President’s Message May 2020
I thought these President’s messages were going to be easy to write- I’d thank people for the past month’s volunteer activities and talk about upcoming opportunities. Well, the world has been turned upside down, and most of our public service activities are on hold.
I’d like to start out with a big shout-out to Gordy Hanson. He’s been doing a tremendous amount of work figuring out how we can administer a VE session remotely, safely, and with integrity. We’re hoping to have something soon, so we can get everybody in our tech class tested and licensed.
I’d also like to thank Roy Wood for his hard work keeping our Skywarn team together. There’s still room on the team if you’d like to help. Since we’re doing it remotely this year, we need people who can reach the primary repeaters of 146.7 and 147.21, but we can also use people to copy reports from the log to the weather service. We had a practice session on tornado awareness day, it worked well to coordinate on Google Meet.
Clay Bartholow has volunteered to lead the Communications Committee as Chair and Public Information Officer. Thanks Clay! We can all help the Communications Committee by providing lots of articles for our newsletter and website.
The MGRC board has decided that we’re unlikely to be able to have Midwinter Madness on August 8th. Since we’d have to start spending money now in preparation, we made the painful decision to cancel entirely for this year. We’ll have an announcement soon on what date we’ll have it in 2021.
We’re not going to be having a big event at Gleason Park this year. Plan on operating some sort of “1” category, and we’ll stay in touch and informally collect our scores.
Although there aren’t any public service radio opportunities right now, there are volunteer opportunities out there. Look on the MN VOAD site, right now there’s need for staffing at shelters to keep homeless safe from COVID. There is also a big need for blood, since a lot of blood drives have been canceled. There are still some out there though, I donated last Friday, go to the Red Cross site and sign up.
Stay well, wash your hands, and wear a mask in public.
Benton Jackson, K0BHJ
