News from the Chair                                _____________

Your chapter’s Executive Committee is working to get the member meetings for the rest of the year finalized – we have only April and May meeting yet to organize. 

Take look at our chapter website (www.sme43.org) to see the list of what we have lined up so far. 

I would like to highlight some new things we are trying.  First, Dean Phillips has been instrumental in putting together and organizing a webinar to have jointly with at least one other technical organization.  This will allow us to have more than one location for the technical session and provide a way for us to share our session with other organizations and foster communication and cooperation.  If this is successful, we are planning to expand it next year to provide several locations that should be more convenient to a larger number of our members.

We are also looking into additional ways to distribute our monthly bulletin.  As most of you are aware, the revenue from the bulletin is the primary source of our scholarship funds and contributes to our operating budget.  If recent years, our revenues have dropped in alignment with the down economy and we have had to pull scholarship and operating funds from other areas.  We are working on a survey to distribute to our members and sponsors to help us move in a positive direction that will allow the bulletin to be more useful for both groups.  Please keep an eye on your email and take the time to respond to this survey – we want this bulletin to be as useful to each of you as possible, and your opinions are essential.

We are also going to take a look at our website and try to make some improvements on it.  The website is not only a communication method from the executive committee to the members, but should provide a place for members to communicate with each other.  Any ideas you have on how the website could be more beneficial to you would great.  Please email me or any other executive committee member with your ideas and suggestions. 

Lastly, officer elections will be held at our December meeting.  If you would like to become a member of the committee, please contact any of the current members.  There are currently two vacancies on the committee that we would like to fill.  A full staff allows the committee to get more done for the chapter’s membership.

As always, if any of you have anything you would like to suggest that would make our chapter better for the members, please do not hesitate to contact your chapter executive committee at any time.  Better yet, come join us at an executive committee meeting on the first Tuesday of each month at Link Electric on McNally Drive.

I hope to see you at the November meeting on November 16.

Don Lewis, P.E.

Don.Lewis@comcast.net