 Every tension. Can everybody hear me? I'll speak a little louder. Can you turn it up a hair, please? Bruce, can you hear me? Bruce can hear me. All right, we apologize for starting a couple minutes late. We're having a little trouble with our broadcasts of the world, but we're gonna go ahead. So my first duty is to welcome you and to call the meeting to order and I will call on Jim Kellogg to lead us in prayer and then in the Pledge of Allegiance. Lord, we ask that you bless this gathering of the current, past, and future aviators. We ask that you continue to give us guidance in our pursuit as an organization dedicated to place nation above self, protect this country through the use and protection of air and space power. We know you can lift us up on wings of eagles and make the sun shine brightly on our endeavor. We ask you to continue to bless us with your wise counsel as we go forth in this meeting. And we ask that you do the same for this nation's political and military leaders. Please continue to guide us as you did in the great spaces in the sky and in the dark. We ask this in your service. I had to start by again welcoming all of you, thanking you for being here, and I would like us to please show our introduction to our appreciation to the staff. They've done a lot of work in preparation for this meeting. They put on a great event for us yesterday, another great event today. So I'll start with our Executive Director, Maureen D. Felice, Program Manager. Oh, I guess that's fair. Clap for all of them. Program Manager, Kristi Kavanaugh, Operations Officer, Taylor Watson. Right back there, Financial Coordinator, Lucia Sanchez-Albana, Membership Coordinator, Crystal Torres, and our Preservationist, Pam Watson. It's that right to acknowledge all the flight captains who are here. If you would, just stand up as I introduce you and then sit back down please. We'll start with Flight 2, Delirka Line. We'll hold on that. I mean, we shouldn't do that. Chad Bansky, Flight 4. David Fay, Flight 7. Anthony Stager, Flight 9. Jerry Bryant, Flight 12. Dave Barnett, Flight 13. He's either on there virtually or he will be soon. And we expect Flight 17 will be on there also. Flight 18, JJ Grinrod. Flight 21, Mike Tankler. Flight 23, Mike Masterson. Flight 26, Happy Woody Allman. Flight 38, Ron Butler. Flight 48, Pete Vetters. Flight 53, Kevin Grady, virtually. Flight 60, Mike Carlin. Flight 77, Tom Creekmore. Flight 82, Ron Perkins. Did I miss anyone? Charlie. Fort Hood. Welcome Dave. Anyone else? We have two previous leaders of this organization. I'd like to recognize Nick Kehoe. You know Nick has served two tours as the national commander and Bruce Smith who served as the chairman of the foundation board. Let's give them all a round of applause. All of the directors and trustees forward to be sworn in by Nick Kehoe. That includes Andy Andreessen, the vice chairman of the board. Gary Walston, the secretary. Dan Clark, the treasurer. Jim Kellogg, the provost marshal. Nick Kehoe, the past chairman. Jim Voss, the historian. Your name's on this slide. Come up here. Bruce Smith, Mike Dinkler, Charlie Dentsford, Maureen D. Felice, Chad Bansky, Ed Sheeran, Dan Myers, Mike Buck, Frank Dunk-Sawada, Bill Erkline, Kathy Steger, Will Hendricks, and Phillip Zabriski. Okay. Will. Okay, if you would, first of all, raise your right hand. I'm going to, I'm going to, the right answer will be I do. And, okay, do you swear that you will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office to which you were either elected or appointed to help you God and keep you steadfast? I do. That's it. You got the photos? Well, Bill Erkline, who's very interested in history, has pointed out that I failed to give Tim Voss credit for his title, which is historian. And believe me, we are grateful that Tim has taken over the history, because we needed a dynamic individual in that job and we have one. And by the way, he flew here from the Netherlands to attend this meeting. Let's welcome Tim. Okay, now we're moving to the awards. And Chad will be the speaker right now for award. So the first award that we have up when it comes up will be our recruiting awards. And normally we give out four of these, but we had a couple of flights that were tied this year. So we're actually going to give out five. This comes with a thousand dollar award that can be used by the flight in any way they see fit for an awardee anytime by the end of 2022. And they are in priority order, so I'm not going to rely on the technology. There are slides, but I think we should let the show go on. And so the first award winner is San Diego Flight 13, accepting on behalf of Flight 13 is Kristi Kavanaugh. Next flight to win the recruiting award is Flight 23, NAS Pensacola. So Mike Dinkler, if you could please come up and feel free to applaud. This is a pretty big deal for us. I won my mistake. Thank you. And is next, Kathy Steger. Flight 48, Pete Vedders. By the way, Flight 9 and Flight 48 were tied. The fourth is Flight 62, representing them. Lucía, please come on up. Okay, next we're going to go to the new Aviator Scholarship Awards. And sorry for the feedback. This is for the flights that have recruited the most new aviators. And of course we've got a couple of pilot training bases, no surprise there. So we have Shangri-La Flight 21 from NAS Pensacola, represented by Mike Dinkler. Please come on up again. The amount of funding for these two awards is $2,000. The flight can use it for any way they need to fit. And the funds must be used by the end of 2022. Flight 74 from Columbus Air Force Base in representing Flight 74, Russell Torres, please come up. Next we have the top flight awards. And you'll see these awards are based on the size of the flight. So the winners are Category A, Elliott Whitesprings Flight 77. Tom Creekmore. Category B, Harley Pope Flight 48, Pete Vetters. Category C, Frank Lamb Flight, Kathy Stager. Kathy just told me she's been flight captain for 10 years. Category D, Shangri-La Flight, Mike Dinkler. And because of the closeness of the calculation of the points, we've decided to award an honorable mention this year and it goes to Curtis LeMay Flight 16 and Nick Kehoe will accept that award. The grand award winner, the du little award winner for the top flight for 2020, Harley Pope Flight 48. Pete Vetters is going on to the Citation of Honor. And these are the criteria for earning the Citation of Honor. This year the Citation of Honor goes to the Salesforce Implementation Committee. This committee did a great job of helping the flights transition from Apollo to Salesforce. And this is a three man team that headed up this effort. And present is Jerry Bryant. Remember that team, please come forward Jerry. And another winner is Jim Distaut and Kathy Stager will accept the award on his behalf. And as you see the third member of the committee is Bill Ryle. Jerry Bryant is going to tell you a little bit about what the Salesforce Implementation Committee did and what they did is great work for all the Dalians. I promise these other two guys that if they didn't come to this meeting I would ladder on eloquently about how I had to carry them because they didn't do any of the work. But now given that they're not here I have to be truthful. It was a three team effort. These guys are wonderful to work with and they did great work. And our process was explore an issue, argue like an old married couple and then come to some amicable resolution. And we all invested acres of time and delivering the capabilities that have been rolled out. There's an email tool, there's a formation invite tool which is where 90% of our time has gone. We're currently developing a new baseline of some other improvements and then we hope to retire once all of those new improvements are fielded. And I think Maureen asked us to foreign this committee because these other two guys and I were the biggest pests and she said I'll teach you guys. You ask all the questions so you feel them and you guys work on it. So we were happy to do that. Great collaboration. Thank you. Now we've presented a lot of awards here but every one of your flights and every one of you deserves an award for the great work you've done over this past year and a half which of course has been very difficult for all of us. Hard to meet, hard to carry on the mission but you've done it. And your enthusiasm and your initiative earned a big thank you from the headquarters staff and the leaders of the organization. And right now you've earned a short break so you can have some more fruit, pastries, coffee. Thank you. Thank you. Now we're going to move into the portion of the program where we review the financial reports of the two treasures and the finance committee and we hear reports from the committee chairman and those are primarily but not entirely foundation committees. You'll hear about our great programs and how they're doing which is extremely well as you might suspect. I'd like to say a couple more words about financial management. You will hear from each treasurer. You will also hear from Dan Myers who is a longtime stalwart member of the finance committee. So the treasurers do their work. The two treasurers meet with the finance committee which consists of members of the foundation board or people nominated by the foundation and same for the order. Additionally their careful work is followed up by audits each year and I've been in leadership positions for eight years and everyone of those audits has been clean. You can be confident that we watch your money very carefully. We'll start with the orders treasurer Lieutenant Colonel Dan Clark. One of the reasons I love these assemblies is I get to meet and greet fellow DeDalien. So I was talking with Will Hendricks. He's been a member since 1961. Does anybody have that beat? Who are our 50-year members here in the audience? A round of applause for our 50-year members. Maureen asked me to cover a couple of administrative notes. One to talk a little bit about the restructuring like General Allen had mentioned. Another just to give you a little bit of background about who is your treasurer now. So I want to thank you first for the vote of confidence in voting me into this position. It's been an honor. It was an honor a couple of years ago when they asked me to participate in the board. And so I thank you for that vote of confidence. A little bit about me. A 25-year Army veteran graduate of West Point. We had a lot of math. I learned how to count on an abacus and we had slide rules. So I have a little bit of accounting experience from my background there. So as a pilot I flew the UH-1 all-fighter weather interceptor in places like Egypt, Irma, Honduras. I grew up and entered into the Black Hawk where I flew that in Germany and two tours in Iraq. Most of my background was a little bit maintenance and operations but more closer to the job of treasurer. I've been in San Antonio since 2006 and I was the chapter treasurer for the Quad-A local Alamo chapter of the Quad-A program. And I was their treasurer for seven years. So I was in that capacity. I got to work alongside Stinson's Flake Tube and Metz and Stollward's and Meyers and Bill Berkelein and Lakeville Square. And they made a very compelling case at a luncheon one time. So let's look to the next slide. So to kick off, we have moved away from the type of