Moving Ahead

Written by Rosemary Hammerton Friday, 12 August 2011 01:08

Thank you to Mimi Wellisch for her early endeavours to get the new committee established, and in very challenging personal circumstances. Mimi immediately identified a plan for rationalisation and her clear vision laid the foundations for our current work.

I feel honoured, though somewhat daunted, to be stepping into the Presidency at this time in the Association’s history. Having worked for the past two months with the highly motivated, skilled and committed individuals who make up the new committee, I am confident that we can turn crisis into opportunity! We are very fortunate to have diverse and complementary skills – from marketing to financial management to IT and web development to psychologists and educators working in the gifted field. What draws us together, of course, is our common
experience of parenting gifted children with all the joys, challenges, intensities, struggles and celebrations that this entails.

We have been painfully aware of the frustrations of many members with our less than optimal delivery of services. For this reason, our #1 priority as has been to develop more reliable and efficient mechanisms for membership processing, delivery of Gifted, events registration and office communication. Phase one of our website redevelopment – online membership processing – is complete, and phase two – online event registration – is almost there, thanks in large part to the generous financial backing and time invested by our Vice President, Dr Biing Yin, working with webmaster David Farmer and assitant webmaster, Christina Martin. We are now utilising social networking media and other marketing strategies to grow our presence, and for this, we are indebted to the talent and hard work of our Secretary and marketing coordinator, Anna Barnes.

We have a skilled Treasurer, Andrew Warburton, who has analysed past financial and management practices to identify areas for improvement and monitor progress. And finally, we have a very capable Parent Support Officer, Tracey Larkin, whose experience as a practicing psychologist and fellow traveller on the gifted journey, is greatly valued.

We are also grateful to our Book Keeper, Sharon Ryan, the only staff member we could afford to retain, who has also volunteered additional hours to get us over this hump.

Once we have stabilised financially and streamlined processes, we will start to engage more directly with your needs as members. We are already investigating business partnerships that will include member discounts to add value, and have exciting plans for some online forum conferences.

We welcome your questions, comments and ideas. If you would like to join our committee, or even volunteer a few hours a month, we would love to hear from you. If you have a question as a parent or teacher of gifted children, we encourage you to post on the forums. These permit a more considered and detailed response, and from a broader range of responders. It is also likely that your question will be someone else’s question, so others will benefit from the exchange. For other inquiries, please note the email links and our new office phone number on the Contacts menu.