Published in the January 6 – 19, 2016 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Kathy Sullivan
Kathy Sullivan
I am usually terrible about keeping my New Year’s resolutions. They disappear faster than days off from work. This year will be different because I will not be alone. The Morgan Hill Downtown Association board members helped form some dynamic new resolutions for how our organization can better provide membership value.
We met at Mama Mia’s for our annual retreat. Besides eating delicious food, we assessed what we were doing right. These included our popular events in 2015 such as Wine Stroll, Beer Crawl, Off the Menu, Staycation, Safe Trick or Treat and the installation and decorating of the beautiful Holiday Tree we are enjoying in front of the Community and Cultural Center.
The harder part was looking at areas where we need improvement. The phrase “What we have here is a failure to communicate” from the film “Cool Hand Luke” came to mind. We began to understand we needed to increase talking with our membership to find out what are important goals for them. We also realized we had done a poor job on promoting our organization. Many of our most successful services have been mistakenly credited to other organizations. We all agreed we could improve our communication. Improving our website and starting a new membership database are proposals of how to improve the technical aspects of MHDA.
Face-to-face discussions with existing and future members will take top priority in the New Year. We will be seeking out their input on how we can best serve them and what their needs are.
We highlight different members at each board meeting with invitations for them to tell their story. Another priority is to improve how we get information about the many changes and happenings of out to the community, as well as making sure our membership has the latest news.
We added three new board members, who are all downtown business owners, to help our new goals reach fruition. Brad Ledwith is a certified financial planner and former president of the Rotary Club of Morgan Hill. An active father of four, he recently bought property for his business in the downtown. Julia Wolfsmith and her husband have co-ownership of Wolfpak, a fitness training center. Nineteen years ago she invested in downtown by building the location of her present beauty salon, Dezign. Dustin Evanger is the proprietor of The Hill Bar & Grill. This chef and his wife recently moved to Morgan Hill.
These talented volunteers, along with the continued leadership of Cheri Devlin as our president and John McKay as our new vice-president, will help keep us on task.
With all the exciting changes going downtown in the next year, we cannot afford to let go of any of MHDA’s resolutions for the New Year.
Kathy Sullivan is a board member of the Morgan Hill Downtown Association. She wrote this column for Morgan Hill Life.
