2025-03-09 AGM Meeting

Elderberries 2025 Annual General Meeting

To Do Before

• Distribute Minutes of last meeting to the membership
• PRint out a few copies of this for the physical meeting

Agenda

• Welcome by the Chair
• Approval of last years' minutes
• Chair’s Report (Barend) (includes activities) (mention Anita)
• Membership Report (Dan)
• Treasurer’s Report (Kaitlin)
• Speaker’s Bureau Report (??)
• Invitation for any present to join the Board "Being on the board is fun, and involves but a couple hours of work a month - attending a boardmeeting, doing some work, most often by showing up somewhere, and coming to our events."
• Election by SLATE: see slate below
• Round of applause for the new Board
• AGM is ended.
• Talk by guest speaker, Katerina Bakolias <katerina.bakolias@gmail.com> playwright, film writer and actor https://lorimer.ca/childrens/product/luscious-love/

Membership Report

By Dan

Again the last year we’ve had several references of members from social workers and therapists which is extremely gratifying - it means that a) we’re known to them and b) they consider us a healthy place for their members to be referred to.

In 2024 we had 45 new members; during covid we had 25 new members per year. During covid 25 new per year; 2018: 55 new; 2017: 23.

As of end of year we had 375 emails on our list and 8 people who we call every month, thank you Kaitlin.

We don’t know how much overlap there is between the Facebook membership and the email membership. I know that we get very VERY little engagement from our Facebook members, I don't know why. The statisitics are: 732 people, 50 more than last year, 58% women, 42% men, 33% from Halifax, 7% from Dartmouth. 98% from Canada.

Out of these possibly eleven hundred people, we get fifteen, the same fifteen, coming to most of our meetings. That’s pretty normal and totally OK. Still it would be good to work on expanding that range.

As of

• We added 38 members in 2024

Slate

• Allison
• Barend
• Dan
• Kaitlin
• Lynn
• Nathan
• Pauline
• Renée