President's Report​ - 2017

            - Judith Falloon-Reid

 

It has been a year since I was elected President of the Association and there was a learning curve for me to get up to speed with everything the association has done over the years and where we were. Thanks to Annie, Marsha & Celia, they held my hand and walked me through to the point where I was comfortable to fully lead.

 

My first order of business was to analyze the present condition of the association, our goals and past accomplishments with a view to streamlining the associations modus operandi. We set about creating new goals and purposes for the organization and a decision was taken that rather than spread our resources thin on several projects per year, we would focus our resources on helping one department or project for the school each year.

 

After carefully consideration and with discussion with the principal and one her right-hand teachers, Miss Williams, it was determined that the Sports department was in most need. During the Cherian years, the concentration was on lifting the academic standards. With that done, it was time to turn their attention to lifting the standards of the sports department.

 

I met with the athletic and netball coaches and it was determined that there was an immediate need for track uniforms and a future need for netball uniforms as well as training gear. In response we provided uniforms for the track team in time for Champs.

 

The Netball team will benefit from the Pledge drive done at the Annual Fish Fry & Family Fun day. The 32 uniforms have been ordered and will soon be delivered to the school.

 

In addition, There is no official gym at the school and the coach has resorted to bringing equipment from his home. In response, we have bought several small pieces of training equipment to be hand delivered to the Coach on November 9th, and we are actively seeking donations of gym equipment for use at the school. We have received a donation of additional small training equipment, a weight bench and a treadmill which we will be making arrangements to ship.

 

The long term goal is to facilitate the building of a gym and we will be discussing this further with the principal shortly. The previous principal had the thought of getting a shipping container and converting it to a gym. We will be exploring that option as a long term solution.

 

MEMBERSHIP

We decided to forgo annual membership dues as we were never successful at achieving compliance and to focus our attention on building support for projects and events.

 

 

EVENTS

We turned our attention to our annual events and the purpose behind the events. It was decided that we would focus on two main legacy events and add a new one annually:

The Fish fry, which is normally our highest earning event, our annual Christmas and Anniversary party  and to introduce a new event, All-Alumni Business Expo. We also decided that we wanted to take our meetings offsite from time to time and to introduce events that were primarily for bonding and having fun.

 

Our Christmas event last year was a blast! We took over Shilohuette night club and a modest group of Alumnae and their families enjoyed good food and dancing to the band. We surprised our outgoing board members with Awards to show our appreciation for their 10 years of service. The cover charge for the event paid for the entire event so that we were not out of pocket.

 

The fish fry was an overwhelming success to the extent that we ran out of food! All hands were on deck for this event. A huge thanks to all the ladies, husbands, mothers and children of alumnae who worked their fingers to the bone to make it a success.

In our postmortem of the event we identified several areas of improvement that are needed going forward but decided undoubtedly that using the CB Smith Park and buying the fish catered was a better way than in previous years. We agreed to move forward in like manner.

 

We did two offsite meetings; one at Peenie Wallies in West Palm Beach, owned by Alumnae Karen Bedassee-West and her husband and the other in Miami after joining Virginia for one of her daughter’s track meets. We will be working towards doing more offsite meetings in the coming year.

 

Our treasurer, Celia Wright, came up with the brilliant idea of introducing an event called Women Empowering Women; a chance to do more than meet and talk business.  Our first event took place in August and featured Family Counselor Tracy Marshall who spoke and facilitated discussions on the topic: Our aging family – dealing with our aging parents and spouses. We had 12 people in attendance and it was a lively, informative and fun event. The objective is to host 3 such events annually.

 

Planing for the Annual Fish Fry and the Expo will begin in earnest with our November 2017 meeting.

 

In closing, my first year as President of the MAHS South Florida Alumnae Association was a wonderful period of learning, sharing and bonding with people who were once acquaintances and are now friends, to achieve more together than we ever could have alone.