A Message from the President, Board of Directors
Welcome to the Annual Meeting
of Project Independence - 2012

Let me start off my report for this year by expressing my sincerest thanks to three very important groups of people; all of which have contributed to the tremendous success that Project Independence has seen over the past year.  I am talking about PI's employees, PI's volunteers and the community that PI serves.  

First, PI's employees -  Rarely have I had the experience or the joy of working with a more dedicated or hard-working group of people.  From my perspective, Dee and Linda have a very enviable job of managing a group of employees that come to work each day prepared for whatever the day holds in store for them, perform their work with a very high level of expertise and care and go to extraordinary means to help to ensure that the many needs of our participants are met (and many times exceeded) throughout each and every day.  The fact that they all seem to enjoy their work is an added benefit for all of them and for our participants.  Thanks to them, PI is a verysafe andfun place to be for everyone!

Next, PI's volunteers -  Each day the staff's efforts are enhanced significantly by a small group of very dedicated people that ask for nothing more than to be able help make PI a better place and to freely offer their time to make that happen.  These volunteers fall into two groups, although the groups are not mutually exclusive of each other.  The first group consists of the folks that come during the day to help the staff take care of our participants.  Some of these volunteers come several days a week and there are a few that could almost call their volunteering a full-time job.  Without the help of these folks, the staff's job would be much more difficult and our participants would be much less happy.  I am grateful for the time and effort that these volunteers expend on PI's behalf.  The second group of volunteers, of course, is the small group of folks that make up the PI Board.  Although they only meet once a month, I can assure you that they think about PI much more often than that.  The last several years have presented the organization with many opportunities and challenges that required the Board to make many difficult decisions in order to help keep the organization on task and financially secure.  I sincerely appreciate both the time that they provide to PI and also the seriousness and creativity with which the Board has faced these difficulties and challenges over the past year.  As I said above, these two groups of volunteers were not really all that separate from each other; this is due to the fact that some of our PI Board members also volunteer at PI during the day.  I take my hat off twice to those folks; thanking them for both their incredible dedication and for their invaluable help.

Finally, PI's community -  The actual “players” in this broad-based group are much harder to define and/or identify and, in fact, some of them change from one year to the next.  This group consists of our donors of both money and in-kind services, people with talents and skills that help entertain its participants during the year, people and organizations that provide indirect support to PI through their assistance in integrating it into the greater Central Vermont community and, of course, all of PI's vendors.  All of these people and organizations have made significant contributions to the success of PI over the last year and we thank them for their contributions.  There is, however, one individual in this group that deserves special mention and thanks; Ken Randall and his company Randall Construction.  As many of you also know, Ken and his company played a critical role in getting our current building (the “PI Palace”) ready for us to move into.  In May of this year, when downtown Barre flooded, Ken and his company (along with many from PI) worked tirelessly to get PI back on its feet after PI's basement nearly filled with water.  The result of this amazing effort was only 2 days of downtime for an organization that makes all of its money from being open to its participants. Without Ken's help and the hard work of PI's employees, such an event would have likely meant financial disaster and possibly collapse.  In the very near future we will once again turn to Ken and his company to help us “repurpose” the main floor of the PI building to accommodate the retirement of the basement as a part of our everyday living and storage space.  While there is never a good time to take on the expense and disruption of this type and scope of construction, the rearrangement of our main floor to provide additional office and stage space is critical to the long-term health of the PI organization.  There is little doubt that the basement will continue to have water problems over time and we will need to ensure that those problems cannot create the disruptive and expensive problems that they have previously.  Ken's excellent skills and judgment will, again, be invaluable in ensuring that PI receives the most benefit from this work for the lowest cost possible.

At the risk of sounding repetitive each year, I will say again what a great honor and privilege it truly is for me to serve on PI's Board and as its President.  I hope that you will join me in thanking the groups of people I mention above and along with them, look forward to all of the successes that the coming year will, no doubt, bring to this amazingly vital organization.

Respectfully submitted,

Steve Koenemann
President, Project Independence Board of Directors

Project Independence will be conducting our Capital Campaign for two years.  Our goal is to retire our debt of $570,000.  So far we have raised $ 47,000.00.  We have a long way to go and we remain hopeful.