identify those members. It took me about 3 hours the other day to finally identify one member. Not only did I identify her but I got her email address as well and now we are communicating. I am also pleased to report that I now have 90% of the member’s telephone numbers and I would estimate that a good 70% have email addresses as well.
I have developed my own personal project to contact as many of our members as possible during the course of my tenure. I make contact via email and post. I request updates about their children and parents and ask them to stay in touch. This project has been very rewarding in so many ways. The cousins truly enjoy being contacted and being asked for their information. They often thank us for being interested.
For future consideration I would request that we utilize this electronic correspondence to make more contact with our cousins. We can now expand the President’s newsletter to include much more news about the WFA. The opportunities with this concept are endless.
My only other suggestion is that the District Representatives become more involved with the cousins in their districts. We do have a handful of District Representatives who truly reach out to their membership. I don’t name those unsung heros’ for the obvious reasons. However, in most of the Districts that are successful in reaching out to their cousins, they almost always have help in the form of their own committee. We need to encourage that kind of participation in the other districts. District 12 has their own web site and we should encourage every district to do that. We need our District Representatives to become more involved.
In closing, I would like to thank all of you for this great opportunity to serve the WFA in the capacity of Corresponding Secretary. I came to this job almost sullenly and I probably whined out loud for the first year and a half. Thank you for being patient with me. I have come to love this job and the opportunity to get to know so many Wing cousins. Thank you very much.
Respectfully Submitted, May 30, 2009 by Toni Cox-Nash
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