Outgoing President's Speech as Given at AGM

WELCOME to everyone. I trust you all have copies of the reports and agenda. Please refer to them throughout the meeting.

I will now present the President’s Report with a general overview of the Membership Report, Entertainment Report including Children’s Activities, and the Social Welfare Report.

MEMBERSHIP
- For the year 2006/2007 we had 79 renewals and 84 new members. Membership currently stands at 163, up 22% on the previous year.
- The Directory went on sale in October 2006 at a new price of Rs 100.
- In June 2006 a new electronic mailing list was set up with all members email addresses. This has meant that the Club has been able to keep the members as up-to-date as possible with forthcoming events and news.
- The newsletter has also been sent out via email for the first time (except for a small number who still receive a hard copy through the post). This has been done to keep costs down and the fact that the hard copy has to be signed for and we had a large number of newsletters returned every month.
- The cost for attendance at the General Meetings has been increased from Rs120 to Rs250. This was implemented in March 2007 and was due to a large increase from the Park Sheraton. This price will hold until February 2008 when it will be reviewed again.

ENTERTAINMENT
The list of meetings are there for you to read so I will not go through them month by month but will pick out what I consider to be the highlights.

- The Laya Project in July was fascinating with a presentation of their musical work on DVD and CD, with the voices and talents of the tsunami survivors.
- Then in August we had our annual Welcome Back Lunch at the Courtyard Marriott Hotel. The theme was International Day and we asked members to come in their National Dress, or an approximation. There was a trivia quiz and a prize for the best costume as well as some NGO stalls.
- The event was a sell-out with 90 people attending. Some people were disappointed as they had left it until the last minute to try and buy a ticket and we couldn’t fit any more in. PLEASE NOTE FOR THIS AUGUST – BUY EARLY!!!
- In September we put together our Hints & Tips for living in India, with our panel of ‘experts’ which was good fun as well as practical. Something I think we will try and repeat this year.
- In October, as a lead into our Ball, we had a salsa demo which many people enjoyed and then at the end of the month we had our main fundraiser – our Annual Ball. The theme was Mardi Gras and the Committee and our volunteers worked extremely hard in making the evening a success – which I am happy to say it was!
- The souvenir brochure raised much needed funds for our charities and we exceeded last year’s figure. This was despite our numbers being down on the previous year.
- In November we had our Christmas meeting with a gift exchange and stalls manned by our NGO’s and our own Craft Group who had worked hard to provide some gifts at short notice.
- In December for the first time we combined our General Meeting with a lunch for some of the elderly that we give funds to. This was held at the Madras Club with the members providing entertainment in the form of carol singing.
- February saw us back at Cottingley for our Annual Garden Tea. The theme was Elegant Dress and prizes were awarded accordingly. We were entertained by the singing talents of Stephanie Thompson and Suzanna Jones on piano. NGO’s provided stalls for shopping.

This leads me onto the Children’s Activities, namely the Halloween trick and treating event and Santa’s Brunch.

- The Halloween event was held in the Kotturpuram area with some generous people agreeing to decorate their homes for the trick and treating. Many thanks to Lakshmi for helping to organize this and to everyone else who helped on the afternoon.
- The Santa’s Brunch was as popular as ever this year and proved to be a sell-out. Due to number constraints set by the Taj some people were disappointed as they had left it late in the day to buy a ticket and they had to be turned away. So, again PLEASE BUY YOUR TICKETS EARLY THIS YEAR!!!
- Sarah Woods and her team of volunteers worked extremely hard to ensure it was a fun filled event with stalls and activities for all to enjoy. The giving tree was a great success again and meant we could distribute much needed gifts to our charities at Christmas time.
- Also a big thank you to Mike Eliseou who was our Father Christmas. I think he enjoys it as much as the kids!

SOCIAL WELFARE
If you refer to the Social Welfare report you will see that our support is widespread and an integral part of what we, the OWC, are about. I will highlight here just a couple of the projects that have received our support this year.

- Firstly, Little Lambs School – this is a new project for us and is a school for 130 under-privileged children in Red Hills. They came to us to help provide a much needed daily nutritional supplement of milk and bananas during their morning break as many come with very little in the way of sustenance to keep them going during the day.
- Then we have the 15,000rs annual donation given for educational support to Guild of Service Family Support Services as well as a 10,000rs quarterly donation for morphine given to Jeevodaya Cancer Hospice.
- We also have our all important Christmas parties. In fact, the funds that we raised throughout the year meant that our Christmas parties reached out to over 1000 beneficiaries, plus providing much needed educational support.
- Special mention should be made to the Children’s Committee whose funds raised from the Halloween and Santa’s Brunch events meant we could give a 17,000Rs donation to Mercy Home Creche to be spent on clothes for 120 children aged 2 to 5 years.
- A special mention also to Helga and Karl Hombach for their help in Hepatitis B support and finally, a thank you to all our members who dropped off clothes, toiletry items, toys etc at our meetings. These are all distributed and much appreciated by the beneficiaries and the newspapers recycled into paperbags by the residents of the Cheshire Home.

Please continue your support, either by dropping off the items I have mentioned at our meetings, or by joining the regular visits to the Homes through the year and especially at Christmas time.

We always need VOLUNTEERS – please contact one of the Social Welfare committee if you are interested.

Before we move on, and as this is the last time I will have you as my captive audience, I would like to mention a couple of other things that have happened during my time as President which I hope a few of you have enjoyed as much as I have.

Firstly, we have introduced a new activity in the form of the Tiffin Club (ably run by Sejal Wasani) which has proved to be very popular and will continue going forward.

We have started up the Craft Group again with the idea of working towards the next Christmas meeting, making various gifts and decorations.

Going further afield, I really enjoyed the trip I organized to Jaipur. This is a fascinating, and at times frustrating country but if you get the opportunity to travel and explore then you can always guarantee you will come away with some memorable experiences. I know that Martha will remember being stuck with a huge needle by Dr Panicker when she was knocked off her feet with a nasty dose of Delhi belly on the day we needed to fly home, but she made it!

On a more serious note, this year we lost one of our members, Marg Wilson who sadly passed away after a brief illness and is missed by all her friends.

And speaking of friends, I would just like to say a big thank you to all my committee members and others I may have roped in on the way – thanks for your support. I can in all honesty say I have enjoyed my time as President and hope you have enjoyed having me.

And finally, if I can leave you with any words of wisdom I have accumulated after my three years of living in India, I will repeat what I said at the Welcome Back Lunch. There are three things you need to survive; they are an open mind, a sense of humour and a bottle of gin. Because when the first two fail, it’s the third that will get you through!

Please refer to point 5 on the Agenda which is the proposal to increase the Annual Membership fee from 500rs to 1000rs with immediate effect. The fee has been static for approximately 10 years and we need to reflect the increase in costs.

Please refer now to Point 7 – the Presentation of Nomination slate for the new Executive Committee.

There are a couple of changes this year, namely that there will be no Vice President as it is only a title and bears very little actual responsibility.

This year we propose that I will support the incoming President for a few months in a handing over procedure, and she will do likewise at the end of her term.

We have also taken out the Members At Large as we need hands-on help, so effectively you are all members at large. If you look at the committee you will see that they are a small number and will need some help and we will be coming to you to provide that help.
We number 163 and growing – and less than 10% do all the work.