Hei Peter, sorry for the delay but of course I can handle your proxy.

One thing I wanted to bring up is our finances. We have reached the stage now where we are in good shape and don't need to worry every month if we can pay the bills. I had my doubts about removing the membership fee but I'm happy to say that I have been proved wrong. Our auditor Penelope suggested that at the AGM we should make a decision on what to do with our surplus every year. In December we made a contribution to the Ronald McDonald House charity with a portion of our surplus from the raffle, but we still had a surplus for 2009.

I think it would be a good idea to decide at the AGM that if we have a surplus in 2010 it should go to X charity. Personally I would prefer some charity that deals with immigrants or language training or something of the sort. Alternatively we could do it ourselves: for instance, we could provide scholarships to people who want to take the Finnish for Foreigners classes. These are just ideas that I came up with, but I'm interested to hear others.

Now keep in mind that we aren't talking about thousands of euros of surplus each year - it is more like a couple hundred - so the decision should be made carefully to make it worthwhile.

The other option is to increase our expenses, such as more advertising, fancy websites, buying expensive pub quiz prizes or whatever. Personally, I would rather see the surplus go to worthwhile causes than increased spending. Our expenses are high enough, I think. They have increased rather dramatically because of all the free membership cards and mailings we had to do.