As we reach the midpoint of the SIS year, there are several important and exciting things to announce.

There will be a change from the past in terms of our SIS Reception at the meeting in Portland. In prior years, we have had an SIS reception independent of the IALL reception. This year, we will have a joint reception with IALL on Sunday evening, immediately following our SIS Business Meeting. The Schaffer Grantee will make a presentation on Monday, ending before the West Party starts. This is a trial to help us deal with both the compressed schedule and the fact that the Portland Annual Meeting is split between two locations.

The Schaffer Grant is a wonderful opportunity, both for the recipient and for the SIS members who get to meet the recipient. Ellen's very generous initial grant and ongoing support from friends of the grant have helped to fund the corpus. The goal is to fund the annual grant from the interest generated by the corpus. Due to a variety of factors, it would be best for us not to remove the interest generated by the account for the next few years. Feel free to ask me why and I'll let you know (and know that you read the Newsletter). To that end, one idea is to have the SIS promise to fund the annual grant for the next few years (~$2000 per year). For each donation to the grant for that year, the SIS will invest whatever is left over from the $2000 in the corpus, to help the grant grow. That means that if you contribute $100 to the annual grant, the SIS will contribute $100 of the $2000 to the grant's corpus. Please let me know what you think. The method for moving forward will be determined once we get feedback and review the SIS bylaws.

Thanks to the Strategic Planning Sub-committee (Molly Brownfield, Victor Essien, Barbara Garavaglia, Carolyn McKelvey, Mary Rumsey, and Dan Wade) for their work on the new SIS Strategic Plan. It is now posted at http://www.aallnet.org/sis/fcilsis/strategic2008.html.

Thanks to Mabel Shaw and Carmen Valero for their excellent work on the Newsletter. Having looked at other SIS Newsletters, I can honestly say that we have one of the finest. Thanks to both of you for your time and effort!

Happy Chinese New Year!