SIR President’s Letter for April

I want to report on the Big Sir meeting held on March 26 so I'm dedicating most of the attached message to that topic. I have already circulated a copy of the PowerPoint files to all attendees (and absent Big Sirs) listing the questions received from the Big Sirs which formed the main discussion period, as well as Area Governor Giorgio Dina's presentation titled "What Type of Area Governor would you like me to be".

This mailing is addressed as a bcc:  to the members of each Branch BEC plus the RAMP volunteers. This is NOT a full mailing to everyone in your Roster, and it is sent from my gmail account so there is no 'unsubscribe' button available. When we mail from a full-service mailing house we will definitely include the unsubscribe feature.

I am also looking for more content to include in the next edition of Happenings. If you have a report of an interesting trip, or something (anything) your branch has done in the last few months, please send it to me. It is easiest to handle if it is in Word document format with pictures in .jpg or .png format. I can extract text from pdf files and I can screen copy pictures but that takes longer! I see the President's letter focusing on SIR administrative material, and Happenings publicising Branch related news. This will not be a perfect division as some articles may belong under both categories. There is no space limitation on the total size of Happenings, but each submission would ideally be less than 300 words, so please send some material which shows your Branch "... improving the lives of our members through fun activities and events – while making friends for life."

One of the jobs delegated to our VP  is the organization of the Annual Meeting, so VP Ed Benson has recently sent out the first invitation describing all the extra activities we have added. This year we are inviting both Big and Little Sirs from each branch to the Annual Meeting. We feel this will help the Little Sir (2018) be better prepared for being Big Sir (2019) - the survey I sent asking about the Annual Meeting arrangments had a very high positive score for including Little Sirs, and the Board has voted to include them. This does increase the total cost of the meeting but we feel it is money well spent.

The next State Board Meeting is on April 10 and I plan to hold a GoToMeeting session for Regional Directors and Area Governors on Wednesday, April 25 at 2 pm to review decisions made. When I mentioned this at the Big Sir meeting I was asked if Big Sirs could listen in. We have a limit of 51 attendees per meeting with our current license, but we will endeavor to increase that to 100 attendees so about 75 Big Sirs could attend. Our biggest audience thus far has been 25 (after the January Board Meeting)  so going to 100 will require attendees to follow the ground rules carefully - the main requirement is a MUTED microphone as otherwise we get awful feedback and a lot of domestic background noise (dogs, phones etc). If a Big Sir is interested please contact your Area Governor and instructions will be provided before the session.

If you have any comments about this communication please let me know.

Best wishes for a successful year

and as we say in England

Cheers!