financial management that would find a member who just happened to be the enthusiast in the markets or their day job was financial management. And now I have a structure where all of the finances are professionally managed. And the treasurers and the Joint Finance Committee, we operate offer this letter of record, number 260, which governs how we do business and operate. For example, paragraph 3 sets and defines how the asset classes and the percentages for each of those asset classes will be managed. So it's a simple matter of myself working with Maureen, working with Wells-Bargo to pull out the calculator and see that our investments are properly balanced between different risk-class. For paragraph 4, for example, that sets out the rules that govern our day-to-day operations. Things that might require General Allen's approval or a treasurer approval or involve the entire board itself. Or unforeseen things or any expenditures that fix these certain thresholds. So that's a little bit about how we go about our task as treasurers in conjunction with the Finance Committees, the boards, and working with Maureen. So with that, let's look to the next slide. And I'll give you a quick overview. So the order balance sheet is actually a four-page document with about 95 line-ups. Okay, so you don't want to pull out your calculator on this one. This is a high-level overview where we show you some of the big-ticket items. I want to point you to the bottom line of the green chart on the left. You can see that the order is financially healthy, roughly 2.5 million in assets under professional management. The graph on the right of the slide, at first impulse you might think, oh no, we're rising, we're falling, but that's not the intent. That shows you how closely year-over-year each of these asset classes, each of our operational funds are closely linked. So it's a good snapshot of how well Maureen runs this ship, is what it really shows you. Next slide, please. Okay, a little bit about the LIFE fund. The order actually conducts an actuarial accounting every five years to assess where we are in the LIFE fund account. This does things to help us mathematically set what LIFE membership costs should be and what is our liability from that fund to sustain up the operating expenses in the operating contract. So Maureen just completed that with our accounting team in 2021. So there's a new number out there. I will say to you, though, a little plug for membership is that I went about five years before I decided to become a LIFE member. Now that I see the numbers, it's about a 50% saving, almost regardless of where you are in the agency. That's my plug for LIFE membership. The key takeaway of this slide is that the LIFE fund's market performance has netted the order of a healthy surplus of over 600K. So you see that at the bottom, the LIFE fund excess need. So the actuarial table defines the liability that we have to pay to the order, and that is met and exceeded by about $600,000. So that's a very healthy performance, so the fund is in a very good position. Next slide please. And so on the left side of this slide, the good news story for 2020 is that the order is finishing the year in black despite market turbulence caused by COVID. Kudos to Maureen's tireless efforts to make this happen. Overall, the order maintains a combined cash assets of roughly $2.5 million under professional financial management. And we have annual auditing that can be made available to anybody if they want to look deeper under the hood. So our LIFE fund assets, again, $2.3 million exceeds our LIFE membership liability by a healthy amount. You see on here a wedge, a yellow wedge called contingency. So in 2021, we have elected to bring back a contingency fund, which Maureen once had a contingency fund, and I don't know how many years ago it was. But she now has that contingency fund to work, day-to-day operations. That was largely funded by that excess drawn out of the LIFE fund. And so that's going to help her manage things like leaky root, broken HVAC, and more other contingencies that arise. So, ladies and gentlemen, this concludes my portion of the briefing. So any questions you might have? Back is the treasurer of the foundation. His report is next. Everybody can hear me all right? I'd like to point out that I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy as a young man, but evidently I was too high on the test, so I'm not going to Ohio State instead. So where I did take accounting, but I prefer not to share my grade point in that class. So here I am as your treasurer, so lucky you. I'd like to first point out that it's not always easy for folks who aren't in the weeds on this to understand that there was between foundation's money and the order's money. So as our director Maureen likes to put it, the order's money is there to memorialize our heritage, and the foundation's money is used to fund the future. So that's why I'm very happy to be a part of the foundation because we get to work with young people and try to encourage them to move into military aviation in a variety of different ways. Slide please. All right, some terminology. We have unrestricted funds which can be used for any program that the foundation chooses to support to fund the future. By definition, the other funds or named endowments are restricted. They're restricted in the sense that the endowments have been given with a particular intent in mind. You can notice that General Egan's name is rather prominent on the right side of the pie graph. His daughter Alice provided that endowment in General Egan's name some time ago, and it represents better than 50% of the total foundation endowments for these funds. In the case of the Egan named endowment, it is for scholarship purposes, and there are a variety of others as well. Next slide. You'll notice that the General Egan endowment is not represented on this because if it was, it would be well up through the second floor and out the roof. But again, as you can see at the top of the chart represents a good chunk of our foundations. Our various named endowments typically generate about $120,000 a year for our various foundation programs. So that's a respectable chunk of change, and we appreciate all the flights taking great advantage of our programs such as our matching fund scholarships and so on. A lot of the endowments have been established fairly recently, as recently as 2020, and they're generally restricted. They'll be restricted, that is to say specified for purpose, throughout the next 10 years. They can be exhausted, in some case the existing perpetuity, such as the Egan account which retains a certain corpus so that it doesn't exhaust and the extra is generated from its investment is there for us to use over here. Yes, sir. Were you curious, the first line there is $50,000, but up there where the Jacobs goes up to, you can't see the two. That's $250,000. It is a bit off-screen there, isn't it? It's like government math. Alright, next slide please. Alright, so this is semi-linear in progression, so hopefully even pilots can understand it. So taking a look at what 2019 actually looked like, you can see that we had almost half a million dollars in donations, which is tremendous. Please note though, at the bottom of the screen, that half of that half million, better than half of it, came from the Jacobs estate. That makes 2019 an unusual year. Because the donations from that one particular estate were so great, you can see that we didn't bump our 2020 budget up to $450,000. We kept it, what historically it has been, somewhere in the neighborhood of $230,000 or $140,000, so we weren't anticipating similar donations. But they're always welcome. So you can see that our investment income, the 2020 budget is what we expected, based on historical performance. So we expected about $75,000 of investment income and other incomes, fire expenses stayed relatively cost in our plan. Grants and scholarships the same way. So you can see that our 2020 budget was essentially a reflection of 2019's reality and previous year's historical performance. In reality, we did better in 2020 in a lot of categories than we had budgeted. For instance, if you look at the donations, the donations were actually in excess of what we had expected. We did release some money from restriction to fund our accounts from our restricted accounts to fund our various programs. Fire expenses did go up slightly, but you'll probably notice that the thickness of the fire also expanded slightly. So kudos to the fire staff for expanding it from a one-time stapled pamphlet into a full-blown glossy magazine with great pictures in it, by the way, which is good for violence. We continue to fund our grants and scholarships. The operating expenses went up slightly, but there's a good news story in there because the operation included a legacy campaign that was originally not in the budget for 2020. It cost an additional $12,000, but it in turn generated $40,000 in additional donations. So money well spent in that regard. Next slide, please. So the good news is that we've got a great team that is budgeting. We've got a great team that is executing to that budget. We have tremendous members who are continuing to donate. We've got tremendous members shift that is continuing to find ways to spend that money. We're happy to do it. Does anybody have any questions for what the foundation is doing to fund the future or how we go about doing it? Really simple questions. Yes. We have had a big give for the last several years. I would say at least the last six or seven, haven't we? This will be our eighth year coming up. And that's a great question. How does that fit into that slide that we've had up there before? So again, unrestricted funds, not named accounts, not restricted accounts. It falls in as a donation. And it's typically on the order of $30,000 to $40,000, isn't it? With a big give each year. So who does DeMarine for uncovering the big give? I give her credit for creating it, but I'm not sure that would be quite accurate. Taking advantage of it, certainly. Great question. Anybody else? That's good, because I'm all out of ideas. And you will hear more about the big give during the fundraising presentation. Right now, we're going to call on Dan Myers for whatever he chooses to talk about. You know, years ago, flying helicopters in Vietnam, that taught me it was always dressed like you may have to walk. And it's going to be 110 degrees outside today. So when you walk out, walk out without your jackets on. Anyway, Chad is the third boss of the foundation I've worked for. Bruce Smith recruited me. Then he left. Jerry came in. We started raising more money. Bruce was the chairman of Air Force Villages Inc. He recruited me to come out there. And then he left me out there. And now I'm the chair of the audit committee, chair of the investment committee, sit on the finance committee, and on the executive committee. And so for an army guy to participate in all these Air Force organizations, kind of unique. So I have been on the joint finance committee as long as I can remember. I think Bruce had some color in his hair back then. And the idea is that you have two different organizations. The order of 501C4 and the foundation of 501C3. The C3 can accept tax deductible donations. And let me pause on that for just a