From President Doug Fee

As has been previously reported to you in this space, as well as at our monthly meetings, your Board of Directors has been researching and debating the possibility of establishing a permanent endowment. The purpose of this endowment would be to provide a ongoing source of funding for our scholarships. This has been a nearly six-month discussion that has involved multiple briefings with the Placer Community Foundation, followed by extensive question and answer sessions. Untold numbers of emails have zipped back and forth between various members of our Association, members of the Board, and the PCF representative. Your Board also met with a financial advisor to discuss the issue, and to get his perspective and thoughts on just whether or not this would be a good move for the AAA. I believe that your Board has truly performed it's duty of due diligence. The end result is that, on June 3, your Board met and unanimously voted in favor of establishing an endowment to be held within the umbrella of the the Placer Community Foundation. Personally, I'm very excited about this move. While we may have a few years of work ahead of us to bump up the funding to a level that we want, I believe that, in years to come, we will look back on this move and be very glad that we did it. The beauty of whole idea is that the endowment will be a permanent thing that will fund our scholarships in perpetuity. Long after you and I are long gone, our endowment will still be providing aviation career help to our youth here in Auburn. That is a legacy that, I believe, we can all take great pride in. Meanwhile, where things stand right now, we've put about half as much into the endowment as we'd like to have. Our very energetic and creative Scholarship Director, Don Wolfe, has been brainstorming ways to finish it's funding, and you'll be hearing more about his efforts in months to come. Of course, we're open to your ideas, input and suggestions. More to come on this issue . . . . Our July Meeting This year, the first Wednesday of the month of July happens to fall on the day before our Independence Day holiday, so we decided to shift our meeting for this one month to the second Wednesday of the month. And it will be a somewhat special and unusual meeting in that we are planning to meet jointly with the Auburn chapter of the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA). So anticipate a full room and a somewhat different meeting format than usual. I'm expecting it to be great fun, so please join us! Blue skies, Doug