IFVP Board of Directors meeting: September 2024

The IFVP board of directors met for their regular monthly meeting on Saturday, September 14. We took time to check in about our current lives and work. Our finances are in good shape after the Montclair Summit, the university offers us a very good rate on the space we use (but food is not such a good rate!) and we discussed possibly holding another summit there in the future. Our membership is at 247, with most of those being premium members but a significant number of basic members. We are recognizing that the basic membership is financially unsustainable for us, and we expect to make some changes in the new year. We discussed reinvigorating the board nominations process starting in March to reconnect with our bylaws and maintain a solid board at the current level. We are taking a good look at updating our bylaws to reflect current realities. A major concern we have going forward is to insure the value that we offer to members and to achieve financial sustainability with enough for growth initiatives. The new Circle forum platform that we announced at the Annual General Meeting continues to develop with beta testers. We believe it will be a major contribution to the value our members experience and will become a major part of our online presence. We spent a good amount of the meeting discussing the many dimensions of our online presence, different options for how to structure that, and what is doable in the short and long term. We are going to focus on Circle with hopes to have it fully launched by the end of the year. We will be holding some in-between meetings to further focus on Circle development.