Hopes for the New Year
On behalf of the Council, I extend to all of you and your loved ones our best wishes for the New Year. We pray that our Benevolent Father in Heaven will shower you with His graces, protect you from harm, and bless you with good health, peace and prosperity.
As we close this past year, we look ahead with great anticipation to another period of dedicated albeit voluntary service to this great organization. We prepare our minds and spirit to forge ahead and continue with the work that we started a year ago in service to the general membership. On January 17, we will officially start the UPAA year with a Council Planning Session, then quickly followed in February by the Career Development Seminar series and the year's first Kapihan. Meanwhile, the Internal Development Group will be firing on all its cylinders to recruit new members and to improve internal environment ideally suited for membership retention. The External Development Group will continue to be a beehive of activities especially as the UPAA Golf Tournament draws closer. As you probably know, this tournament aims to raise money for the UPAA-Toronto Endowment which funds our professorial chair and scholarship in Diliman.
Early in December, our Communications and Information Management Group quietly launched our new and improved website. If you have not yet done so, I invite you to visit it. Current members of the Association will be able to login, update their profiles, renew membership, post classified ads, among other things. This new website is work in progress, so expect improvements as we go along.
These are just a few of the many things your Council has done and continues to do as a service to the general membership. As we move ahead into year 2010, we sincerely hope to do much more with your help and cooperation.
Once again, we wish all the members the very best for 2010.
Joe Zagala
