|
|
Food Protection Trends COMMENTARY from the Executive Director “We hope you will take advantage
of the electronic election capabilities
and make your vote count this year!
" As the year 2007 comes to a close, it is a good time to reflect back and also to look forward. Today I want to cover three items: the Third European Symposium on Food Safety, our upcoming Secretary election, and the financial results for fiscal year ending August 31, 2007. So let’s get started! The Third European Sympos-ium on Food Safety was held October 18–19 in Rome, Italy with an audience of 140 attendees. This year, the attendance was equal to the attendance in Barcelona at our Second European Symposium but our sponsorship monies increased as did the technical poster session participation. There are pictures and a report from the Symposium on page 979 in this issue. Be sure to take a look and plan now to attend IAFP’s Fourth European Symposium on Food Safety in 2008. Location and dates will be announced in February! The Nominating Committee recently met to select candidates to stand for election to the position of IAFP Secretary for the year 2008–2009. Those candidates will be announced by February 1, 2008 when the voting begins. On or IAFP c ontracted with an inde penden t, third-party vendor to conduct this election. It is of utmost importance to ensure that our election is held without any opportunity for vote tampering and the vendor we selected is the leader in conducting electronic elections because of their built-in security features. Each IAFP Member will receive a unique alpha-numeric password that allows you, as an IAFP Member to place your vote. Of course the system will only allow one vote per Member to be registered. Once your vote is recorded, it is allocated to the proper candidate, but without your name or identification number(s) tied to the actual vote. Upon conclusion of the election, the vote results will be certified to the IAFP Teller who will then inform the IAFP President about the election outcome. Board Members, staff or the Teller from IAFP will not be able to determine who, specifically, voted for which candidate. We are comfortable with this new system of conducting elections for the IAFP Secretary. It offers IAFP Members a quick and convenient method of voting for the future leaders of IAFP. We hope you will take advantage of the electronic election capabilities and make your vote count this year! Watch for your notification in early February. As always, you can call the IAFP office should you have any questions on the electronic voting system. The last subject to cover this month is our financial results for the fiscal year ending August 31, 2007. It was a very successful year financially for IAFP. On page 1010, the General Fund Statement of Activity for the year is presented. From that statement, you can see that the Association added more than $182,000 to the General Fund from its activities during the year. The “Change in General Fund” is one of the most important numbers on the page as even though we are a “not-for-profit” organization, we must still break even or do better to continue as a viable organization. This excess revenue sounds like a large amount, but when compared to total revenue, it is only a modest seven percent. Another important number on this report is the General Fund amount under “Net Assets as of 8/31/07.” This shows the General Fund at $760,474. Again, that number sounds like a large one, but for not-for-profit organizations, the target is to hold 50% of your annual revenue in our General Fund ($1.3 million in our case). So, we are making great progress financially, but we still have a ways to go! The last aspect of the financial report that I want to point out is the balance held by IAFP’s Foundation (under Net Assets as of 8/31/07). You can see that we have a little more than $711,000 in the Foundation. This shows wonderful progress for the Found-ation in its fundraising efforts over the past few years. For the year ending August of 2007, we added more than $340,000 to the Foundation’s balance. We are well on the way to achieving our goal of raising the balance to $1 million by 2010! Since beginning our fundraising effort in 2005, the IAFP Foundation increased its spending in support of IAFP’s activities related to Annual Meeting and our new international pursuits. The Foundation supported five students’ travel expenses to attend IAFP 2007 in Orlando in addition to supporting the “Leafy Greens” Symposium in October 2006 and the European Symposium in November 2006 and October of 2007. As we enter the new financial year, the Foundation will continue supporting many programs that it has over the years, but will continue to increase its support of IAFP’s student development and international efforts. We see both of these areas as our “new frontier” for expansion in IAFP’s Membership and our increasing network of food safety professionals. We are pleased to see the rapid growth of support offered to IAFP’s Foundation by both individual contributions and those from companies. Happy Holidays and best wishes for a happy and prosperous New Year!
|