PRESIDENT’S REPORT

December, 2019

Greetings Old Boys. The Association has operated quietly through 2019, yet I am pleased to report that significant steps have been taken towards building a sustainable and rewarding future, bringing benefits to the school and to our members as we seek to achieve our core aims, as set out here:

Since the 90th Reunion there has been a notable increase in the number of Old Boys making contact with the Association, mostly by way of providing new or updated email addresses. Each new address we collect increases the likelihood of building further connections and since ‘going digital’ we have had an initial response which saw 88 members contact us through the website and they in turn generated 20 new subscriptions/donations. Please do share Old Boys’ information with your school mates and encourage them to send their details to us.

More recently, a simple appeal to members to connect with us via our Facebook page had our greatest response ever, generating over 500 comments, most of which also provided new emails. Each new contact does create necessary administrative time to match it to our database and update fields but we are excited by the affirmation of the time we have invested to modernise our business structures to operate more dynamically in a digital world.

Nothing is simple, of course, and we have to ensure we are protected from spam-mail or phishing. We were victims of a sustained attack in the first half of this year and by the time we reacted to the nuisance we had over 600 fictitious members in the database! These have been manually removed and appropriate protections put in place. We believe we now have over 900 viable email addresses and continue to track updates for the 450 addresses which remain ‘bounced’ from 2018.

However, despite the burst of interest in attending the 90th and the addition of the website contacts, the overall number of members making payments to the Association has remained static since 2017. It is clear from the excellent response to our request for donations towards the James Hunter Leadership Scholarship (see report below) that alumni are far more willing to provide financial support to specific causes. The Committee will develop a sensible list of projects (big and small) to present to members. We also intend to seek a grant to assist with our administration costs (currently about $4000 pa), so we can maximise the benefits of donations.

A volunteer organisation’s most precious asset is time and I continue to be immensely grateful to John Martin and Bruce Cockburn for their tireless efforts to maintain our archives and supply copy for the Chariot newsletter. To hopefully ease that burden, I am delighted to have started a process of working closely with the school’s Interact Service Club, under the leadership of their president, Year 12 student Jamal Fiso, son of Tofinu’u Fiso (1979-84). Jamal is keen to help the Association to bridge the age-gap as students transition out of the college and build a more dynamic and relevant on-line social media presence to engage our youngest members. In addition, the Interact students will enter assist with entering data for four missing years of student leavers, lost when the school transitioned to a new LMS twenty years ago, as well as assisting with the time-intensive work of continuing to digitise our archives.

Continuing this move to present a more youthful “face” of the Association. I am very pleased that Joe Fiu has joined the Committee. Joe (2001-05) followed his three brothers through Rongotai, his son begins Year 9 in 2020, and his mother, Lotofoa, has been teaching Samoan Language to our students since 2005. As a

proud Old Boy, father and a Lyall Bay businessman, Joe is keen to support the Association to achieve its aims, especially to strengthen our community’s social and business networks.

On behalf of the Association committee members, I wish all our alumni the very best for the summer and look forward to being of service to members and to the college in 2020.

Matt Eagle (1976-80, student; 1988-present, staff) President