moment. During the big give, those of us in this room that are old enough, who are in required minimum distribution, you can give a much larger check, have it sent early from your IRA, and Maureen will mark it up as part of the big give. So it's not just a matter of calling in and giving a credit card number. Arrange with the custodian of your IRA to do that. I have a general securities license plus a registered investment advisor license, which means I have a fiduciary responsibility to whatever I do when it comes to OPM, other people's money. And so one of the reasons for having the two different treasures, because there's two different organizations with two different missions, several years ago I convinced the GEN then treasurer of the order, of the foundation that we need to pay part of the expenses for the staff. So we contribute the foundation about 38% of the expenses. So the majority of the money that's in the foundation coffers goes for scholarships. The EGAN scholarship, which is restricted when it was gifted, has a little caveat to it that we have to grow that money by the urban CPI every year and can never go below that amount. Well, over the past couple of years the markets have been extremely kind to anybody who's been in the right things in the right market. This year we restructured both portfolios. We moved the assets that were in various mutual funds in different bonds within the order and within the foundation into professionally managed assets. So Bellhaven is a registered investment advisor that just does municipal bonds. What we get from them are taxable municipal bonds, which are about 120 basis points or 1.2% over a normal tax-free, and they actually beat U.S. treasuries by about a 25% margin. The exchange-traded fund for equities, the portfolios are exactly the same for both organizations, and our rate of return going back several years has been really quite good. Okay, next slide. As a matter of fact, on your programs at the very beginning where it talks about the treasurer's report, there's a little caveat that everything is audited and those audits are available if anybody wants to look at it. I along with the other trustees and also the board members have to sign documents for the auditors. An auditor is a CPA without a personality. These are the guys with the little green eye shades that hang over their faces who are looking to find something wrong that the CPAs did in posting their things. And so we do the same thing out of Air Force villages. Two different firms do two different functions, and so having a clean audit is a testament both to treasurers and to the staff that we don't have any complications. So as you can see, we have quite a bit of money in the foundation. Most of that money for the foundation or for the order comes from dues and the life fund. And the life fund mentioned earlier that we actually assigned what it's going to cost. Life members are probably about 45% contribution to the orders operating budget where if you want to maintain annual membership, we charge you a little bit more for that privilege. So the total income, total expenses, just like any advocates will show you that you've got to match those two things. So same way with assets and income. Now the income for the foundation has been steadily increasing every year. I think Bruce Smith charged Jerry with increasing the amount of money, not for more scholarships, but for larger, more meaningful scholarships. So all of the things, and all of these are available if you want to get right down to it. But we raise a lot of money and we send a lot of money out to young men and women who want to be future military aviators. Next slide, please. You can see the activity, the amount, the donations, additional income. And surprisingly enough, last year there was a lot of, the law changed that you didn't have to take an RMD, required minimum distribution, but people still gave it. Now this year, same thing. So we're hoping to get larger amounts from people's required minimum distribution who tend to be charitably inclined. Just think of it this way, you have to give $10,000, that's $3,500, that's not going in tax money to Uncle Sam. So program expenses, those are the scholarships, those are the awards. Those are all of the things that we do in order to increase the awareness of the organization. The two slides, or the two pie charts on the right side, actually if you were just to talk about the foundation, that programs are 87% of the money we spend. Next slide, please. And here you can see where everything is. The order has a life account equity with Wells Fargo Managed ETF, the Bell Haven Managed Bond portfolio. And then come to the right side and that's where most of the money is because that's where most of the charitable activities take place. And as a foundation under tax laws, we have to give away a certain percent. So for all of the flights, the money's here, you just have to come and ask for it because Will would really love to give away more than he's got. In the past couple of years we've lagged, so we've got some work to do to catch up and we've got enough money to do it. Next. Any questions? Jerry wanted me to clarify the fact that taxable bonds, because we're a non-profit 501c3, we don't pay taxes on any of the income, we don't pay capital gains, so everything we make goes to the bottom line. And in some cases taxable municipal bonds make sense for individuals, depending on your tax rate. Any other questions? The idea is you give more money. We can always use more money. We're going to transition into some of the foundation officers, but before I ask Colonel Frank Kapp to come up, the Big Give had been mentioned, and I did want to highlight that the new Aviator Scholarships that 21 and 74 got do come out of the Big Give proceeds that come to us. So those are the two $2,000 scholarships mentioned before. Quick story on fundraising, and of course fundraising is inextricably linked to our overall financial strength that has just been talked about, which is why we segue to it at this point. I'm a big social media person and I'm going to talk about that later in my closing comments, but one of the joys that I get is signing dozens and dozens and dozens of thank you notes and letters that go out to all the people that donate to our causes. Recently, and Crystal helps run this for us. I received a packet at this time, and I do about every three weeks a packet of 75 such instruments to sign to send out to donors. A great joy, love wearing out my hand. Well, I made a little post on my Facebook page with a picture of all these things on my floor talking about, you know, what our organization is about. And Facebook has some kind of algorithm in it where it recognized that there was fundraising in the subject of my post and it created a donate button. And I had one of my friends donate $100 through Facebook just based on a social media post. Now, I recognize not everybody is social media savvy, but it just goes to show that, you know, technology and as we grow and as we bring in a new demographic of younger people, this is just one of many new ways we can attract not only new members, but new donors as well who are social media savvy. So with that, I'm going to bring up Colonel Frank Kapp to talk about our fundraising efforts for this year. I am one half of the chairmanship of this fundraising foundation. Maureen is the other half, and we get together on ad hoc basis whenever it's needed. Three major campaigns showing 2019 and 2020. On the left in 2019, the big gift down below it, what we did in 2020. You'll notice that in 2020, doing part to the big gift program, giving out less in incentive money, we earned a little bit less in 2020 than 2019. Although we had more dadalians give to the program, which was pretty good. The legacy program in 2019 was our first year we ran that program. And then we got a modest return for the request. We got a big jump in 2020. Not loud enough? It might. We had significant growth in 2020. In part due, we think, to the unusual request we put out. Maureen's idea, send out a puzzle piece and ask people to become part of a puzzle that put together a legacy for the future of aviation. And that worked out pretty well. And the year campaign is the request you get for donations that come out when you get your ballots to vote. And you'll notice that it was down in 2020. And regardless of what Dan says, I think part of the reason it was down was because people did not have to donate their required minimum, use their required minimum distribution. And we did notice that there were several people who had been sending money in that way who did not send it in this year. And we think that for next year. Overall, even though we're down a little bit, I'm positive about this thing because we have a larger number of people donating to us. And I thought it was very interesting on the right side you notice that we had a larger number of people in 2020 who actually gave to more than one campaign. So that was pretty good. Slide please. Here are the named gifts for 2019 and 2020. You've seen the names appear on the earlier slides. We had two named gifts in 2019. Piercy and Jacobs, we have six in 2020, but one of those piercy was an add-on. And the Atlantic, we expect that is going to be increased this year over what the 5000 was given. Notice that Stuart was for flying training and not just for the academic scholarships. So 2020 was a pretty good year. Slide please. These are the completed campaign. I say completed tongue-in-cheek because even though the legacy donations are supposed to be over with, this slide has changed three times in the last two weeks because money is still coming in. The average gift is about $125 per person. Coming up in September, we've got another big gift and there's something called, up there it says need flight champions. And Maureen tells me that General Mansky is going to have a few words to say about that. This is new, so you'll need to listen up to that when he does it. The last is the end of year donation request, which goes out in October along with your ballot. Slide please. Corporate gifts. We've averaged about 15,000 over the last two years. In 2019, if you notice, Boeing is up there twice. They actually responded to a 2018 request late, so we actually got two donations from them. In 2020, we got two donations in from American Airlines and Boeing and then everything stopped because of COVID. Folks didn't want to donate during that period, so we quit asking for it, but we had one windfall and that's advertising income. We had a great windfall when River Colony Retirement Home decided to place a large advertisement with this, which brought us back up to about $15,000, so that was pretty good. This year in 2021, we have three that we've received already from AirPower, Lightos and Lockheed Martin. Boeing is pending. We're hoping to get $2,000 out of them. If you noticed from previous years, we've only gotten $500 out except for that 2018 request. And American Airlines is pending. We think we're not going to get money from American Airlines, but we may get mileage to use for travel, which will help. Slide, please. Yeah, we have to be careful with it to avoid losing our 501C3 status. Okay, before I lose my voice here, the last slide is on the endowments that inspire. I'll let you read the