23. 2018 FAPA Annual  Board of Director Meeting in Houston/TX with 80+ Attendants

Dear members of FAPA Board of Directors:

    Our 2018 BOD meeting was held at Houston, TX last weekend with more than 80 attendants, including 47 BODs, 6 proxy holder, and more than 20 general members and spouses. Again, I like to say thank you to those people who came to the meeting, showed your strong support of FAPA, and provided meaningful opinions and idea. Generally speaking, it was a pretty successful,  productive and informative meeting. I like to take this opportunity to thank those 3  HQ staffs and Standing Committee Members who worked till the last minute and during the meeting to make the meeting possible. I  want also to thank the Texas South Chapter members for their logistic and financial support. They helped to print the handbooks, made the award plaques, prepare the Sunday lunch boxes, provide Hobby airport pickup, and donate $3000 to pay for the Saturday night banquet. Our HQ staffs will soon mail a copy of our meeting handbook to those who were not able to come to the meeting in person. My power point presentation slides in the meeting is in the attachment for you to review. In my report, you will find out what have been done and accomplished by the HQ staffs, SCM, me, and all of you during 2018. if you have any questions about my report, please let me know and I’ll be happy to answer your questions.
    Briefly, I would like to tell you what were accomplished in this meeting.
1. We hired Stephen Yates as our Senior Adviser. He declared that he had nothing to do the newly formed organization “福和會”. he will help us to promote our top agenda and fund raising, etc.
2. We passed the Action plan for 2019.
3. We reviewed 2017, 2018 finance reports which detailed all incomes and expenses in each category. You will see the report in the handbook.
4. We approved the 2019 budget with $720,000 ordinary income, and $104,000 fund transfers from our investment funds to cover $824,000 total expected expenditures. Details are also in the handbook.
5. We spent more than 2 hours to do bylaw and operational guideline amendments, At the end, we amended 5 bylaws with majority’s approvals.
The membership suspension/termination proposal was removed from the discussion due to our lawyer’s suggestion and was agreed by majority vote.
The proposal to reduce the total number of BOD was tabled after some debates.
6. The lawsuit report was not presented under the advice of our lawyer. However, we let the 4 plaintiffs to present their reasons why they insisted to file the lawsuit.
7. We had a very informative chapter experience exchange session. A lot of chapters presented their unique ways to promote and advocate for Taiwan.
8. In the new business session, we passed a resolution to add “US-Taiwan Free Trade Agreement” into this year’s top agenda.
9. After the lunch break, we showed two videos, one from President Tsai, and the other one from Minister of Foreign Affairs(外交部), Dr. Joseph Wu. Both of them told us how much they appreciated FAPA’s help and support. 
10. Four of eight SCM stepped down because of two year’s term. However, two of them were reelected to serve another term. Therefore, the 2019 SCM are:
Bob Yang (平原區), Cherry Chi (North West region), Jerry Liu (South West Region), Susan Chang( Central West), Mary Yang (Central South), Eric Lee (South East region), Henry Lin (Central East region) and Stephanie Chan (North East region). Special thank to Nick Wu and Hsinjin Yang for their service in the last two years as a Standing Committee member.


Please feel free to forward this email to your chapter members and tell them more good things about this meeting. Next year, the BOD meeting will go back to Washington DC. Thank you.

Best Regards
Mike Kuo
President, FAPA