President's Message

By: Allison Collins | January 2020

We are already a few weeks into the New Year and starting a new decade, I can’t believe how fast time is going by! It feels like yesterday that we were at our Annual Golf Tournament enjoying the beautiful weather, catching up with our fellow MPI colleagues sharing what we did over the summer and now here we are, half way through the year. How did that happen? Everybody told me how fast this year would go by and I guess they were right.

Having gone through six months I can’t help but think of what we’ve achieved as a board and as a chapter. We’ve hosted many well attended and unique events were we’ve received really positive feedback from our members. We were recognized as a high level performing chapter by MPI Global which was a huge honour as we are measured on different aspects such as volunteer engagement, financials, member retention, member growth and member satisfaction. We’ve also worked really hard at staying on budget which has not been an easy task and in my opinion the most important thing is we continue to have amazing and dedicated volunteers work on our events, our marketing, social media and so much more.

I mention our volunteers because I think this is what makes our Chapter so great. It is truly a strength we have in our community. In speaking with other Chapter leaders across Canada and the US this is always one of their biggest challenges, how to recruit and engage volunteers. Somehow we do not have this challenge. We consistently have a third of our Chapter members volunteer on committees or in other words close to 100 volunteers. I can’t help but wonder why we have such an engaged chapter and why do we have so many volunteers? Reading up on the benefits of volunteering surprised me a bit. I found out that volunteering has a huge impact on people’s mental and physical health. It also has the ability to improve people’s quality of life. I wanted to take this opportunity to mention our volunteers because without you we wouldn’t be able to do what we do. Our board is committed to making the chair and volunteer roles easier and more efficient. We’ve heard feedback this year and want to use this to improve how we do things. If you volunteer, please keep your eye out for more streamlined processes and standard operating procedures this is what we have committed to doing to help make being a volunteer with MPI Ottawa easier, less stressful and more rewarding.

So thank you to all of our volunteers, I look forward to working with you in the next half of this year and to see all the amazing things you do.

Article written by Allison Collins, Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre & Westin Wall Centre Vancouver Airport

Article edited by Rozanne Lyons, CMP, Intertask Conferences