{"id":30,"date":"2008-02-16T18:00:18","date_gmt":"2008-02-16T18:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/?p=30"},"modified":"2008-08-30T14:25:41","modified_gmt":"2008-08-30T14:25:41","slug":"mid-year-board-meeting-rancho-santa-margarita-california","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/16\/mid-year-board-meeting-rancho-santa-margarita-california\/","title":{"rendered":"Mid-year board meeting, Rancho Santa Margarita, California"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/dsc03240sc.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-49\" title=\"dsc03240sc\" src=\"http:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/dsc03240sc-300x231.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"231\" srcset=\"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/dsc03240sc-300x231.jpg 300w, https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/dsc03240sc.jpg 500w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve never been too fond of the Chicago winters &#8212; I&#8217;d be quite happy to never see snow again! So I figured that a trip to sunny southern California for the mid-year board of directors briefing would be a nice way to thaw out. (Photo at right in front of World Headquarters today.)<\/p>\n<p>There were about 70-80 people present, besides the board itself. I think the biggest news is that they won&#8217;t try to bring up any of the proposed changes for approval at the August 2008 business meeting in Calgary. It&#8217;s a huge package of changes, all intricately related, and with over 100 policies and procedures affected, it&#8217;s just not going to be ready in time. So that&#8217;s reduced the pressure a bit, the plan is to have it all ready for a vote in August 2009.<\/p>\n<p>Other highlights from my notes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There&#8217;s a strong partnership with Caterpillar, where the Toastmasters program is being fully integrated into their corporate learning curriculum. This will be a great prototype to follow with other companies.<\/li>\n<li>Membership for the first six months is up almost 5% compared to a year ago, new members are up 8%, but new clubs are down 10%.<\/li>\n<li>Provisional districts 81P (Caribbean), 82P (India and Sri Lanka), and 85P (China) are being promoted to full district status effective July 1, 2008.<\/li>\n<li>A comprehensive evaluation program is being developed for district and region leaders (Regional Advisors, RAs) to provide feedback and promote improvement.<\/li>\n<li>No changes to the DCP for now, though they&#8217;re exploring how they might encourage new clubs and low-membership clubs to follow it better.<\/li>\n<li>The new District Governor-elect position will probably be responsible for the DCP for the clubs in the district (not just a pure understudy role to the District Governor).<\/li>\n<li>Aspiring district leaders will likely have a specialized &#8220;advanced leader&#8221; manual to follow, including the setting of personal development goals.<\/li>\n<li>The Distinguished District Program (DDP) will likely change to more closely integrate with the Distinguished Club Program (DCP). There&#8217;s also talk of eliminating the caps limiting President&#8217;s and Select Distinguished districts to six each.<\/li>\n<li>The plan for 15 regions has been reduced to 14, 10 in North America, and four overseas. Region V would probably be the same as it is today, except D62 (Michigan and western Ontario) will be added to it, making it truly international.<\/li>\n<li>The regional conferences will continue, primarily for the purposes of district officer training (though apparently these may be combined, two regions at a time, 14 seem to be too many), and speech contests. There won&#8217;t be any business meeting or elections held at the region level in the new plan.<\/li>\n<li>Jana Barnhill&#8217;s International President theme for 2008-09 will be &#8220;The Courage to Conquer&#8221;, and she gave a stirring speech about why this was important to her, and to Toastmasters.<\/li>\n<li>International President Chris Ford presented Immediate Past President Johnny Uy with several photo albums to remember his year by.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Full details from TI are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.toastmasters.org\/Members\/News\/Announcements\/BoardBriefing.aspx\" target=\"_new\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Afterwards, there was a time for socializing with light refreshments, and tours of World Headquarters. I had visited as LGET back in November, 2005, to meet some of the people I&#8217;ve been talking to for so long. That&#8217;s how I met Judy Chapman in Member Services, who has been invaluable so many times while I was serving District 30.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve never been too fond of the Chicago winters &#8212; I&#8217;d be quite happy to never see snow again! So I figured that a trip to sunny southern California for the mid-year board of directors briefing would be a nice way to thaw out. (Photo at right in front of World Headquarters today.) There were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-id-campaign","category-miscellaneous-toastmasters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}