President’s report AGM 2021
Dear CAV Members,
Last year, during my presidential campaign speech, I spoke about my “4R” Mission to Rebuild, Reconnect, Reach Out and Regenerate. I felt that we were weak in our business processes and infrastructure, and as an association, we were beginning to lose our identity and our fellowship and we were on course to contract and lose our younger membership.
We had such great plans, only to be slowed down by the multiple Covid lockdowns. But lockdown or not, the CAV has a physical presence, and a maintenance cost that did not go away. We instead turned our attention inwards to improve the ways we were doing things. We applied for numerous financial grants to multiple agencies and were successful for a number of them. We had multiple monthly Zoom meetings to discuss fundamental concerns and the improvements that we could make to the CAV. As you will see in this report, we have been quite busy.
Of particular concern was the effects of discontinuity between the annual dramatic changes in EXCO over the last few years, so we established an Advisory Board to provide non-binding advice to the EXCO President including suggestions, issues and directions for the future of the CAV. This year’s Advisory Board members have all been past presidents of the CAV. They are Dr Frank Chew OAM, Dr Clement Wong, Vincent Chow OAM, Dr KaSing Chua, Susan Gin, Simon Soon and Shirley Teh.
Using my “4R” framework, here is a concise summary of our activities in 2020:
Rebuild
We took advantage of the down time to restructure and simplify CAV’’s business processes. In particular, We:
- streamlined our vendor management and payment processes
- upgraded our CAV membership database system from a stack of manually managed excel spreadsheets to a cloud-based system that also handles billing and contactless collections via the internet
- rebuilt and refreshed the CAV main and subgroup websites to become more informative, welcoming and honouring our founders and fellows.
- put the last 12 years of CAV newsletters and bulletins online
- installed a Network Access Storage server that has allowed us to build a data and video/photo repository of our history
- cleaned up the surrounding areas and embarked on a major renovation and refurbishment of our portable classroom building
- designed and ordered 2 more class rooms and an office/library for the school, which will be delivered in the March/April 2021 timeframe
- put up a balustrade around the school corridor for children’s safety
Recognising the opportunities for the use of the land purchased by our founders, we re-established the Building Project Committee (BPC) and mandated that the sitting President will not chair the BPC to avoid conflict of interest or personal agendas. This means that when the EXCO team changes (including the President), the BPC chairperson will remain the same and continue the same agenda as before. The initial mission for the BPC is to come up with a proposal to our members which will then lead to a proper master plan for future development. The current chairperson of the BPC is Daniel Loh, who is an experienced property development professional. The BPC chairperson will report separately in the AGM.
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