Annual General Body Meeting 2020

नमस्कार मंडळी,
बऱ्याच दिवसांनी आम्ही स.न.वि.वि. च्या माध्यमातून आपल्याशी संपर्क साधत आहोत आणि आशा करतो कि तुम्ही सगळे खुशाल असाल. जेंव्हा २०२० साल सुरु झाले आणि आम्ही नेहमीच्याच उमेदीने आणि उत्साहाने SMMच्या कार्यक्रमांची सुरुवात केली तेंव्हा कुणाला वाटलं होतं की लवकरच करोना व्हायरस चा प्रादुर्भाव ह्या एवढ्या मोठ्या प्रमाणात सर्व जग हादरवून टाकेल? वर्ष सरत आलंय आणि संपूर्ण जग कोरोना वरच्या लसीची उत्कंठेने वाट पाहत आहे कारण जोपर्यंत ती लस विकसित होऊन सर्वत्र उपलब्ध होत नाही तोपर्यंत तरी गोष्टी पूर्वपदावर येतील असं वाटतं नाही आहे. अश्या ह्या अभूतपूर्व परिस्थितीत SMMच्या कार्यप्रणालीत बदल करणं हे अपरिहार्य आहें आणि त्यादृष्टीने ह्या वर्षीच्या कमिटीने, मंडळाच्या बोर्ड ऑफ ट्रस्टींच्या सहमतीने घेतलेल्या काही निर्णयांची माहिती आम्ही ह्या न्यूजलेटरच्या माध्यमातून आपल्यापर्यंत पोहोचवण्याचा प्रयत्न करत आहोत.

When Seattle Maharashtra Mandal was founded and its bylaws were written, the Mandal had not foreseen the unusual situation such as Covid-19 and with the global pandemic that we are currently experiencing, we have no choice but to take some deviations from the set procedures. So, under the guidance and approval from the BOT, this year’s executive committee has taken some decisions which we would like to communicate through this newsletter.

The key decisions are listed below

• Similar to the previous years, we had a good membership uptake during early 2020 and though the current committee tried their best to conduct a lot of events online, we do understand that given the restrictions involved, we were not able to provide all the membership benefits to the community. In view of the situation, it is decided that all the SMM members for the year 2020 would get their membership carried forward to 2021 without any extra fees. We have already disabled the PayPal auto-debit so those who have opted for an auto-renewal of the membership, won’t see any new fees deducted from your account for the coming year. Please refer to the instructions in next section to know how to check your membership details on the SMM website. We shall also be temporarily suspending the facility to buy new membership from the SMM website to avoid any erroneous transactions.
• We will follow the current by-laws which require that a new EC be elected at an Annual General Body Meeting (AGBM) at the end of 2020 to serve in 2021. Though in our bylaws no accommodation was made to allow for non-in-person AGBM, BOT’s have agreed to allow non-in-person remote meetings for this year to continue the normal activities while keeping the SMM members and guests safe.
• This year’s AGBM would be conducted online on Sunday, 13th December 5pm Pacific.  You can join this meeting by clicking this link https://bit.ly/agbm2020. We would like to encourage all the 2020 members to join the meeting to hear about the year gone by and share your feedback, suggestions.
• We would also like to encourage members of the SMM community to send their nominations for the 2021 committee by following this link Submit your nominations before the December 10th, 2020. In case there are more than 17 nominations (Size of the SMM executive committee as per the current bylaws), an election would be conducted to choose the 17 members. In such a case, the election officer would ask the members who attended the AGBM to send their votes by email by a specific cutoff time. The votes would be counted after verifying the membership and the final results would be published thereafter
• To ensure knowledge continuity in the current times, the committee has also decided to delay the request for nominations for a new BOT member to take over from Mr. Arun Nisargand who is completing his prescribed tenure of 3 years. We would like to thank Arun kaka for his continued support and guidance to the SMM team.

If you have any questions about these points above, feel free to send your questions to info@seattlemm.org.