By Jenna Moore, Chapter President

As this is my first “presidential” article, I would like to begin by congratulating our outgoing president, Michael Harvey, on a fantastic year. We owe him many thanks for stepping up to the plate and taking on the responsibility of leadership for our chapter yet again. We have spent this past year reinventing our chapter and ourselves. We have changed those habits that have “always been done that way” and tried new things. With hard work, those changes have paid off.

Some of the changes we made during this reinvention include holding our monthly programs at non-traditional times, such as Saturday morning. This initiative definitely succeeded. We had a new crowd with different faces that showed up for what was a very informative discussion about working with offshore resources. We held fewer meetings overall during the month, choosing fewer meetings with higher quality so our members would be able to attend. This initiative has also paid off in that we have raised our average attendance.

This year we will be focusing on taking that reinvention to a new level by building up our community, STC Carolina. Building community is important to sustaining that community. We have a new slate of officers this year with some newer faces and some more experienced ones. Our leadership will be working hard to bring you, the members, the quality programs, resources, and interaction that can benefit us all.

To make this initiative achievable, we need volunteers to help out our leadership board. Our traditional model has become that each administrative council member takes over their area of concentration and handles everything. While I know our leaders are quite capable of doing that, I also know that the best work comes from teams. It’s time to rebuild our community by rebuilding our committees.

I would like to take a moment and welcome all the new members of our team. In particular, I would like to introduce our new Vice President and Acting Programs Manager, Bea Bailey! Bea is an energetic and driven individual. She has already proven her ability to take on a task and follow it through. The administrative council voted unanimously to appoint Bea as our new Vice President at the August council meeting. I look forward to working with her. As I served as the acting programs manager during my vice presidency — so will Bea. Bea already has a committee in place and they are making great strides in planning an excellent program year. Don’t forget to contact Bea if you have a topic you’d like to see covered or would like to present a topic to the membership.

Our incoming Membership Manager, Andrea Wenger, has much promise and I am looking forward to working with her. She will handle greeting members and non-members that attend our meetings, thanking people for attending meetings, running our annual membership picnic, and other tasks that keep us moving and our members happy. It’s a lot of work for one person, but my mother always said that “many hands make light work.” Once again, mother knows best. We need volunteers to help out Andrea as part of the membership committee. There are many tasks that you can undertake, from greeting attendees at one monthly meeting, to arranging parts of the annual picnic. If you’re interested in volunteering to be on our membership committee, please contact Andrea Wenger.

Communications is one more place where we want to build up a committee. Betsy Kent is our incumbent and incoming Communications Manager. Rick Sapir has served as our Webmaster for the last year and will continue in that role as well. Again, we have many small tasks that can be considered for someone with a little time to volunteer.

Vince Reh is our incoming Treasurer this year. He and Michael Harvey have worked closely to move over the accounts and information to keep us strong. I also expect Vince to keep me in line so all our money is invested well in the chapter.

These ideas are only the beginning of the community building that we will be doing this year. As we build from these small and humble roots, we can branch out into new initiatives that will benefit even more of our members. The larger our leadership board and volunteer base are, the more we can do to provide strong value to our members.

So think about what you would like to see become a part of our community and how we can make it happen. Bring those ideas to the administrative council or to me (feel free to e-mail me anytime at president at stc-carolina dot org). Please remember that if all you have is a little time, we will respect that. No one will overload you with more volunteer work than you can handle, so don’t be afraid to step forward. I look forward to serving this fine community and hope you are ready to start building.

Jenna can be reached at president at stc-carolina dot org.