paragraph. By the way, General Andreessen gave us the idea for this particular effort, so thank you, sir, for that. If you notice, there's three levels of endowments. And opposite that, you see that the foundation will donate up to the amount shown in the right column for up to 10 years if your endowment lasts that long. If you want to really put a large endowment in, you'll have to arrange what we put in with Maureen, so... By the way, we're working with three people this year for 2021 there in various stages of ongoing talks. Talk this program up with your flight members. It's a very worthwhile effort and a good way to honor and recognize an aviator, even if it might be you, and do some good for the future of aviation for the kids who are going to be standing on our shoulders one of these days. Any questions? Okay, I won't drop the mic. Our financial strength is connected to our fundraising efforts. Then a successful fundraising effort will allow us to have and grow better scholarship programs. And so, calling up Will Hendricks to talk about our scholarships as our scholarship chair. I'm Will Hendricks, the token civilian for the Dalian organization. And I've been at it a little while. However, it appears that we have collected plenty of money. And what you've heard about is all the money that is sitting there waiting for us to use it, make something happen with it. That's a key ingredient here. If they put a slide up there, they've just been talking to you about the business of putting your name on an endowment, putting that money into our bank so that we can pass that money on in scholarship form. Well, here's a slide that shows the name of active endowments at this point. You can look up your various information. Each of those endowments, they're not all the same. Some of those people want special qualities within the recipient of that scholarship. You all need to look that up. You flight captains who are concentrated on finding candidates to apply a scholarship to, you can start by going to your flight manual and other locations. I guess our new sales, what's it called? Sales Force, that new program will give you some information about these various locations of money. Here's the thing. Let me see the next slide, please. The important thing here is look at the growth in our scholarship numbers and look also at the number of flights participating. The key ingredient in getting scholarships out to scholarship recipients is locating the candidates and finding that they are qualified to receive a scholarship. We've got the money. What we have to do is get the flights, each flight I suppose has a scholarship chairman or somebody in there that's responsible for finding candidates. If that's the case, put your efforts to it and become more active. In the past we've had as many as 40 flights participating. Let's drop down. I don't know the reason for it, but it runs high and low. I'd like to see 40, 41, 42 flights every year participating in scholarship programs. The money is there. I know that in some cases it's a matching scholarship. If we're asking you to the flight to come up with that money, we can match. Remember, our match is much greater than what the flight has to put out. If the flight brings us $1,000, we're going to match that with $2,000 is the way it's working today. That is important and if the money is there, you provide us a candidate. Those candidates are not that hard to find. You guys who have experience with going to a university that has an ROTC detachment, you work with the head of that detachment, telling what it is you need, what you're willing to do for his students, and most of them will jump right in there to help you with that, and you will produce candidates. Well, the analysis of the candidates is pretty easy. I and two or three other folks, including General Mansky, we work on that analysis of that candidate. It's really simple and we will therefore provide a scholarship to that university for that student. You can see by these numbers how we have gone from year to year, it fluctuates depending on the activity, but it starts at the flight level. I'm so glad to see flight captains here in the room and folks who can take the information back to their flight and talk about that we've got the money. Let's pass it on to those students who are qualified, eligible for it. The Dalian Foundation will be honored as a result. There's one more slide here that has a list of the named scholarships. Again, we've generated quite a bit of money in the last year or so. It was named endowments and the information is available. We have an expert, Christy Cavanaugh is an expert on the rules and regulations, covering each of these. But if you have a question, call the office and get it straightened out and you will be successful in passing scholarships on to those candidates. Any questions about any of that? Let's get some... Before I bring Colonel Ed Sheeran up to talk about DFT and junior ROTC. If you go back a slide please. We're on track this bottom right number here in 2021 to bring in another $100,000. This is really good news. A couple of interesting dynamics that COVID gave us as Ed comes up. We didn't do much DFT last year, understandably, because of COVID. Our coffers continue to fill without any outgoing money. If you go to the next slide, we need to give this much money away this year. It's all we can do to get qualified applicants into our DFT and our scholarship programs to give this money away and we're happy to do it. So please keep sending through the headquarters your qualified scholarship candidates so that we can give our money away. Is Ed here? Yeah, Ed. Ed's going to talk about the... Dan, are you going to do it? Okay, yes, please do. Thanks. When we talk about all the scholarship money, we consolidated all of the assets within the foundation into two accounts, the restricted, which is even, and the unrestricted. And Maureen manages the distribution based on the percentage of contribution and the percentage of return that we get. It's far less expensive to have these accounts consolidated like that. The other thing is that the Joint Finance Committee meets four times a year. One of those times is actually for the budget preparation for the coming year and the other is we have the people from Wells Fargo sitting across the table from us. Well, we will in the future, past has been Zoom, for them to tell us what their performance is and we can treat... We can tell them what we think. I'm a good critique of what's going on and they've actually been very receptive to what we do. So, Ed? Thanks, Ed. General Allen, General Mansky, fellow Dodalians. As you all know, last year, the problems of the pandemic led us to cancel the 2020 the Dalian Flight Training Program. And after we did that, we started watching to see what the flight schools were doing as far as taking precautions to stem infections that could be transferred in the cockpits of the training aircraft. And the flight schools did pretty good. We could not find an example of where a instructor or a student contracted the virus in the training environment. So, we made another decision that we would go back, go out to the flights and ask the flight project officers, or the flight training, to take a good look at their flight schools and if they were happy with the procedures the flight schools were taking, that they were effective, then to go ahead and plan for DFT in 2021. So, we also made a funding decision based on that. Next slide, please. We're going to increase the funding from the foundation. So, if a flight has one student, the foundation will reimburse 75% of the ground and flight training expenses. Two students, 65%. Three students, 50%. So, we have a little extra money to spend and this is the way we're going to do it and this is for 2021 now, not too sure what's going to happen in the out years as yet. The ground and flight training expenses are just that. The pre-mission brief, the post-mission brief, the flight training, the rental of the aircraft, it does not include flight physicals, awards, jackets if the flight chooses to present those, any training publications that go along with the program. So, we are limited to reimbursing for ground and flight training only. The one thing that has come up this year is liability insurance. We require the flight schools to carry substantial liability and they do anyhow and it covers the aircraft, it covers the student, it covers the instructor, it covers anybody who might be injured on the ground, excuse me, in the event of an accident, but it does not cover the student on the solo flight. So, we have started to include hull insurance for that student to cover the solo flight and we found several insurance companies that will provide pretty reasonable hull insurance for short periods of time rather than to have to purchase it for the whole year. Next slide, please. This is a list of participating flights and right now it looks like we have about 40, what does it say up there, 47 students? That's going to go to 48 because Mike Nickler just told me that they decided to take their alternate who was doing so well and add them to their student force. We're glad to see that happen. We've come a long way since 2000 when we had four students here in San Antonio start the flight training program. Unfortunately, the continuity of training was so poor that we had to cancel the 2020, the 2000 program and we started, we went back and learned our lessons and went back to 2000, back in 2001 we started up again and then that year we had four students and all together now we have we have trained 390 young men and women in a general aviation aircraft most of those leading to a solo flight. You'll notice that some flights are going with one student and a couple with two. Okay, well that's going to put us at 50. Thank you, I expected that Dan Okay, some are at one student, some at two, some at three and there's a couple flights up there that have got as many as seven students on the roll for this year and that means they're doing a lot of great local funding to support that extra training effort. Next slide please. These are the costs last year, the 2019 average and you can see it goes from a low high across the country. Some high cost areas gets pretty expensive to try to do flight training. That young lady in the picture up there is Skyler Sharmaski and she was a 2019 graduate of the Stinson program here in San Antonio and she is currently has finished her first year at the Air Force Academy and is starting a flight training program this summer and her first term goal is to be a glider instructor at the Air Force Academy. And next slide please. The junior ROTC program is live and well we depend on the on the flights to manage their local programs. The foundation supplies the medals at no cost to participating flights and members who want to sponsor junior ROTC programs in their area. The foundation sponsors Department of Defense Schools Overseas and provides the award at no cost to those schools. We depend on the junior ROTC instructors to make the selections with their own student body and we give them guidelines. We say that there ought to be a cadet who is in the top 10 percent of the ROTC class the top 20 percent of their academic class and I think that's about covers it. Any questions on the flight program or