I hope that the holiday season is treating everyone well, and that all of you are safe and healthy. I have several exciting updates from the Board that I would like to share with you. The first is that the PPBSO has gone completely virtual and has shut down our office in Milton. While it was a sad occasion to close our office after 14 years, we’re looking at this as an opportunity to save money over the next year. For the time being we’re working remotely but have secured access to a co-working space in Oakville should the need and opportunity for in-person activities to resume. As life and our operations start to return to normal, we’ll reevaluate our office needs.
The next thing I’m happy to announce is that the Board of Directors has extended all 2020 memberships until April 30th, 2021. There is obviously a lot of uncertainty as to the shape and nature of our 2021 season, and so until we have a better idea of what that season will look like, we want to allow our current members to be able to continue to benefit from their memberships to participate in our branch events and our upcoming AGM. Additionally, we’ve decided to eliminate all late fees for our 2021 memberships.
What we haven’t decided upon yet is what those 2021 membership dues should look like. Our plan is to have a conversation at the upcoming AGM to discuss the finances of the PPBSO, what services and opportunities we can provide to our membership, and options for membership dues. The AGM will be held on January 30th, 2021 at 1:00 PM. Under the COVID-19 emergency measures passed by the Government of Ontario, our AGM will be online. Details including the agenda, Zoom link, and other materials will be made available in the coming weeks.
In order to help minimize costs and modernize our communication strategy, we’re looking to move away from physical notices for meetings and move to an electronic format. To do this we need your help! Under Ontario law, notifications for meetings must be made individually. This means that we need to send you the notices for general meetings either via email or physical mail – a posting on the website or Facebook is insufficient. Unfortunately an analysis of the member email addresses in the database shows that the majority are either missing or invalid. We need each member to provide us with up-to-date contact information. At the end of this post there will be instructions on how to do that. Please take the time to do this – every valid email address saves us money on printing and postage. We also want to be able to more directly communicate with our members and send information and surveys to you, but we need your help to make that happen.
Finally, over the course of the past few months both the Board and the Music Committee have been extremely busy. We’ve been continuing to look at ways to reduce operational costs, provide events through our branches, process upgrade requests from competitors, plan for various possible options for the 2021 season, engage in a strategic planning initiative and develop a member survey, review our adjudication requirements and professional development, discuss and examine opportunities for engagement in education, and many, many other things. We’re looking forward to sharing and discussing the details of these things at our AGM. I am proud of the work of all our volunteers and staff, and thank each and every one of them for their dedication and their time – the PPBSO wouldn’t function without them.
I look forward to seeing as many of you at the AGM as possible. In the meantime, please partake in the online events offered by our branches and continue to play and practice as we eye a return to a summer competition season.
Chris Buchanan
Updating your contact information The best way to do this is to use the online member services at https://ppbso.org/secure_html/. For those members who haven’t registered, please follow the instructions at https://ppbso.org/secure_html/register.html. If you are unable to do this, we’ve created an online form for you to use (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1LYF5WpHY93ODULtKLEvAGThYCaSUFkPvTMVZnaAaGAQ).
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