Hello Family, I am sorry that I was unable to attend the Regional Meeting this month. Oscar and I attended the Western States Zonal forum in July. As reported earlier, our meeting this year was going to be focused on performing an inventory and looking at where we are and where we see the Zone heading in the future. With the invaluable help of world board member Mary B. and NAWS staff member Steve R. we spent the entire day saturday beginning our work on this task. There was a unanimous concensus among the delegate that we do not want to lose the sharing that we now conduct at this meeting. But we also want to maybe incorporate training or learning sessions into the weekend as well. We also are going to take a look at moving our meetings to either the month of January or February to accomodate possible CAR sessions on the conference years. We came to somewhat of an impasse when the topic of possible trusted servants that would be elected to the Zone (Chair, Secretary, etc...). The Zone does not have any funding at this time and this posses a problem in how those trusted servants would be able to attend the meeting. So at this point we have assigned several members with the task of creating a draft of a re-written Zonal Purpose. And we defined tasks that are being performed by the Zone presently and assigned members to write procedures. "MORE WILL BE REVEALED.

I also spent some time in conversations with other delegates about some of the challenges we are facing in our region today. It seems that we are not alone and I am looking forward to our early meeting in September to discuss some of these things.

July 31st. was the deadline for input on the new Service Pamphlets. I will keep you posted on the finished products.

I am sorry that I missed our convention but from the people I have talked to it sounds like a success.

As you can see I contacted Mike C. and I can now finally utilize the Regional Website as intended. YAHOO. I am looking forward to this format.

in loving service
michael m. RD