the junior ROTC awards program. Okay thank you. I apologize if I'm stealing somebody else's thunder but you saw the picture of Skyler Sharmaski a member of the 2019 DFT class here in Stinson's flight we had six students. As of this week four of those six students who completed DFT under Stinson's flight in 2019 are cadets at the United States Air Force Academy. That's pretty darn good isn't it four out of six. All right now I have the pleasure of introducing Nick Kehoe who will talk about our awards program and I'll tell you that Nick works tirelessly on this program and he has certainly improved that's our name out in front of all the services. Thank you Jerry. Next slide. This just shows you the number of awards we have particularly at national level. There's not a lot of change over the last few years we're the exception of when we expanded our eligibility categories we also started we also expanded the awards that we would give the top graduates so that's why the military education and training in all of the categories that we have applied to the top graduates. And there have been a couple of small changes in the other awards and I'm going to go through that in just a second. Next slide. This is just a compendium of the awards that we we give out there are a lot of them the big ones are the national awards but you can see safety in particular safety individual performance some of the support areas that we support are all ones where we go out and say thank you for what you're doing and congratulations on what you're doing and keep going. We used to do our awards national awards at convention we stopped at several years ago so now we go out I'm going to show you some pictures in just a second we go out personally to our organizations that present the award in front of their peers their families and so on and I'll show you a couple pictures. Next slide. This is probably one of the most influential or one of the most prestigious awards we give the award to the top graduate at the Air Force Academy we have sponsored that award since the academy first started this year Jerry this right now this he's helping the today Anderson I think it was they inducted into the award your honor roll at the Air Force Academy the award that we give us a little bit is separate from that and it's a part of the whole award ceremony that culminates at the end of the couple hours or whatever of awards maybe a hundred or more awards that they give out with our award at the very end and it's really something big so for the that's to the top graduate Next slide. That award I said that this is the this is the daddy rabbit if you will of all of our awards 1938 was the first time we presented the general Benjamin Floyd Award and we've been doing it ever since and this year this past year we had restrictions on when we could move and what we were moving Jerry General Allen actually presented the award over zoom or over a digital way or whatever means it was it was probably the commands and here Woody was there and he did it in person for us he's presenting the award to the Vice Commander of Air Mobility Command or having the top safety program in the United States Air Force Next slide. This is an acquisition award the reason I wanted to show this award is last fall Christie and I went up to Fort Hood and because it was close enough the original trophy with us so I really wanted you to see and if you walked around that building yesterday or you've been there before you can see the nature of the awards that we present or we used to present the original awards that the Dalians used we found it the awards are getting banged up and it was very hard to take them out to the convention so most of them now except for one I think have been recovered at the headquarters and we have my display with all of the other memorabilia that is on display in our headquarters that trophy there that we were presenting the commander of the unit was presenting to to the battalion commander if you watched the US Open Phil Mickelson got the trophy today Ram who won the PGA I think it was he won the Open Mickelson won the PGA I guess he received the trophy the trophies that they received are just like that this is no if you look at them in our headquarters you'll see there's no small afterthoughts there they are really significant when we can do a Corpus Christi next in the next week or two and to present the top safety award to the US Navy I'm not sure if he's going to carry that trophy or not one short side when I carried the trophy up to this this one here last year I left it in the car by mistake and so I told I hadn't picked it up before so it's Christi to go out and get it and we forgot so Christi goes out and carries it that is a heavy mother so when I saw her coming in let me have that anyway very prestigious this is the wolf award next slide real quick this is what we did last year on a few of our awards this is the Fairchild Award was there since 1960 or so that we did over Zoom and you can see the original trophy on the right there but it was under picture and I presented that to it was won by the Air Force Institute of Technology that comes under the Air University and we did it on Zoom and we did a couple others that way also next slide this is one that we just did this was 2019 we had two awards that we couldn't present in 2019 one of them was in Alaska you couldn't get to Alaska because they had such severe restrictions on people going there and so we had a 2019 award that just did it two weeks ago and the 2020 award which we had learned about since so we did both of them at the same time so this is Lieutenant Bowers up there receiving the award what I wanted to show you next slide we want to make sure the families come to these and very commonly they do you'll see another picture in a second in that regard so Lieutenant Bowers who Lieutenant Commander Bowers rather US Coast Guard with his son Ashley and daughter Brinley were part of the ceremony as was the Commander's wife and a few others and all of the units there they didn't take a picture up we have a picture of it but if you were looking at these pictures on the other end going out anywhere from a hundred to more people at the Amateur also all of the people from that unit next slide here's a quick interesting story this is Kodiak Alaska after he presented the award the guy who was my taking care of me I had to go fly so he turned me over to three US Coast Guard, senior US Coast Guard Academy Cadets to do a tour of Kodiak which took about one minute anyway I said I'm going to take you guys to lunch so I invited the lunch and just a random restaurant we stopped at so we walked in the door the cadet on the cadet Rivera there on the on the left saw her mother across the room her mother was visiting her and her grandmother somewhere else when she came back I was talking about the didelians as I do when I'm out and what we do and what we represent and so on and our heritage and she says oh my mother won one of those awards she didn't say which one so I get my phone out I looked it up said Melissa Rivera US Coast Guard 2002 she won the same award as Lieutenant Bowers or Lieutenant Commander Bowers so I gave my phone to the cadet and said go show that to your mother that's how we memorialize these awards and then when she came back our food wasn't at the table yet so I went over and talked to her mother and found out that not only was her mother a recipient of one of our awards she used to be the station commander at Kodiak leaves on her shoulder right now but she's no seven select so she's waiting to pin on you guys go right to two stars or whatever the Coast Guard calls Commodore or whatever they call the first flag officer rank so that was really kind of neat next slide in the middle there is Luke this is Sitka, Alaska another Coast Guard station with the 2020 award that is being presented to Lieutenant Commander Sir Oakman and his son wanted to be part of it so you can see his son kind of looking up and amazement if I took a picture about two minutes or about a minute later you would have seen the mother came up and grabbed them by the by the car and dragged them out across the floor next slide this is an award we just did at Langley Air Force Base a couple of weeks ago and the commander of the unit Colonel Campbell is on the right in the middle is the youngest airman in the squadron this award is the Carter where it goes to the top logistics readiness squadron in the Air Force and what they've done traditionally which was started when when I did one at Holloman is invite the youngest airman in the to take a part in the award ceremony signifying that that award was won by the involvement and the key work of everybody in the squadron not just a commander or a senior person so this is airman Bradley Peake in the middle receiving the award with his commander on the right now here's how airman Peake who got highlighted a lot reacted afterwards next slide this is an hour this is an hour and a half later and that's airman Peake the youngest airman in the squadron paying back his commander with a pie if I were to summarize I would say the fact that when we went from doing these at conventions to doing them in person at a unit we have increased our awareness immensely and appreciation I can't tell you it's hard to express just how satisfying it is to go out to these units and to be able in front of peers and a lot of people talk about what the who we are and what we're about and then to present an award either to an organization or to an individual and and see how appreciative that organization is and one of the points I always make is I wouldn't have been there or Jerry or anybody else if somebody hadn't taken the time to put down document the performance of the unit or the individual put it through the channels compete with all the other units that are eligible in the same category and then be the winner that this award, the Carter Award they consider it to be the super bowl of logistics readiness the same thing is true with the maintenance award we do to the top maintenance group in the Air Force they go nuts when they win that because they're competing against in the Air Force in this case so anyway there's a great deal of satisfaction associated with this and we're having a great impact in terms of recognizing in this case mostly active duty and the forces that we're trying to support and to inspire Americans to join in the future anybody have any questions this program costs a little bit too and this is what your donations of our membership do they help pay for this whole program anybody else anybody okay thank you Jerry I have to leave because I'm going to present an award to the top graduate of your undergraduate pilot training class just up the street at the Taj Mahal who won the who's the top graduate and Jerry did it for the first class this is called UPT 2.5 it's that new program with virtual reality and so on thanks for the opportunity and as you saw Nick has done a great deal of work for us on the awards program and we owe him a great deal for that now I'm going to call on Mike Buck you've already seen Mike Buck up here talking as the treasurer of the foundation Mike Buck is an energetic guy who takes the initiative to make things happen thanks Mike that's all due to excessive coffee consumption every day the mentoring