Newsletter Jan/Feb 2012

Message from the Board

Dear Members and Friends,

First, we would like to say thank you to the ones joining us at this month’s meeting. We had a great discussion about the future course of our association.

Before outlining our future strategy, we would like to bring those who could not join up to date about the most important facts which pushed us into this direction:

• Our membership base has dropped to 26 members in total incl. honorary members (5) and students (3). Currently, only 18 members have renewed their membership.
• We had multiple great events (John Stanton, Nanotech at UofA & NINT, 40th anniversary) with low attendance rates despite the quality of the event.
• Out of app. 40 guests welcomed at the 40th anniversary, no new memberships could be created.

You are going to be seeing some exciting changes and improvements in the GCBPAA over the next while.  To do this, we will need your help, and welcome your opinions.  However, most of all – we look forward to your participation.

We decided to move on by concentrating on our roots – supporting ourselves and our businesses by creating friendships and a strong network. For the upcoming meetings, we will not have an external speaker but invite you - our members - to introduce themselves and their businesses instead. The motto is: get together, start your relaxing “Feierabend” with friends and promote yours and your friend’s business. Furthermore, it should be everyone’s goal to invite at least one guest, so we can slowly but surely enlarge our membership basis which we have  to secure our association’s survival.

Following this motto, we hope to see many of you on Feb. 14th for our next meeting. As usual, we doors open at the GCCC on Roper Rd. at 5:30p and dinner will start at 6:30p.

Your GCBPAA Board

Tel.: 780 484 0000  E-Mail: president@gcbpaa.ca