Greetings Members!
What a glorious summer it has been. A bit hot and humid for me butstill a glorious summer.
Our Vice Presidents of Programs, Shela Hidalgo and Sopheap Nhim, have lined up a fabulous and interesting year for our monthly dinners. They are fun, interesting, and new. I can’t wait!
We will kick-off the year with our September meeting celebrating our scholarship recipients. We will be celebrating 12 beautiful and fabulous recipients. I am so excited to meet them and hear what amazing work each are doing. Our monthly meetings are usually the first Monday of the month; however, as the first Monday in September is Labor-day and this year the second Monday is Rosh Hashanah, we have moved the recipient monthly dinner to the third Monday, the 17th.
Over the past year, the Board has been reviewing a number of our procedures and programming and tools, and looking for ways to improve our members’ experience with BBPW. One such change that many of you have already experienced is at the meetings where we have changed the agenda and programming to include a reflective exercise, the Trinity, that facilitates getting to know each other better and to have a chance to reflect on our lives.
Another thing we identified was a critical need to update our website to be more user friendly, engaging and appealing. In that vein, the Board has sent out an RFP to solicit proposals to migrate and update our website so that we can more easily share information with our membership and to improve the functionality. The projected date for our new website is November 1st.
Another aspect that we revisited is the timing of the Woman of Achievement dinner. Based on historical precedent from the National BPW, this dinner was always held in the Fall. It is one of our largest fundraisers for the scholarships that we award, yet the money raised in October was not disbursed until the following September which we felt was a lost opportunity to make a stronger connection between these two events.
For this year, we are trying something new by moving the WOA dinner to May so that it is closer in date to the scholarship dinner in September. We are discussing ways to connect these two events strategically such that we can use the WOA as a capstone to the end of the year and the scholarship dinner as a launch of the new year, and designing the program in such a way that we bridge the energy and the donors of the WOA to the scholarship recipient dinner in September. We hope you agree. In October, we will hold our regular program event the first Monday of the month.
What makes Berkshire BPW so wonderful, fun and interesting? All of you! If you have ideas, thoughts or want to volunteer on one of our committees, please let us know.
Please welcome Andrea Wadsworth to our raffle committee. She will be joining Christine Carpenter for our 18-19 season of organizing the fabulous items we have for our monthly raffles. The raffle money also supports our Scholarship program. Thank you, Andrea and Christine. We look forward to a great and fun year.
Do you have news to share about your organization or events or services you are offering? We want to hear from you. Please send your submissions via email to Lori Gazzillo Kiely at bbpwnewsletter@gmail.com no later than the 10th of each month for inclusion in that month’s newsletter.
Warmly,
Claire Richards
bbpwpresident@gmail.com