program is one of our newer programs and it has evolved in the last few years out of a recognition that there was actually already a lot of mentoring being done by the Dallions and so what we decided to do was to create a clearing house if you will at the headquarters by advertising a way for people who are interested had the time and the energy in providing mentoring to supply us with their information and in particular their areas of expertise whether you had combat experience or you're a logistician at some point or you're a test pilot that's the sort of thing we're looking for resume bullets if you will and then when a young individual who or someone who's currently serving has questions in those areas then we can connect the dots if you will put the two of them directly together next slide please so it's all over the map as far as the possibilities go this is young Jeffrey Davila and his father was a federal law enforcement officer and because his father traveled a lot he was around airplanes a lot and then one day he came out to my community Kestrel Airpark just north of San Antonio and we were able to get him to ride in a T6 Texan 2 the real thing not the new one a T6 Texan AT and all of a sudden he decided wow I really like this and he was around military aviators and this is from something he wrote for us he said I've always had a strong interest in military aviation after speaking to former fire department Mike Buck apparently is not only devilishly handsome but also probably at least oh wait I'm sorry I'm embellishing slightly asking him any questions and doing research I've decided that I am committed to becoming a military aviator and it will be a terrific experience and allow me to achieve my ultimate goal which is to become a military test pilot so because of those interactions we've been able to kind of steer him in the right course and so in his classes at a particular school he's been taking physics and higher level mathematics in preparation for that and he hopes to go to a service academy think about the possibilities here not only can you mentor someone and say yeah majoring in art is nice but if you want to be a test pilot that may not be your best choice but we can also steer them toward the Dallian scholarships and that's what I'm doing with Jeffery Jeffery if you don't happen to wind up going to a service academy then be sure to contact this Tinson's flight here are some of the key phrases we're looking for in these applications for instance and so we can grow it that way but it's also supposed to be for people who are currently serving you have a particular question you know how do you how do you prod yourself to go to weapons school what was weapons school like questions like that things I can't answer because again I scored too high on the test so the what we would do is continue to encourage you to rattle the bushes if you will and try to get people to at least put their names in the hats along with some resume bullets and we'll build up a database of people who have been to Sitka, Alaska and can give the tour even if it only takes a minute the the mentoring well Jeffery's my my latest victim if you will I'd like to talk about one of my earlier victims my daughter Caroline you might have read her story she is currently with her P-8 squadron over in the med at Siganella and she sent me a text this morning saying I guess what dad I've been selected to become a plane captain and next year I'm going to be going to the fleet instructor school and probably either go to Jackson to be an instructor in the P-8 or come back to Corpus to be a primary instructor in the T-6 and so she's loving life she hasn't become even slightly jaded yet although she did point out that her roommates at Siganella who were academy graduates were terribly messy and did not know how to use pots and pans she said it was a trend item Sagan years of repression years of repression yeah so and then she went through a sort of a modified version of DFT which was called dad flying training programs so I gave her all my worst habits anybody have any questions about the mentoring program right now an awful lot of it is just getting it going and establishing the database and a lot of our reports are anecdotal hopefully we can get to some point where we have some metrics such as total numbers of mentors and total numbers of hours spent and things like that but in the meantime I'd encourage you to encourage others to participate if you know it yourself thank you so the key theme of the Allen administration as your national commander is to grow the membership we're doing great work we need more members to do more great work we have an excellent marketing committee headed by Wayne Mudge we have a membership committee headed by Chip Otterback both are at a funeral today so Maureen who is the person who does leads, initiates much of the work in this organization is going to step in and give you their report Maureen good morning can everybody hear me I gotta tell you it is such an honor to see everybody here when we talk about membership we're gonna look at some numbers but it's really about all of you and all the people you represent back in your flights and those members that aren't represented by flights so we're gonna take a look at some of the numbers if I can have the first slide when we ended 2019 we had just a little over 10,000 members and that was a number that we were hoping to increase over 2020 somehow 2020 seemed to be a little bit challenging we did have some issues as far as what were we going to do next how were we going to continue the operation in March of 2020 as you may recall we shut down a lot of things and thanks to the great leadership with our board members and the great staff that we have we continued so at the end of 2020 we ended up with the number of 10,069 members and that's a nice place to be to look at what happened in 2020 but there were some other things that we want to look at when we're looking at total membership so can I have the next slide normally when we get our new members in our new members usually equate what we lose in deceased this year in 2021 we're looking at close to 400 members passing away if you look at 2020's numbers we only gained 160 members that number is not sustainable so it's very important that we do something about our membership as far as increasing that can I have the next slide please so some of the opportunities that we have are to increase our numbers through the new criteria the aviators that are air battle managers and combat system operators and navigators those are all areas that we can find new members and as you can see over the last few years the trends have been pretty consistent but they are not large numbers so we encourage you to shake the hands of somebody that isn't a pilot but is serving as an aviator and invite them to come to what we have as meetings the heritage is important the legacy of what we do as an organization is important and the inspiration for our students is really important too so when they join they join something that's not just a handshake it's an organization that does a lot of good can I have the next slide please just a little bit of facts about the membership a lot of you go to flight meetings and you see some of your members in your flights aging year after year I can happily report that our membership is actually getting younger and part of that is because we're bringing in newer younger members there is the factor that some of our older members have flown west we've lost some of our wonderful World War II veterans and that's something that is a legacy that we want to continue because you bring in some of these new aviators they're going to have some wonderful stories to tell in a future generation so I encourage you to think about that too and it does show you some small details about 60% of our membership is life membership the other 40% or so are dues paying members and those are ones that we can see dwindling as far as paying their dues so if you're a flight leader I encourage you to also talk to your flights about keeping up with their national dues so that we can continue all these programs that we're doing so well on so the other challenge is also the male and female ratio I think there's probably more than 233 female pilots in the world so if you see a female pilot they're also eligible something to keep in mind there too I think we have only one female pilot Kathy, you're here right now and I know you're part of women in aviation so those are people that would be great members for the DeDalience as well so now we get to the big question how do we get new members what do we do because it's something important that we need to try a new path on the membership and marketing committees have met with all the different challenges and looked at different ways of how do we gain more members and one of the ways we've decided is to look at using a professional marketing team we're going to go to we've actually gone to Anderson marketing we've asked them to come up with a new plan for creating a professional message this message is to actually ask people to do something it's called a call to action and it will be targeted to people that are not members now but do qualify all of you have phones you probably notice that if you have a conversation about something about 10 minutes later you'll notice you get an email that tells you you can buy something that you're talking about if you've not noticed that trust me it's going on so that's how they target that they find people that are qualified as members and they target these messages to those people it's not been tried before we don't know how it's going to result but it is something that we're looking at doing another thing that we want to do is the digital display ads on your computers with messaging that comes across to people that are searching information about military aviation and these messages will pop out with that call to action that message that asks people to join the members and to learn more about the dalliance and it will be done in a professional manner because to be honest with you it's really hard to come up with that kind of message that's very successful that's why we've looked at a professional firm to come up with that kind of targeting and then another thing is the social media we all have some kind of connection in social media whether it's using our Facebook accounts maybe we just text maybe we actually just call people but we have social connections with other people in this case we're going to try to use to target some people that are qualified and see if we can share some of the message of the good news of things that we do phone bank so this is something that I never talked about with the flights but flights 102 in Atlanta Bill Ryle who is actually not here today but did get part of the citation of honor he is actually doing this he has 55 members that have fallen off the ranks and he has decided to call each one of them and ask them why they're not members or what he can do to get them to come back into the organization and we want to do this on a national level we're looking at doing something like this in the fall getting some volunteers to just call some people that have been members that have fallen off of the dues and the roles and are no longer current so that's