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Ken Evans
Well, 2008 was another successful year with our St. David's Day celebrations, picnic, and bus trip to Venedocia; the Gymanfa Ganu and Te Bach were great and well attended and donations were up, thanks to our members; our wonderful Dragon Tales and web site keep us in touch with each other.
Our membership has slowly decreased over the last several years. New members haven't offset deaths and those moving away, so the board has been working on an outreach agenda the last few months.
We need help from the membership.
We have a membership of about 220. The easiest way to double that to 440 would be if every member got a new member. If every person coming to the St. David's Day Statehouse event brought another person, we would increase from 25-30 to 50-60. If everyone coming to the St. David's Day luncheon would invite another, we would increase participation from 100+ to 200+. We would especially love to increase young people's participation in addition to us … uhhhh … older people.
The CELTIC Gathering in May, at the Fairfield County Fairgrounds in Lancaster, Ohio, will be another excellent venue to introduce people to the preservation of Welsh culture / heritage.
This could be quite a gathering of our CELTIC Welsh, Irish, Scottish brethren [and sistren?]. Seek out the Welsh and bring them over to our WSCO BOOTH.
I’ve been told that you can tell the Welsh … they’re the good-looking and prosperous-looking ones; I’ve heard some women say you can tell the Welsh men … you just can’t tell them much.
Tegwyn Lantz
New Website and Email Addresses
In an effort to help those interested in WSCO to find us on the Internet, the board decided to change our domain name to www.welshsocietyofcentralohio.org from the long-standing www.centralohiowelsh.org. In addition, WSCO’s new email address will be info(at)welshsocietyofcentralohio(dot)org. We felt that these changes would provide a uniform name for our promotion program we are planning to launch to help attract more members. Please visit us at the new address and remember to save it to your Favorites. And speaking of attracting more members, if you know someone interested in joining WSCO, encourage them to go to our website to learn about WSCO and our activities. While they are there, they can download a membership form right from the website.
I hope when you need a Welsh fix you think to check out our page called Newyddiadur Cymru / Welsh Newspaper. A recent addition to this page is a link to an article about the upcoming Welsh Festival hosted by the Smithsonian that expects to draw over one million visitors to Washington DC this July.
Our most recently added page is our Welsh Links page. These websites promote Welsh history, genealogy, language, or items for sale.
Our Events page is updated for all WSCO, Welsh Country Dancers, and CWSS events. At the bottom of the page you can click on ”Other Events of Interest” to link to Welsh-interest events not sponsored by WSCO. Currently we have links to the Celtic Gathering website for the upcoming May Lancaster, Ohio, event where WSCO will have a booth and to NAFOW’s site for the Welsh National being held this September in Pittsburgh. When we learn of events being held in Jackson County or Venedocia you will find them here as well.
Visit us at http://www.welshsocietyofcentralohio.org.