ARS Holds Annual Members' Meeting
Carol Mishler began the meeting by sharing PowerPoint slides with the annual pie charts showing income and expenses in the last fiscal year. She also discussed ARS’s accomplishments and future plans for the new year.
ARS fiscal income in past fiscal year: $236,575
- Donations make up 41% of income.
- Expenses were less than income: $207,911
How was money spent?
- Scholarships to members to attend week-long or weekend workshops
- The Traveling Teacher Program
- Chapter grants
- DEI grants as well as an outreach to HBCUs to make historically black colleges aware of ARS
- Educational Outreach grants to schools for purchase of recorders or music to restore music programs
- Free beginner and 2nd level classes on Zoom
- ARS NEWS and ARS NOVA e-newsletters
- We currently have three contractors: Marketing Manager, AR Editor and the AR Layout Specialist who produce great work for ARS
Plans for next year: more website tours, more engagement with members, chapter rep roundtables, larger ARS merchandise program, and to align member benefits with member needs/wants. There will be no live event for PtRM, but a video will be produced. We want to maintain and grow our fundraising. We will keep our communication channels open and ongoing. We want to spend the money that we earn via Fidelity investments for new scholarships. We will continue DEI grants and support a project to give HBCU composition students a chance to learn how to compose for the recorder. They will be invited to participate in two recorder composing tutorials with composer Harvey Stokes, who has written the Play-the-Recorder Month piece for 2025.
Questions from participants:
Q: Could the ARS provide more advanced free classes?
A: ARS doesn’t want to compete with our recorder teachers or workshops who offer online classes; ARS tries to find areas of instruction that most others don’t cover.
Q: Do we have new recorder players as new members, or established players who are new to ARS?
A: We have both: brand-new players and many with wide ranges of experience who joined ARS after playing previously or continuously.
Q: What is the member renewal rate?
A: It is between and 80-90%.
Q: Can ARS tease out fundraising from other expenses, in order to apply for grants, e.g. arts education (classes) grants?
A: Yes -- great suggestion!
Q: In terms of DEI, does ARS have interest in younger people?
A: Yes, in fact we are currently working on a youth & diversity concert event at the Boston Early Music Festival and are inviting young recorder players from different countries to perform there. Other organizations like American Orff-Schulwerk and Suzuki already do outreach to kids, so ARS tends to focus more on outreach to adults and teachers. We provide Educational Outreach Grants to teachers so they can purchase recorders and curriculum materials, often to students from many different backgrounds. Adults with kids sometimes rediscover recorder with their kids, so that’s another pool of potential members. Another possible avenue is that ARS would like to consider is teaching the teachers. We also want to reach out to college students and people in their 20s, potentially by offering workshop scholarships.
Geoffrey Burgess, the editor of American Recorder magazine, spoke about what’s coming up in the next issue: a David Lasocki article, the PtRM piece, and reviews by Victor Eijkhout whose work is much appreciated. Many ideas and projects are ahead, including ways to adjust the look of the publication. The next issue will feature a special cover and an article on kids playing recorder in Kenya. Geoffrey’s goal is for readers to see the magazine as a place of inspiration, and he is always open for members’ ideas and feedback.
The ARS past and present Board members expressed their thanks to Glen Shannon for reviewing music submissions for the ARS Online Music Libraries. It’s a labor of love.
Some members find that the ARS website can be daunting. To help with that, the Membership Benefits committee will be offering its second ARS Web “Site-Seeing” tour. It’s coming up on Nov 16. Please attend to learn more about using the many resources on the ARS site. Past participants agreed that they were surprised at the vast amount of resources available.
Learn more and register here.
Many thanks to all who attended the meeting!
