Letter from the President - March 2019

I'll be honest... I started by typing and erasing several forced references to the weather, before settling on this. Let's hope our new website comes out of the gate stronger than this column.

Oh hey! Speaking of which -- new website! Going live on March 1st. Board and staff are really pumped for you to see and use it, and are really grateful to our Website Working Group -- volunteers who painstakingly oversaw the project from 'requirements' phase through to now, putting in hundreds of hours along the way. Special thanks to Rob Borges, who led the group and was tireless in pushing things forward to have the site ready for the registration period upon us.

On the topic of registration, you'll see that membership fees are up $5 this year, and summer team fees are up $50. The board had a good discussion, at our most recent board meeting, before settling on these adjustments. One of the things that came up in conversation -- and was heard loud and clear via our Fall 2018 survey -- was that, as an organization, we haven't done a good job historically of educating our membership about MODS' financial architecture.

Of course, the basic idea is that money comes in, money goes out and we try to control those two things in such a way that we break roughly even every year. What might be more interesting, though, is a bit more detail on specifically what you'd find in the 'in' and 'out' buckets. Some stuff is probably pretty obvious: registration and membership fees 'in'; facility rental and staff wages 'out', for example. But probably a lot of things are less obvious: say, Sport Manitoba base funding 'in' and field-maintenance costs 'out'.

Either way, a few themes came up in this recent board discussion: that a) as an organization, we remain focused on striking the balance between keeping member costs affordable and being able to support a wide array of programming at high-quality venues; b) we would like to get better at painting the picture of where your money goes (look for a more descriptive communication on this, sometime in the near-ish future), and c) speaking of money, we're feeling optimistic that you'll find the new website to have been a good use of it.

Enjoy and talk soon.

-Yacine

(president 'at' mods dot mb ca)