Last week, I attended the Annual TU Meeting in Bend, Oregon.  This meeting features a large collection of the NTU staff, along with volunteer leaders at all levels of the organization from across the country in one place.  Opportunities for collaboration and exploration across states and regions abound, and it has become a valuable platform to learn and gain experience from others. Of course, it would be hard to adequately summarize the entire 3-day meeting, so I thought that I might hit some of the highlights.  Certainly, if there are questions about anything specific, you can email me at Sinjin.Eberle@coloradotu.org for more information.  Here we go…

1)     West Denver TU Wins Silver Trout Award – The West Denver Chapter was awarded one of the highest chapter awards in TU.  They are very deserving of this honor for their broad based, steady, and consistent approach to all aspects of being a TU chapter.  They run a strong youth program, are consistently reaching out to new members, have done phase after phase of restoration work on their home streams, and are engaged in various aspects surrounding impacts from the I-70 corridor.  Congratulations!

2)     New National TU Community Website – while it is still in the testing phase, National TU has come a long way in developing a community-oriented website.  Most importantly, the new website will feature pre-built chapter templates that, for free, chapters can use as the basis for developing their own site.  There are many advantages to this – especially the integration of chapter activities being highlighted by NTU, as well as NTU news feeds streaming into the chapter websites.  I think you will be excited about the new toys as they become available (in the next couple of months)

3)     Upper Colorado Makes National Conservation Agenda – the National Leadership Council sets a list of National Priorities every year – and this year the Upper Colorado work has made that agenda.  This is great as we will be able to get increased focus on Colorado’s top priority issue.

4)     Youth Education Programs get more defined – The National TU Youth folks are building out their suite of youth education offerings, and in a pretty smart way, I might add.  They are building programs to ensure that they have youth-ed coverage for all ages, from the very young through college-age persons.  More to come on this as these programs are rolled out!

5)     Annual Financial Reports and Chapter By-Laws– STRONG REMINDER from National that ALL chapters must submit their Annual Financial Reports by November 15, 2011 – this is REQUIRED of all chapters and there are strong penalties for not doing so.  Also, this year is the year for updating chapter bylaws – please be working on your new chapter by-laws and have them uploaded to the National TU website by December 31, 2011!!  We need to have 100% compliance on this.  Help is available for this on the National TU website, in the Toolbox in the Leaders Only section.  Please contact Dennis Cook (rkymtnangler@q.com) or I if you need help on these!