Over 40 WBFN members met on May 13 in the World Bank J Building auditorium to hold this year’s Annual Meeting.  The gathering included most heads of activities and some twenty of them addressed the audience and reported on the highlights of the year. 
Together we reminisced on the increasingly successful efforts of the welcoming team, the joyful atmosphere that underscored the picnic in October, the Holiday Party in December and the Children’s Art Competition in April, and the positive energy that motivated all the volunteers during the three days of our Annual Exhibit in the Atrium in April.
Then, the respective presidents of the Book Project and the Margaret McNamara Memorial Fund reviewed their achievements for the year:  2 large shipments of books to Malawi and Tanzania and 2 small shipments to schools in India and Philippines, and 14 scholarships awarded to brilliant women from developing countries.
We were then told that the Information Seminars program is going on strong, the Investment Club had an eventful year but managed to stay the course, the Teen Summer Program is well-poised for a fifth session starting at the end of June, and the Spouse Issues team has successfully completed the year with a new team after the departure of two long-term memebrs.
English language classes and financial literacy classes still attract a lot of participants.  we have been fine tuning our new member management system, launched at the end of last fiscal year and which merged three of our databases into an improved one. 

Looking ahead, WBFN will carry on with increasing its collaboration with the family associations of other international organizations.  It will maintain as well its close relationship with Global Mobility and with the HR Service Center.  As for our Members Abroad activities, now that our databases have been unified and improved, we hope to resume our support for them more actively.

To carry on the work of WBFN next year, the new members of the Executive Committee were introduced to those at the meeting.  In accordance with the by-laws, their biographies had been published one month earlier.  The audience voted unanimously to vote them in.
Our best wishes to them to carry on WBFN’s mission for the next twelve months.