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Greetings from your Affiliate Board!

Dear Affiliate Companions on the Journey,

Greetings from your Affiliate Board! We gathered via conference call this evening to reflect on the many gifts of our recent MAC gathering and to discern next steps as we seek ways, together with the Regional Coordinators, to carry the vision created in the conference forward. We express our heartfelt thanks to the Fr. Price Wilmington Chapter Planning Committee and to Fred Goddard for making our 20^th anniversary conference such a memorable event!

Our agenda for this evening was:

1. Learnings from MAC
2. Topics for the October Board meeting
3. Board member nominations
4. Guidelines for Recognition of New Affiliate Chapters
5. Open Space group responses

We began with a brief sharing of our experiences at Stony Point. Some of what we heard included: 

• Sense of unity in our diversity amongst the Affiliates
• Evolving self-awareness and maturity
• Felt in touch with the Affiliate movement and its evolving international nature
• Much energy around the input of young people; sense of more to do to involve them
• Saw the movement being alive, celebration of 20 years of existence
• International nature of the movement and awareness of the importance of language to be truly inclusive. Many came on their own, which was very positive. Can others participate without some assistance?
• Very uplifting, wonderful program
• Richness of the prayer experience grounded us throughout

Fred has compiled the Conference Evaluation and Open Space reports, both of which are available on our website. We would encourage all to view these. One important learning we received from the evaluations is that people would appreciate more communication from our Board. We are committed to doing this so please look for more updates and requests for input from us (via the Web, NSFA, the weekly updates, etc) and let us know in what ways we can do a better job. 

Secondly, we considered agenda items that we felt would be important for the upcoming October Board meeting. Some items surfaced included:

1. Updating our Recognition of New Chapter Guidelines – These are now 10 years old and need to be updated to more closely reflect our current reality. We have a working draft prepared by Fred and Dave S and discussed a process of preparation and input that would allow us to accomplish significant work when we meet in Oct 
2. Interim report from the Experimental Model Evaluation Committee
3. Future MAC planning - Beth Begley, Mary Massaro and Dave Schaffner agreed to develop with the assistance of Fred
4. Draft of next year’s Appeal letter

Please let us know if you have other topics you believe we should consider.

Third, we discussed nominations. Two of our members, Beth Begley and Gaye Hieb, will be leaving the Board this fall and will need to be replaced. As always, we encourage people to consider serving on the Board. We meet twice yearly with some conference calls in between. Working with your fellow Affiliates in this way is very meaningful and fun. We would invite you to consider joining us.

Lastly, we turned our attention to some of the issues raised in the Open Space sections of the MAC and the need for specific responses from our Board. We are working on these and will be in touch with those Open Space groups shortly.

Best wishes to all for a restful summer and please do let us know in what we ways our Board can be of better service to the wider Affiliate movement.

Peace and blessings,

Beth Begley, Margo Cambier MKLM, Ann Carr, Gaye Hieb, Ann Hayden MM, Lee Fermin, Mary Massaro, Paul Masson MM, Dave Schaffner