Chairperson's message for June 2011
In Praise of Volunteers
Like a whole lot of important organizations, LASPE works only because of volunteers.
I have the temporary honor of chairing the Board of this organization. But part of the time, I fell kind of like one of these:
No, I don’t mean that I feel like a middle-aged woman in a bad dress, I mean sometimes I think that I am just a figurehead in this fine organization.
An excellent example of what I mean is our recent very successful Annual Golf Tournament. That event happened on Friday, May 6. A total of 199 players on two courses resulted in a net surplus of $21,441 and improvement of $5,735 over the results of the 2010 Tournament. That is to say, the event was a great success, the 199 people who participated had a lot of fun, and when all the results are in LASPE will have gained over $20,000 to be used for good purposes such as our scholarship program. Why did this happen? It happened because of a great group of volunteers, led by Golf Tournament Chairman Rich Manuel. Rich volunteered for the job. There is a lot of work involved in organizing a big fund-raising event like the Golf Tournament, and every bit of it was done by volunteers.
That’s not all. The largest single expense of the LASPE every year is the scholarships we award to college students who are pursuing careers in our industry. How are those applications solicited, evaluated, ranked and selected? This important work is done by volunteers, led by Craig Webster.
How are our outreach programs for younger students organized and conducted? It is all done by volunteers.
Who runs our successful Technical Forum program? Leila Rashedi, a volunteer.
All the members of the board, all the committee chairpersons, all the people who make all of LASPE’s events happen and all of our programs work as well as they do are volunteers. I thank you all.
I am definitely different from a figurehead in some ways; I make a lot more noise, for one thing. But, would the ship sail on without the figurehead? Yes. LASPE would probably function just fine without me, because I am only one volunteer, and probably not the most important one. But LASPE would not work at all without the efforts of all our dedicated volunteers, who do all the important work of the organization.
Here’s to the Volunteers!
Mike Utt
LASPE Chairperson 2010-2011
mikeutt@roadrunner.com