By Laurel Teel

At Child Protect, our fiscal year runs from October 1 - September 30. Every year at the end of September our board and staff get together for our Annual Meeting to recap the year, celebrate, and pass the gavel. This year we met at the Capital City Club for their lunch buffet and it was fantastic! Anita Carter passed the gavel to Les Massey, now serving as President. Other officers include Michelle Parks as President-Elect, Delbert Madison as Treasurer, and Amanda Hines as Secretary.

Leading up to our annual meeting, we accept recommendations for new members and reach out to those who may have previously expressed an interest in joining us. Our three members joining the board this year came highly recommended, and all had an opportunity to come for a tour and meet the staff in order to decide if our organization was a good fit for them.
For our Junior Board, this was our second year to host an after-hours Open House. We had approximately twenty attendees come and take tours with the staff, mingle with our current junior board members and ask any questions they may have had about our agency. This year we welcomed six new young professionals as our agency’s ambassadors. The Junior Board has already hosted their first event of the year, our Annual Halloween Party, and it was a huge success raising over $1,100!

We are excited to spend the next year working with these wonderful people and appreciate their willingness to devote their time, resources, and ideas to our organization. Child Protect is extremely blessed.

Check out our new members.

​Our staff and team members spent an entire morning with WSFA filming an amazing video to highlight just how important this addition will be to our community. I was tasked with creating a compelling brochure in order to evoke an emotional response to give. (I used Adobe InDesign for the first time ever and it was quite the learning curve.) We finalized tent/table/linen rentals, catering, and a program for the evening. Our kickoff party was sure to be a great event!

On Thursday, November 10th, members of our executive and junior executive boards, our staff, and our guests gathered under a big white tent next door to celebrate our future. Everyone enjoyed delicious food provided by Debbie Kemsel Catering (Mac-N-Cheese bites, anyone??) while watching our campaign video, courtesy of WSFA. Our campaign goal of $598,000 was unveiled and guests previewed renderings and sketches of the floor plan. It truly was a wonderful fall evening full of energy and excitement.
 
Where do we go from here? What’s next? Today, I am excited that thanks to Jeanne Drummond and her commitment for the naming of our building, we have already reached 54% of our goal!! Jeanne is an Executive Board member with a heart for our organization and we are forever grateful for her service and this amazing gift. With that being said, our goal from the beginning of this process was to aim for a groundbreaking in April 2017, to celebrate Child Abuse Awareness Month and it looks like we should be right on schedule to do just that! I am so excited to get the rest of our money raised and to continue making an impact in our community.