Dear MER Members,
I hope this finds you well and enjoying the summer. It was good to see many of you at our membership meeting during the WOCN conference in Salt Lake City. Connecting with colleagues new and of longstanding is one of the best parts of conference!
We are extending the deadline for scholarships and awards. Please consider nominating a colleague for an award, or your favorite vendor for Manufacturer of the Year. There are WOCNEP and graduate school scholarships available as well as a research grant. It is easy to apply on our upgraded website mideastregion.org. All deadlines are now August 30.
A new scholarship for mission work was proposed at our membership meeting. It was decided to form a taskforce to develop criteria for this scholarship. If interested in being on the taskforce, please contact me at mkoch524@gmail.com. We hope the task force can finish their work in time to add this item to next year’s budget.
Copies of our former newsletter, The Mideast Dropper, and many photos can be viewed on our website. While happy to save this part of our history, it reminds us that we have not been sharing our local news with others in the region. We wish to propose a new electronic newsletter that can be sent via email twice a year with that news and then preserved in pdf format on our website. We would ask that members submit material to share. There is a onetime cost of $650 to develop, then about $150 per newsletter thereafter. We will discuss this further at our membership meeting in the fall and vote whether this should be added to the budget.
Your board and conference planning committees are busy working toward future conferences for our region. Here is what we have in store:
- October 5-7 2017 Dearborn, MI Registration is still open on our website
- September 13-15, 2018 Morgantown, WV
- September 25-27, 2019 Cincinnati, OH
- 2020 Indiana
Indiana members – please consider forming a conference planning committee. There is a place on our website to submit your name and city for consideration. We have 1 submission and would like more to consider. Please submit by September 15.
Lastly, it is time for Board elections: We are electing our treasurer, Director 1 and Director 3. Please vote on this and our other issues.
Our fall conference in Dearborn has an amazing program planned – I hope to see you there!
Sincerely,
Monica Koch – President, Mideast Region of the WOCN® Society