Thanks to all of you for your support and your many contributions over the last year. The good will and positive energy you exude is wonderful. I would like to extend special thanks to the dedicated members of the Board of Directors for their generous, imaginative and good-humored leadership.

As president, I will share with you some of what the Board has been doing. We had a Board retreat in February and, inspired by our view from Idie’s delightful cabin, discussed our mission, vision and values and set goals for the year in a variety of areas. In the Basic Issues department, we crafted our Mission Statement and reviewed by-laws issues. Then we established priorities and agreed on a work plan with achievable objectives for the year.

Those objectives are to:

1. Support fundraising by designing and producing a WBA patch for sale and by producing a package of useful publication items including a species list, flight period charts and food plant list for sale;
2. Spread the load of leadership, starting with providing greater involvement of members in field trip leading, organizing and coordinating;
3. Initiate a conservation program, starting with a printed piece on discouraging the practice of releasing butterflies at weddings and another on informing counties of healthier alternatives to roadside spraying;
4. Develop a WBA website;
5. Partner with other like-minded organizations to provide learning opportunities as well as new membership opportunities;
6. Develop a general purpose WBA brochure; and
7. Develop a publicity plan.

If one of these action objectives is appealing to you and you would like to help on it, we would welcome you on a small team to help achieve these goals. If you have other ideas for things we can be doing to make WBA better, please share them with us. Our Washington Butterfly Association continues to develop as a place where we can learn more about the world of nature through butterflies and enjoy each other as we enjoy the butterflies.

Unveiling WBA Mission Statement

We are pleased to introduce our Mission Statement in this issue. The WBA Board worked hard to identify the key words that we believe express the essential qualities of our organization. Science has been a particular strength of our chapter and, as you know, enjoyment pervades everything we do. Butterflies are our central focus, of course, and they lead us to a world of related things though awareness of their ecology. All this is advocated through conservation and communicated through education. These important words were brought together in a concise statement expressing our mission. So, here it is:

The Washington Butterfly Association is devoted to scientific understanding and enjoyment of butterflies and their ecology through conservation and education.

We hope it will serve as a guide and an inspiration to us.

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