​Dear Volunteers and Staff,

This past weekend the AFS-USA Board of Directors, our new President and CEO Tara Hofmann and the Executive Team (ET) met in the New York office for our first Board meeting of the year.

If you are unfamiliar with the Board, I want you to know that every one of us is an “AFSer.” We are all either active volunteers, sending parents, members of host families, former staff members, or AFS Returnees, and many of us have more than one AFS affiliation. Additionally, as Board members each one of us contributes to the organization in a variety of other ways, such as chairing or being a member of the various Board Committees that fall within our individual areas of expertise.

The Board’s Education and Evaluation Committee recommended at the end of 2018 that we start including a 60-minute education session at the start of each meeting to help us gain a deeper understanding of one chosen area of the organization; for this first meeting we focused on Funds Development and Alumni Relations. In addition, on Saturday the Board took a closer look at four other areas of the organization proposed by the Executive Committee: Hosting; Sponsored Programs; the National Council; and Chappaqua and Organizational Development.

Collectively, the Board assumes fiduciary responsibility for ensuring the financial health and stability of the organization. As I hope all of you are aware by now, AFS-USA is embarking on a new Strategic Plan – SP 2.0 – which the Board expects to approve and launch during our next meeting in June. We kicked off our Board meeting Friday afternoon with an SP 2.0 presentation by our consultant David Williams, the purpose of which was to get us thinking about the mid-and-long term future of AFS-USA – our mission, our vision, our repositioning as thought leaders – while we begin to shape our goal areas. This is a significant project for the entire organization and the Board is very pleased with the progress made thus far. We want to especially thank the AFS-USA Volunteers and Staff who, as members of the SP 2.0 Driver group, have worked very hard on it.

The highlight of the Board meeting for me, and for many other Board members, was the opportunity to meet and mingle with approximately twenty AFS-USA staff members at a casual happy hour in the office on Friday afternoon. As I commented afterward during the Board meeting, I appreciated the opportunity to meet people whose names I knew and whose work I respected, but until now I had never formally met. I want to extend special thanks to Parker Allen for seamlessly handling our logistics, catering, minute taking, multimedia needs, etc., that helped the meeting run so smoothly.

Finally, I want to recognize all of you for your outstanding efforts toward bringing AFS and its Mission to more people, families and communities—and especially into schools across the U.S. Throughout our history, there has never been a time when the Mission of AFS was more critical than today. Thank you all for being the catalyst for change!

Sincerely,

Joan B. Siegel
Chair, AFS-USA Board of Directors
AFS Returnee – U.S. to Japan, 1979-80