Hello everybody!
This past weekend was the annual MNFurs Board Retreat. During the Board Retreat, the current board members meet with the incoming board members from the recent election, and spend about 15 hours over the course of two days onboarding the new directors, offboarding those leaving the board in April, and planning MNFurs on a technical level for the 2025-2026 year. A lot of this planning revolves around how to maintain our legal status, reviewing operational documentation to ensure it stays up-to-date and relevant, and divvying important tasks to various board members. I wanted to give a (very) brief summary of some important parts of the Retreat for you all!
Elected Officers
Firstly, an important part of the retreat involves appointing new officers for the 2025-2026 year. Officers are decided by the board by nomination and vote. The new officer positions are as follows, and will take effect April 1st at the start of the new term:
President: Talon
Vice President: Rocket Dog
Con Chair: Rico
Secretary: JJ
Treasurer: Snap
Director: Vulan
Policies and Procedures
The organization Bylaws are also currently under review – we located a section that could use revision regarding annual reporting (as the wording currently is from such a time when voting was done entirely in person). Other operational documents were also reviewed to ensure they are the best they can be.
We will also be (slightly) changing how events will be categorized – this is to ensure clarity both to members and from a legal standpoint. This is still in the works, and will be explained in more detail when the policies for that are fully ironed out. Stay tuned!
Financials
Finally, part of the Retreat is looking at our financials for the year. We would like to be very transparent with you all about this. For the 2024-2025 year, MNFurs had a deficit of $1,054.69. The current projected budget for 2025-2026, if things do not change, leaves us with a $6,950 deficit. This means that our expenses are greater than our intake. In part, this is because we have grown so much recently that we are needing to upgrade to larger venues, and need to spend more money on food for picnics.
While not inherently a bad thing, the intake through donations has unfortunately not kept pace with the increased expenses. As an example, Oval meets alone cost us $380 each. We typically get $10 in donations per Oval. This is not sustainable, and we may have to start making cuts to programming we don’t want to if other attempts to decrease this deficit are not fruitful.
This is not meant to be alarming, and is not us trying to say everything is doomed! It does mean that we are going to be placing more emphasis on donations. I’m going to be doing that right now: if you enjoy MNFurs, if you enjoy coming to the picnics, to the Ovals, please consider donating if you can. Quite literally anything helps, whether that be $1 or $100. We want to be able to keep putting on fun and exciting events for you, we want to keep supplying hamburgers and hotdogs at the picnics, and hosting Ovals, but these things are all very expensive. We have a way to donate online here: https://www.mnfurs.org/donate/ Please consider donating if you can.
We will also be coming up with new merch and incentives to help encourage cashflow, so keep an eye out for that!
Thank you to all of you for being part of our community, and we’re excited for the things in store for this year!
-Talon