one way to try to gain some of our membership back from people that have been members but it's also a way of finding out why maybe people aren't active with the membership and again we also know that 2020 was a very unusual year and then finally new member November this was something started a couple of years ago and we'll finish it in 2020 for obvious reasons but in 2021 we're going to supply any flights with any kind of marketing effort you want to talk about how you can gain more members into your flight we'll supply you with any of the marketing needs you need and then we're going to also do some messages online during that new member November so hopefully we'll get some people that are interested in your aviation and interested in all the good programs that you've been seeing and then talk about it to their friends and try a meeting out and see what happens finally what I want to say about membership is that it's like I said at the beginning not about the numbers it's about the connections it's about what we do for the future of military aviation it's about helping the students it's about honoring those that are serving right now and those are a lot of things to be proud about and I'm very very honored to be here with all of you so I just want to thank you for everything that you do to help the membership and to help with our marketing efforts thank you what remains is for Chad and Jerry to give some concluding remarks and then we will have the annual salute to those who flew west in the previous full year which would be 2020 and we'll also have a Q&A session that I mentioned anyway, but first you've earned a short break but please do make it a short break thanks to close out I've got thanks for hanging with us I've got the potpourri round of issues that just mentioned from the foundation side general Allen from the order side but first of all I want to recognize everybody who is online with us all the flights who couldn't be here so we had at the height of it 12 flights on there's about 5 or so now so welcome everybody out in live stream world glad you could participate with us speaking of flights flights are the life blood of our organization most everything that has been discussed today does not happen without flight support, member support in some way shape or form the outreach that flights help help us with it's really the life blood and actually the future of our organization is dependent on flight activity and flight outreach that enables us to do the things that we can do at the headquarters a little bit about myself real briefly I'm blessed to be in this position by the way I've been a diddalion for 24 years back when you had to fill out an application and sweat the sponsorship and two signatories it was a really big deal back then and we've transformed in many ways a couple years ago as a part of a flight for national capital flight where I inherited the flight captaincy four years ago general Kehoe as part of our flight said hey Chad would you be interested in maybe being a part of the board for the order I said yeah I'd love to I'd love to learn a little bit more and have enjoyed that for the last two years and then out of the blue I got a text from general Allen hey Chad would you like to run the foundation and I said okay does it come with help or support I don't know a whole lot but I'm really good at asking questions so I'm really blessed to serve in this capacity we couldn't do and it's already been emphasized what we do without the help of and support of the staff the staff is fantastic and I can't emphasize that enough I do want to make mention the very last slide we will have here shortly is on our air power symposium it's going to be October 15 that Dr. Ben Lambeth an honorary member of the Dadalians and no stranger to many of you from past conventions and Lieutenant General Dave Deptula Dean of the Mitchell Institute and a life member of the Dadalians and who's very active today in Air Force circles if you haven't seen the podcast and interviews that he's done with Air Force officers and very senior positions are putting together the slate of speakers and topics or that which will be held at the Mitchell Institute in Arlington Virginia we're still working out the hotel contract if you have it likely will be walking distance or a short drive from the hotel to the Mitchell Institute with the theme being the relevance of air power in the 21st century so look in your email and other communications that we have more details when that comes talking about the growth of our programs as was indicated by several of the briefing topics we had today want to highlight that our Dadalian flying training program we had 45 students enrolled this year I've got a chart in front of me I'm not going to read it but the program's been around now for a better part of 15 years having 45 students enrolled in that program this year is the second highest number that we've ever had actually I guess the number is 51 so now we have the highest I guess as I'm doing the math in my head very quickly here that is a big deal since we didn't do any flying last year and we're emerging from the pandemic so this is really good news and it's only projected to grow as interest and knowledge of the program grows junior ROTC medals we've given out 1480 of those this year this past year that's an increase in 100 over 2019 and we made a corporate decision to sell those medals online to non-member schools and so we're reaping dividend and income from that as well scholarships want to punctuate what was said on the scholarship program we've grown in two ways the number of scholarships given and we've added the named scholarship program so we went from nine scholarships at the beginning of 2020 to 12 and one of the named scholarships here Lieutenant Colonel Joe Tom and Candace Birch was one of the ones that were up on the slide so we thank you for that scholarship addition and as I said before as we connect the dots financial health fundraising and scholarship programs are all interconnected and related so this is just a new vehicle there's been a lot of interest to recognize a loved one a heritage to our own World War I heritage to create a vehicle there may be the potential to create a hereditary membership scholarship program very exciting so the potential is endless and limitless in this area the amount of funding that we've awarded also from back in 2019 just over $110,000 to 2020 just over $159,000 this year we're budgeted to give out over $218,000 so enormous jumps in those areas our matching funds program as was talked about earlier again is one of the joys of being in this position that I have we have a very strict process of which Christie helps us with the rules as others have noted before we have a committee of people that strenuously look over the applications for matching scholarships and we ask hard questions if we don't think they merit that the answers come back very quickly and I'm pleased to say I love working with our team of folks who are on that committee who help approve those matching funds and also want to highlight that the headquarters throws in an additional $1,000 on top of the matching funds to distribute as a flight wishes communications has been another bright spot for us you may have noticed when you've got your previous Betel Aspire not the current issue the previous one was the largest one we've ever produced 78 pages long lots of great content lots of great articles the steadily increasing advertising that follows the ethics of our order that Maureen mentioned and we're moving to a themed quarterly issue from the way we've done it in the past and Aaron Fowle who has just left us as handed the reins over to Taylor Watson we have a very engaged and eclectic group of individuals on our communications committee who bring a lot of energy and ideas it's fun to watch how we have some of these brainstorming sessions they've all been virtual that I've been a part of but it's fantastic mentioned earlier was our social media presence Facebook I shared a story on we're very active there LinkedIn is also one of the vehicles we have we have a very strong presence on Instagram you've never heard of it or don't know how to spell it that's okay it's primarily pictures based so it should be really good for aviators who love pictures and we're also on Twitter and I'm a social media person as I mentioned before if you're on social media one of the things that you want to see on these kinds of platforms is a consistency of messaging which we now have that we didn't have before getting our message out being present and marketing ourselves and what we do and all the good work that we do so it's very exciting to watch I can barely keep up with it so if I can barely keep up with it I know these guys are very busy talking about the lineage and history of our order and I've learned a lot actually too our blog the other communications that go out there that really drew a lot of us in as members in the first place is very encouraging to see our flights get support from the foundation we're offering coins and certificates and other type of things like memberships to both the top graduate for aviation school as well as top graduate awards for flight schools Frank mentioned also the big give champions and noted that I was going to talk a little bit about that the big give champions is a way for your flights to earn money if you have a person within your flight who can be signed up as a flight champion 5% of the donations raised through your flight will go back to your flight and you'll get a flight rebate much like all of the points that you earn during the year when you submit your quarterly reports your presence in being here today represent a flight you will get a flight rebate that goes back to your flight that serves your programs you see fit in your flights one of the things that dues was brought up and the declining dues and the program that Maureen talked about one of the things that we've done in national capital flight I know some others have done is COVID has brought an opportunity it's been a threat to a lot of flights who are used to having their meetings in person but it's also brought opportunity many flights have been meeting virtually it allows not only your flight to have a speaker geographically separated that you can bring in but it also allows people particularly during these past 18 months who aren't comfortable meeting in person to enjoy a presentation in the fellowship of other Dadalians but then it is also allowed across colonization of flight means nationally which I think has really allowed us to get to know one another and not be as disconnected as we were once before and drawn us together but regarding dues specifically whereas you may have collected your dues by check at a flight meeting at your club or wherever you meet our flight got really creative and started hounding members who are reluctant to give in the traditional way because they were used to doing it in person well we just used our digital paying ability through PayPal Venmo, Zell again if you're not familiar with these that's okay these are digital currency transaction ways we could continue to collect our flight dues for our flight program so for you flights who are trying to figure out how do we continue keeping our membership on the books to keep our