Over 45 WBFN members met on May 14 in the Preston auditorium to hold this year’s Annual Meeting.  The gathering included most heads of activities and some twenty of them addressed the audience and reported on the highlights of the year. 
Together we reminisced on the increasingly successful efforts of the welcoming team, the joyful atmosphere that underscored the picnic in October, the Holiday Party in December and the Children’s Art Competition in March, and the positive energy that motivated all the volunteers during the three days of our Annual Exhibit in the Atrium in March.
Then, the respective presidents of the Book Project and the Margaret McNamara Memorial Fund reviewed their achievements for the year:  Seven shipments of books to seven different countries, and seventeen scholarships awarded to seventeen brilliant women from developing countries.
We were then told that the Information Seminars program is going on strong, the Investment Club had an eventful year but managed to stay the course, the Teens Programs is well-poised for a fourth session this month of July, and the Spouse Issues team has been totally reorganized to make way for a smooth transition after the departure of two of its main members.
English language classes and financial literacy classes still attract a lot of participants.  Our volunteers are being assigned more specific and more limited responsibilities.  Our system of managing our members is getting refined and we are on the verge of merging three of our databases into an improved one.  The architecture of our website has been radically revamped and closely synchronized with our other publications such as our newsletter Mosaic.  A web version, Mosaic Plus, has been launched and offers more pictures, lengthier articles and the possibility to explore earlier issues.
Looking ahead, WBFN will carry on increasing its collaboration with the family associations of other international organizations.  It will maintain as well its close relationship with Global Mobility and with the newly restructured HR Service Center.  As for our Members Abroad activities, now that our databases are being unified and improved, we hope to resume them with even more gusto than before.
On short, we have achieved a lot this year!

To carry on the work of WBFN next year, the new members of the Executive Committee were introduced to the meeting.  In accordance with the by-laws, their biographies had been published one month earlier.  The audience voted unanimously to vote them in.
Our best wishes to them to carry on WBFN’s mission for the next twelve months.

Rula Ghani