Chris Smart, Gerry Bourrier, Eyra Edington: Over, but not out!
With this edition, after 46 since September 2011, Chris Smart will retire as editor of the Bulletin and as a member of the Alumni Association Executive. For close to two decades, Chris has served the IDRC Alumni in many different and important ways, including coordinating the Alumni grants, updating the Alumni website, liaising with the Centre, initiating webinars and generally providing wise input to our group discussions and decisions. Chris did all of that, and still found time to take on the big mandate of editing the newsletter which is so important to our association as, along with the Alumni Facebook page, the most effective vehicle to communicate with our members. With all that he has done, it would be an understatement to say that Chris has been an integral part of the association. What Chris has been all of these years is an inspirational leader, a dedicated worker and a dear colleague. We will miss him. An invitation to Alumni members to join our Executive and help out with communications.
With Chris’s departure, we want to ensure that we can continue to have solid lines of communications with our members. Your executive is considering options.
Ideally, we would welcome someone volunteering to join the executive to coordinate communications. We are open to different approaches, including maintaining the Bulletin or merging it into our Facebook page. In the latter option, you would work closely with Shaun Bona who as a member of the executive manages our Facebook presence. Interested in helping us out with our communications? Write to us at idrcalumniancienscrdi@gmail.com
I would also like to take this opportunity to bring to your attention that, in addition to Chris, two other Executive members will be stepping down from their roles – they are Gerry Bourrier and Eyra Edington. Gerry is the only member of the executive who has served uninterrupted since the launch of the Alumni Association 20 years ago. That is quite a record. For those 20 years, Gerry served as Treasurer and played major roles in coordinating our annual meetings and simply keeping the association moving forward. With his long and broad experience as an Ottawa-based program director and Regional Director in Dakar, Gerry was also our ‘Corporate memory’.
Eyra was our coordinator of memberships and in that role took on the responsibility of promoting the association, recruiting members and keeping up to date the list of our membership – all key roles in keeping the association going.
On your behalf, and on behalf of my fellow Alumni Executive members, I want to express our heartfelt gratitude to Chris, Gerry and Eyra for their immense contributions to our association.
We celebrate and applaud all that they have done to keep our IDRC community alive and wish all three of them the very best in the future.
Giving Chris the last word… Onward!
Claude Paul Boivin for the Alumni Executive
Bulletin No. 70
January 2023