FWEC 2021 Annual Meeting on Facebook Live, 2/22 7pm

Last year’s annual report (written March 13, 2020) seems like a message from another century: “Lastly, I want to touch on Welty’s plans for dealing with Covid-19…We are taking our cues from the School District of Beloit (closed until April 6, for now) and will cancel public programs until then. The last two years of fundraising mean we can weather a few months of low program income…Please keep washing your hands, and stay tuned for our late spring schedules!”  Three weeks without programs or field trips, can you imagine!

Last year’s annual meeting was filmed on Mark’s iphone propped  against a milk carton…long before we perfected meeting by Zoom!

Well, here we are, almost a year later and we haven’t had a public program meet in our program room since last spring. So, while it was a year unlike anything we’d ever imagined, we were very fortunate how everything unfolded.  This is all due to the wonderful people we have working with the organization–staff, Board members, volunteers, community partners, interns, camp families, area school districts, our generous donors and grantors.

Would you like to hear the details of our Year of the Pivot, and who helped us weather the extraordinary changes that come from operating during a pandemic? Next Monday, Feb. 22, we will hold our Annual Meeting as a facebook live event at 7pm. You can tune into this link on an internet-connected device to hear from me, our Board president Mark Spreitzer, and our Board VP Kirk Berridge about how it all went down, and a bit about our plans for 2021. You can also listen to the recording at a later date.

By the end of the month, I will send out our Annual Report, which will be a written version of the meeting, to our membership and email list.  I will also post a copy here that you can download from this website.

We would be limping along right now, if it wasn’t for all the support and wisdom of our community. We are very grateful for you all and, while I don’t dare be so glib by predicting in-person activity in April, I really hope we can come together in the summer. Take care, stay safe, and I  hope to see you next week!