The 2020 Annual
Members Meeting
Our bylaws require at least one meeting of the members every year. This year it was held on Saturday 19 December 2020 at 2PM PST as a virtual meeting conducted via Zoom. In addition to our then-current five Board members, we had about 34 members and guests in attendance.
After a quick review of what our Board had been up to for the past year, we heard from Josh Slocum, Executive Director of the national Funeral Consumers Alliance, Incorporated. He told us the history of the FCA movement, and noted that the Tri-County Memorial Funeral Society played an important role in the founding of the national FCA. He went on to say that the national FCA has more than fifty affiliates across the nation, and its primary mission is to support all those local FCAs and to advocate for improved legal rights for consumers and responsibilities for the funeral industry.
We then took a vote on our new bylaws. They were adopted unanimously. Click here to read our bylaws.
Next was the election of new Board members. In order to fill out our Board to its full authorized size of nine members we needed to have at least four new people volunteer. Soon four people did agree to stand for election. In addition, Don West, who had been added to our Board last January by appointment, rather than being elected by the members, also stood for election. All five of them were elected to a two-year term. (The other four members of the Board had been elected last fall, and thus will serve until our next Annual Members Meeting.) Click here to see our present Board of Directors and Key volunteers, plus a listing of some of other tasks for which we seek still other volunteers.
Our featured speaker, Lee Webster, is a consumer advocate from New Hampshire with expertise in family-directed funerals and natural burials. She has served on the board of the Green Burial Council, and founded the New Hampshire Funeral Resources Advocacy and Education site, nhfuneral.org. Her talk was titled “Green Burials.” In it she briefly summarized how the funeral industry in the United States got started around 150 years ago, and how it has now established its services of burials in coffins in vaults or cremation as the norm, even though we had a long tradition of other options for funerals, including home funerals and “natural” burials. She also showed numerous examples of these alternative practices and gave some references to sources where one can learn more about them.
Finally, we had our drawing for the special gingerbread house (created by our Board Secretary, Judy Ikenberry). The entry by Lilas A. Green, a resident of Garden Grove and a member since about 2010 was drawn as the winner. She wasn’t present, so we delivered the gingerbread house to her on New Year’s Day at the Assisted Living Center where she now resides. We learned then that she is 88 years old, and had moved to California some 61 years ago.
Here are a couple of pictures of the gingerbread house and one of Judy presenting it to Lilas Green.
Judy Ikenberry delivers the
gingerbread house to Lilas A. Green
Our president and vice-president, Tina Sommers-Bernhardt and John Goodman closed the meeting with a reminder that we hope every member who can will send us an email address (either their own, or that of someone who will receive emails from us and share them with the member) to make it easier and less expensive for us to keep them up-to-date on our plans and activities.
The 2021 Annual
Members Meeting
Our next Annual Members Meeting will be held in the fall of 2021, at a date to be determined. If the pandemic is still active, we may need to make it a totally “virtual” meeting (as we did this year). But we hope to be able to make it an in-person meeting, or perhaps a hybrid of an in-person and a virtual meeting. Please stay tuned for details!