Letter from the Chairperson’s Desk...
Dear Friends,
We are now looking forward very much to meeting up in Istanbul in October. By now you should have selected your delegates, booked your hotels and flights, decided if you are nominating anyone to the Board (nominations have closed!) and be ready to let us know who your voting delegate will be! As I have said, we are looking forward to welcoming you to our meeting – and that includes delegates from the new member organisations who will be seeking full membership at the Annual General Meeting – Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Greece, Japan, Mexico – and maybe one or two more!
It was a great pleasure to welcome Johan Prevot to his new role as Director of Global Development in early June. If Johan has not been in touch with you yet, you can sure to meet him in Istanbul!
In recent weeks we have been exceptionally busy with IPOPI personnel taking parts in events in Argentina and Chile (Dr Espanol and Roberta Pena), Russia (Johan at the Rare Disorders Conference for Russia), Germany (David at the ISBT Conference) and Morocco ( Martine and I at the ASID meeting) – so many thanks to everyone for the different roles they played in those very different events!
We have also learned that in Spain AEDIP – our NMO there – has held its very first family weekend in Navacerrada – so well done and congratulations. In addition to all that we have been involved in a variety of ways to highlight the importance of PIDs in the European Parliament – making presentations, meetings members of the Parliament, and so on. We were privileged to work alongside our good friends and colleagues from the Jeffrey Modell Foundation and it was highly productive to work together as two global organisations in this way.
In the last e-news I spoke of the value of the ADVOCACY TRAINING which is being made available to our NMOs by invitation – since then there has been another highly successful event in Budapest attended by IPOPI NMOs from Cyprus, Serbia, Poland, Hungary and Greece. The final session for the year will be in Rome the weekend before we meet in Istanbul. If you have been invited please do try to send two delegates along – they will learn so much and benefit your NMO immensely on their return!
We have also been looking ahead to planning future activities based on our Strategic Plan. By the time we meet in Istanbul we will be able to present some of the things we hope to achieve over the next couple of years – dependent, of course, on available funding. We are also committing to having mechanisms to listen to what you – our valued Members – want and expect from IPOPI! That is important as we only exist to meet the needs of the PID community around the world, so when the time comes DO tell us what your views are – we need to know!!
With all good wishes from the IPOPI Board and staff team
Yours sincerely
Jose Drabwell
Chairperson, IPOPI |
