Member's Meeting 2022/2023

Our 2022/2023 regular Membership Meeting was held on May 9, 2023. As usual, we conducted these virtually via video conference. The board could welcome 10 members of the association, 9 members were excused. Despite minor and major technical difficulties, the event started almost on time, which was particularly important as there was an extensive program, the focus of which was the new elections of the auditors and the board. To cut a long story short, both cash auditors Klaus Joas and Jörg Lesch not only did a great job as every year in auditing our finances; but both agreed to continue the responsible work as cash auditors in the future. Thank you very much for this to both of you! The election of the board was also more of a formality. New and old board members are Thomas Erkert, Daniel Gerlach and Hildegard Mackert. All three have been active members of the club for many years and are therefore no strangers. Thank you to all members for the trust you have placed in us. However, it is much more important for the association that we have restructured ourselves organizationally and that we can thus continue to bind the expertise of our former board members Karsten Gareis, Günther Michels and Daniel Schleßmann to our association and integrate them organizationally. At this point, however, we of the new board would first like to say a heartfelt "thank you" to our predecessors for their many years of cooperation. It's great what we have "managed" in the last few years and how many joint projects we have carried out despite the Corona pandemic. In the 12 years of our existence, we have carried out almost 40 projects in Ghana. In order to be able to achieve our goals in the future - despite ever worsening general conditions - it was necessary to spread the responsibility over several shoulders. For this reason, the new and old board of directors worked out a joint concept of how we want to meet the requirements in the future. In principle, we are expanding the organizational structure to include specific areas of responsibility, which we call departments. The departments can be expanded at will without having to intervene in the association's statutes.

In addition to this and other activities in Ghana, we were also able to report on how we used the Corona time not only to reorganize the association, but above all to revise our Internet presence(www.hita-ev.org). A special role was played by Marion Fellmann, whose expertise and contacts with professional developers have helped to ensure that our websites slowly but surely meet modern requirements. The new pages are now designed using Responsive Web Design so that accessing the website via mobile devices is just as possible as via a PC or laptop. This is particularly important for our partners in Ghana, where access is almost exclusively via cell phones. To be able to react faster and stay more up-to-date, we rely on WordPress as our content management system (CMS). This also enables optimization for search engines and provides extensive and high security. The process of revising the pages will take several more months. We concluded the member's meeting with an appeal to our existing and also potential members: We urgently need your help. Despite the organizational measures that have been initiated, we are no longer able to do justice to all the tasks. The effort for individuals has become too great. That is why we need more active volunteers who are willing to take on certain tasks on a permanent basis. Our most important "construction sites" are:

• the acquisition and support of members and sponsors, and
• the acquisition of donations. We need to continuously increase the volume of donations or tap other sources (project funds, heritage, etc.) to be able to achieve our goals in the future.

In the follow-up of the member's meeting we will focus on the cooperation and progress of "1Bed4All". Furthermore, we hope to present more active members - be it in a department or for project work!

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  Ghana trip from 24 March to 07 April 2023