For around ten years, Risa Booze was the BNC’s membership volunteer. Over the past year, Risa gracefully handed these duties off. Of the various volunteer roles around the BNC, this can be a lonely and difficult one. It’s an hour of one’s time here and there, usually at home and on one’s own. Sometimes a member may be hard to please and the membership volunteer ends up engaging in what feels like it should be paid customer service only to find that it’s a generally thankless role.
Risa did the whole thing without complaint. Over the years, she occasionally came to board meetings in order to make the board aware of something important. She persisted through lots of changes from an old fashioned paper system which, in many ways, was actually superior, to an on-line system that somehow is less personal and can have bugs.
She phoned people in person now and then in order to confirm information. She did all this with an easy and friendly tone founded on patience that added to the BNC’s ability to exist and to relate to its community.
The board voted unanimously to issue a thank you gift to Risa and to formally thank her. The board also included Amie Durden who did the same job, also for about ten years preceding Risa’s work. Thanks to both Risa and Amie for their crucial contribution to the BNC for a total of more than twenty years.
