Holiday Message 2023
Hello to all our GSAs and partners! We wanted to take this time to wish you a wonderful and joyous holiday season. We hope that you can enjoy time spent with your family and friends. We are looking forward to some quality time with our families as well.
It’s been another successful year for GSA, although we are still slowly but surely recovering from the pandemic. In 2022, GSAs volunteered at 19 welcome centers and 25 events. We acquired 5 new welcome center partners over the course of the year, and we also assisted with some interesting new events. We won’t tally our 2022 hours totals until January, but we are on track to return to volunteer hours amounts that should rival pre-Covid by the end of 2023! THANK YOU to all you have done to help these welcome centers and events. All those double shifts and the extra effort paid off, and certainly did not go unnoticed!
With a focus of re-energizing our partnerships and volunteers, we started off this recovery year with a budgeted $20,000 deficit. Thanks to your generous donations and volunteer efforts to help our organization succeed, we ended the year with only a $5,000 deficit. This achievement bought us one more year to go full bore with two full-time staff. If you remember, Emily and I were both part-time prior to the pandemic. For 2023 we are using the remainder of our Covid Stimulus Money to complete our recovery efforts and rebuild our volunteer numbers. This final step in our phased plan is by far the most critical.
In 2023, we have already lined up a new visitor center in Lebanon – details coming soon. We have our training dates and locations lined up for March, April, and May. Again, we are focusing on recruiting as many GSA volunteers as possible in 2023, so please, please help us out and share the information with your family, friends and club members. Let’s show more NH folks how enriching and fun this organization is! You can access training information on our website and in our newsletter. We have scheduled a couple of informational Zoom sessions to introduce prospective GSAs to our beloved organization in January and February. Visit the For Current GSAs page on our website for details.
We also have many, many, did I mention MANY events on deck! Please stay tuned for more information – keep an eye on the website and the newsletter for more details as we get closer. You can also view our Master Schedule to get the dates of anything confirmed on your calendars. This is located in the newsletter and there is a link on our website.
Granite State Ambassadors are again the expo managers for the NH Farm, Forest & Garden Expo and plans are in full swing for May 5th and 6th, at their new location at the Deerfield Fairgrounds. We will be looking for lots of GSA help as we get closer and for the ramp up if you would like to help with the planning.
We look forward to continuing to work with you all next year.
Wishing you a Happy New Year, and see you in 2023!
