For the full letter please go to:

http://www.ewmd.org/topics/helen-macfarlane/international-ne...

Dear EWMD Members

Our 25th year is almost over and before we enter into the 26th year of EWMD international we would like to share a few thoughts as well as celebrate the latest and future developments of our association .

We have been making steady progress in the development of many areas of the association. From the administration side, the new statutes have been ratified. They were voted for at the  extraordinary meeting on the 28th of November by the present members and the proxy votes from individual and corporate members.  Thank you to all those who managed to attend the meeting and those who sent their proxy votes. A great deal of work was involved to ensure the statutes comply with the latest German tax laws, which unfortunately change from time to time.

We have not only been busy with bureaucracy  but also with plans and projects of association expansion. In October , we organised our international board meeting in Maribor, Slovenia hand in hand with an initial step to open the doors to Slovenian members. Expert speakers from EWMD supported the event as well as guest and  local academics and business women.

Through further very generous sponsorship of Sandoz and the highly professional and enthusiastic input of the local business women, especially Ms Sevda Dogan, the Technical Operations Director of Sandoz in Instanbul and her team,  we were able to organise a very rich event in Istanbul introducing the EWMD concept to a most promising new country member group in Istanbul, Turkey.

This kind of association activity demonstrates just how important it is to have a good balance of corporate and individual members all of whom  are essential to represent and support the balance of employed and self employed women in management, and in our group. For this purpose our corporate member director Doris Subeit has developed a concept for a clear overview of the benefits and the corporate member care of EWMD members. This fits perfectly with the general communication structures which are being worked on for more transparency and for our group. You can see the concept with the minutes of the board meetings.

It is of course very important to keep up with our marketing activities, and here we are extremely happy to be able to send out some warm word of congratulations to our Marketing Director, Özlem Weiss on the birth of her delightful girl and boy twins, Leyla Méline and Taha Rémi. 

We are now preparing for the next stages of optimising our association information dissemination via the internet and are very happy to report the activities of national groups to inform and instruct members as to the use of our website. We would like to say a special thank you to Austria’s Anita Moser  at this point who has been untiring in her support on this topic as well as her website use training of the regional Austrian members.

We would like to take the opportunity to thank all who have contributed to the organisation and the running of the association this year which will definitely be a year to remember and learn from. Despite a rather gloomy start to the year seen from a global point of view, we feel our future is bright due to the spirit and expertise found in our diverse group. We will always learn from our experiences and each other.

Our past, present and future are our treasures. For this reason, we have decided that our international conference in 2010 should be based on the learning and support of each other and our younger peers in connection with our  cross border, intercultural 3GL project initiated by Elisabeth Blum (Austria). We will be concentrating on the position of mentoring and at the same time presenting EWMD’s very own concept based on a three generation concept.

We have already had some initial meetings with the organisational team in Munich where we discussed at great length the content and organisational issues of the conference.

The conference will take place on September 3-5th, 2010,  at the Novartis Campus in Basel, Switzerland. As we are organising this in the exclusive conference room of the visitor centre it is limited to 126 participants. We will be sending out the invitation and information at the beginning of next year but please save the date now – it will definitely be a conference which will live up to all the past quality gatherings and more. And we would look forward very much to seeing you there.

It only remains for us to wish you all a wonderful winter festive season and the very best for you and your loved ones in 2010.

Keep your eyes on tomorrow, your feet on today!

Nicole Meissner and Teresa de Lacerda
EWMD International Presidents

For the full letter please go to

http://www.ewmd.org/topics/helen-macfarlane/international-newsletter-december-2009