Greetings Members, Sponsors and Colleagues!
I’m writing to share our last Chapter update for the year and, fondly, with my final entry as your President.
Our last Board meeting for 2016-2017 took place in May. During the meeting we elected incoming Board members and officers for next year:
- Chris Kane, Secretary
- Phil Bridge
- Rich Denman
- Naskeh Habibi
- Kristin Timm
Our newly elected Secretary, Chris Kane, hails from Pacific Continental Bank. Current Board member Kenechi Onyeagusi, Pacific Continental Bank, will serve as President with Cyrus Vafi of Banner Bank as Vice President. Cyrus will graciously play a key role supporting the Presidency over the next months.
Our new officer team has many great ideas and we will all do our best to support those initiatives at the Board level. We’ll be well represented at the national Chapter Leaders Conference this month in Scottsdale, with Cyrus Vafi, standing in as President and Kaco Newbury, Susan Kane and Naskeh Habibi as your representatives for the Portland Metro Chapter. We’ll take the opportunity to see how our partner chapters approach events, courses, communications and more.
Please read on, next Fall’s Membership meetings and our Education Course Offerings are included at the end.
First, allow me first to look back to our CRE event in May. The event was well attended and wildly popular; JLL’s own Buzz Ellis and Patricia Raicht shared an insider’s look at commercial real estate and capital markets. We were thrilled to see many new faces and many old friends. Thank you to Patricia for sharing the excellent slides, click here to view the presentation from the event.
My huge thank you for the opportunity to be your President this year. It has been an honor to represent the RMA Portland Metro Chapter. I’m especially happy to report our membership base is growing. We also improved content and attendance in all our areas thanks to members like you and to our Board and sponsors. We expect this growth to continue with our excellent new officers.
With our newly expanded sponsorship program, all our wonderful sponsors are also integral to our success as a Chapter. We appreciate their many contributions to marketing, attendance, speakers, and, of course, to our treasury. Your Board members sit on various committees, working on Education, Marketing and Membership, spending ample time to provide great value for membership contributions at institutional and individual levels.
I’m excited to share that our Portland Metro Chapter was nominated for national Chapter Excellence Awards in two categories this year, Membership and Communications. We believe we were at the top of the list for all our initiatives, from Academic Engagement to Community Involvement and Programming. We’ll hear the final results later this month at the Chapter Leaders Conference.
On behalf of the entire Board, we hope this year was as informative for you as it was for us. We hope you made valuable connections and gained perspective on our Chapter objectives throughout the year. We welcome your feedback and hope you will continue to engage as volunteers and participants in our many activities.
I wish you all a memorable, sun-filled summer and look forward to seeing you in September.
Respectfully,
Jan Heald Robinson