flight dues coming in and much like national where we're working on the website to make donating not only to the foundation in order causes but your national dues and other monies we're trying to streamline that on the website as well I do want to thank the staff again I can't emphasize enough how fun it is to work with our staff and lastly I'm going to go get a book but I do want to talk about our guest speaker briefly for lunch today we're going to have Breeder General retired Chuck Cobble talk to us today about his father's memoirs that were edited and so this is a book that I have reviewed and put a plug in for people who read aviation themed books send your review in and we'll put it in the flyer if it hadn't been previously reviewed my hero Colonel Frank Kapp has encouraged me to do the same so I've started contributing reviews reviewed this book it's excellent I've been around aviation a while I was going to say a long time but I'm preaching to the choir with this group I had never really heard of General Cobble and this book is excellent he's been involved in so many interesting things and he donated this book so that we could review it he has signed it to the Dadalians we're going to gift this to the Dadalian library however, he does have books for sale back here for $50 he's donating all the proceeds of the books to the order of Dadalians not keeping any of it for himself so I encourage you it's an excellent book we're donating this one and with that I'm going to hand the podium back over to our commander General Allen thank you very much well I have just one topic I want to talk about you know what it is our task for the coming year and the year after that is to grow the membership why? so that we can carry on the mission in an even better fashion today and you've heard a lot of great things today but we want to keep doing the job as well or better than we are doing it to do that we have to maintain our membership we'd like to grow our membership one of you mentioned to me this morning that the way to grow the membership is in member to potential member conversations, interactions invitations to meetings and I would like to ask you flight captains to emphasize that to your members then all of you to take it on as a personal mission to please invite more people to join our organization so that we can do what advocate for air and space power honor those who flew and fly and inspire tomorrow's military aviators so the next thing we're going to do is take questions and I have the first question Tim Voss would you tell us what you're doing as our historian please it didn't sound planted did it? hi everybody for those of you who haven't met me I'm Tim Voss and I'm honored to be the national historian of the Order of the Dadalians General Kehoe asked me to come on board saw how interested I was in the Dadalians I'm a young member I've only been a Dadalian for 21 years so I got a ways to go and I was an air battle manager actually I was a communications officer when I first started became an air battle manager I was a tanker I saw the Order of the Dadalians room walked in there looked at the history that was in there the camaraderie that was happening and the ability to come together and speak about aviation together as a brother and I couldn't I wanted to be a Dadalian but I was an ABMer so I couldn't be one luckily General Ryan gave me a waiver and sent me off to pilot training and I became a C-5 pilot I phoned the C-17 and I was lucky enough to fly the WC-130J the Hurricane Hunter is out of Keesley so a few airplanes but it's just a pleasure to be here and under General Allen's stewardship and the executive director we are starting to take our history to the next level we have just published our first digital history for the 2019 year it is just now thanks to Taylor oh there's Taylor thankfully to Taylor Watson and Pam Watson everybody say hi to Pam in the back we said hi before our new preservationist we are going to take the library that we have there in the headquarters and start to digitize it which is great for our preservation of our history but more importantly you and your flight members the first one just went on two days ago the 2019 you'll get more information later from the staff on how to access that, what the password is but we are starting to do it and that is phenomenal I can't wait to see where we go from there so we're going to start taking all those green books that you see in there digitize them and make them available to you the next step for us is to make them available to PME to research to academia how do we do that for people who are interested in the history of aviation in the history of our pilots from World War I in our current history how does that get out there so that's our next step long term vision for all of you who have been in the headquarters you've seen the amazing memorabilia we have in that organization in that building but unless you live here make it available to members to the public to see our rich history well, virtual reality is something that is real it is out there, we can do it and so that's the long term vision is to be able to scan all that into virtual reality and make it where you can look at it in a VR environment and turn it around read the inscriptions like you're actually there holding it so that's our long term vision I'm so excited to be here I just flew in from the Netherlands a few days ago what a wonderful country but how great is it to be back here in the United States with fellow aviators talking about aviation and talking about the future of the Order of the Italians and how we're inspiring aviators so I'm so excited to be here thank you General Allen for helping me move the history forward into the staff for making this a reality for the moment for history I'd be happy to take them going once going 12, we got one in the back so the question was are we having a state of the organization update how many flights do we have are we losing flights are we gaining flights I will tell you that in the history but there is a list of the current flights but I can't speak to losing or gaining General, International Marine says and of course we have the virtual flight we may have a nearby flight or who live overseas I think there was one other bell do you have a question? No okay, sure schools, that's a very good question and we don't have the answer to that yet the first goal is to make it available to members but making it available to academia is absolutely a goal later on thanks for the question alright Bruce Smith suggested a question for Marine by the Better Business Bureau and other similar ranking organizations Bruce Smith encouraged me many years ago to get involved with a couple of different things the Better Business Bureau ranks our non-profits and we're the highest ranking with them and on our guide star we are at the platinum level which is the highest level you can get on guide star ratings for non-profits any other questions the question is are we still around 90% Air Force and then the other members are Coast Guard Marine, well Navy Naval Aviation, Army Aviation and the answer is basically yes we don't see any breakthroughs in the other services but we would be happy to have those of you who are especially in the other services to talk to your fellow aviators and of course we encourage all Air Force folks to be parochial and even for Army Helicopter pilots thank you Dan did you have a question Jerry someday something will happen with Space Force but it's not clear what it will be will it be operators people who operate spacecraft who knows what it will be we're working hard to establish an award for the Space Force but that is progressing slowly also because they're trying to have Space Force tell us who they would like us to honor but Space Force is working hard to get established yes I spoke with Chad just a minute ago in kind of a segue to this social media thing it's not really a question it's a comment if you were to pick your smart phones up right now put the search bar in and go Shangri-La our flight is going to come up with the photos the little bit of the bad news that happened in Pensacola everybody remembers the December shooting at Pensacola shut the base down covid comes up shut the base down what shut down after that the national flight academy at the museum we have a shared mission with the flight academy we have a didelian room and a didelian lounge those high school kids come through that flight academy and they see that they know that's the next level it's perfect the chairman and CEO the museum foundation right now is a didelian in our flight where this social media thing came in is when we have every DFT solo come in we take photos and we post them that day on our facebook page the best thing about it is after these hits that come in the likes from their high school classmates and so on that 50, 60 of them hey I didn't know you were doing this tell me more what about it is businessmen in Pensacola bombers, electricians everybody else the best note they can say how can I help well guess what my thinkler is going to call you and we're going to talk about this a little bit that's this machine the best part of this is this young lady's photo on facebook landed in the foundation they saw it we congratulated her at our meeting in April at her table was the admiral and her parents she tells the admiral hey I went to the national flight academy a few years ago boom wonderful tell me more about your career oh when I was a fifth grader I went to starbase starbase went away the admiral now had everything he needed and he made a vignette with this young lady he had OSD people at the base talking with the commanding officer talking with the admiral OSD is funding starbase again this is resurrecting the flight academy bringing these fifth graders in for STEM education what are they going to see the didelian lounge again I get back to what Chad just said we want to educate the world of the social media is we want to educate the world about what we do and who we are it's right here it's right here public season and they want to know more who are these folks with these green jackets and things passing out coins and doing stuff and they love us because the results are right there in our communities we can show them kids we can show them car shifts right now and they love it are there other questions number 75% of the flight school costs if you have two students we reimburse 65% of your flight school costs for the two students if you have three students we reimburse the three students if you're considered to be a champion just let me know that you want to be and we'll make sure that your flights donations you count it and 5% of it goes right back to you all we have to do is put it on the webpage for big give and you're done that's it you're not giving anything it's whatever your members give to big give and then that we take 5% of that that's all you're doing is encouraging your flight to give on behalf of the Dodalians now it's going to be more somber we're going to go to the honors to those that the memory of those who passed in 2020 those who flew west to be together thank you all for being here you'll be served here you'll eat your lunch at the same spot or a different spot these are the tables and we'll have our luncheon speaker thank you very much