The Wide Angle - December 1997/January 1998

President's note:

First of all, I want to thank Suzanne Szames for all her devotion and guidance as she performed her duties as our very capable President in our first official year of existence. She will continue as our Vice President of Education and lend her much needed support and knowledge.

Next, I would like to share my vision for the Coalition over the next year. I want to focus on building the community and providing a better network of support for our members. I would like to tell you of some the changes the board has already made to better serve our members and the fat community. We will now have only bimonthly business meetings. We will make every effort to make them as short as possible. Every month we will have a forum (round-table discussion) facilitated by a board member. I hope you as members will come and participate and offer suggestions on future topics. We are also looking into inviting speakers on topics that will be of interest to us all.

Often times we are asked what are the advantages are to being a member vs. a subscriber. Starting in February, we will ask that non-members donate a fee to attend the forums. It will be a nominal fee but will help. As a member, you also get reduced registration fees for our INDD weekend. Your membership dues go to our operating expenses. As of now, the biggest expense we have is our newsletter. We also have to pay for the voice-mail and the PO Box. I believe this is money well spent to keep our worthwhile cause alive. We need more members and it is my goal to add a new member a month. That’s only twelve new people. We need to build our community. “One a month, that’s all I ask” you will be hearing me say this a lot over the next year.

We are looking for free public meeting space. If you know of any accessible facilities please let us know. We are looking for somewhere centrally located and hopefully served by public transportation. Until that time we will continue to offer meetings one month in the North County, the next in the south.

I am in the planning stages of next year’s INDD event. This year we are going to shred our old fad diet books and recycle the paper. Organization’s all over the nation will be joining us in this. So start digging through your garage and rummaging though yard sales looking for all that poor diet advice. I need people to join the event committee and help plan this weekend event. Do I see any hands out there?

I am pleased to inform you we will be getting a new web site. For those of you who are on line and have checked out our home page you know we are sometimes not updated as often we liked to be. I hope the new change will solve that problem. Look for the new URL in the next issue. Thanks to Hans Hornstein for all his past efforts and welcome Jeff Lipton as our new on-line coordinator.

So, join me will you. Come out to the meetings and events. Get involved. Let’s make this community thrive!

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