(A) NEC Annual Meeting Update Summary

Appointment of individuals from each chapter to lead and chair each NEC committee including web design, newsletter, youth, education, convention, asset protection, accounting, senior, women, kids, by-laws, fundraising/charity, and advisory and ekta committees is almost complete. Highlights from some of the committees can be found below: 

• Youth Committee - Committee is in final part of formation including mission definition. Youth activities will be announced soon and activities at the local level have already started such as the DC Youth's volunteer effort at Karma Kitchen DC.
• Education Committee - A draft version of guidelines were created and reviewed. Discussion about a scholarship program took place as well as an academic achievement award program.
• Women's Forum, Senior and Kids Committees - Schedule of activities are being finalized along with committee guidelines and committee member participation from each of the local chapters.
• Newsletter Committee - This newly created committee has started off the year with great success creating and launching the first ever SPCS Newsletter. The newsletter serves to provide all members with updates at all levels - this way you know what is happening at the national level, your local chapter and you get to see what other local chapters are doing. We congratulate the Newsletter Committee on this success and look forward to future issues of the newsletter. For a PDF version of the current newsletter, please click here.
• There was discussion to potentially combine the Advisory and Ekta committees as well as the Youth and Youth Connection committees. A decision will be made soon. 
   

(B) 2012 Convention Update

The 2009 5th International SPCS Convention was a tremendous success and we can only expect that same of the 2012 6th International SPCS Convention which will be held in Georgia for 3 full days and nights of activities from July 5 – 7th, 2012. The convention committee has been working diligently and putting in the many hours required to plan, organize, and execute such a large event. The committee is working to ensure it will be a fun filled convention with fantastic food, exciting entertainment, insightful information sessions, and speeches-presentations from inspirational key note speakers, panelists and other esteemed guests. They have finalized the venuefor the convention and each sub-committee is making significant progress in each of their areas. Check back here soon for a more detailed update. We are looking forward to seeing all of you there next summer! 

2012 Convention committee has utilized latest technology and created a convention specific web site. Please click here to launch 2012 convention web site.
 

We understand that a refresh our SPCS website has been long overdue, however we are pleased to announce that we have organized a new committee that is actively working on this project. We are currently in the process of finalizing our requirements and will be working with a professional web firm to redesign our national site and hope to work with our local chapters to extend the redesign at the chapter level. If you want to participate in the process from either a design, technical, content or social media perspective, please contact Amit Dungarani at amit.dungarani@gmail.com. This is a good way for some of you younger folks to get great experience for your resume while volunteering your time to supporting our wonderful samaj!

(D) Message from the President

The below is an excerpt from NEC President Rameshbhai Suhagia to the entire Samaj in the latest newsletter. The entire message can be found in the newsletters that have been mailed out to each of you and a PDF version can be obtained by clicking here.

My Fellow SPCS Members:
It is a great honor and privilege for me to serve the Samaj in this capacity and thus wanted to thank all of you for this incredible opportunity. On behalf of the entire SPCS Samaj, I also wanted to express my sincere appreciation and gratitude for their hard work over the last few years and the tremendous success of the SPCS 5th International Convention held in Richmond, Virginia. I am confident our new committee can follow in their footsteps to provide the same great leadership and support to all of you.

As president, it is my responsibility to share a vision with our Samaj so that we may advance ourselves and better meet our organizational goals and objectives. At one of our most recent meetings, we had close to 20 individuals comprises of members from the SPCS Board of Trustees, National Executive Committee and various Local Executive Committees. At this meeting we discussed four primary goals, at great length, and set relevant tasks and committees to help us make further progress as the NEC committees administration gets under way. These goals include:

1. Motivating and Preserving the Indian, with an emphasis on Saurashtra, Culture and Heritage through local and national events.
2. Exchanging ideas between our American and Indian cultures to build a stronger bridge between generations
3. Promoting Educational and Philanthropic Activities
4. Building strong unity among the SAMAJ
 

Of these four goals, I wanted to make special mention of the last one. I am strong believer in staying united - no matter what we do.

Unity (Samp) is a key for success of any social, religious, community, and business organization. We all know the power of unity. Just to emphasize, by example if we want to clean one room with one stick of a savarani (broom) it will take forever or will be impossible, but if we tie hundreds of sticks together and make one savarani (broom), than we can clean a room in minutes. With the same principal, it will be totally impossible to run Samaj by one person but will be piece of cake if we all stay united like savarani (broom) steak and work together. We as a leading volunteers of our Samaj it should be our prime goal to maintain and improve our unity and every things else will follow. No activity should be done at cost of Unity.
Main components that help to improve and maintain the unity:

1. Positive Thinking: A positive mind anticipates happiness, joy, health and a successful outcome of every situation and action. Negative thoughts, words and attitude bring up negative and unhappy moods and actions. When the mind is negative, poisons are released into the blood, which cause more unhappiness. For sake of maintaining SAMAJ unity, we all should think positive when time comes to join in Samaj activity, to express personal opinion, thoughts, and feeling about any action, act, or expression by any volunteers or members working for Samaj's betterment.

2. Communication: Communication is a key for keeping up with unity and team work.

3. Encouragement: Encouragement is another tool for maintaining unity. It is very important for us to at least encourage and praise those who are working for Samaj's betterment on their own time. Will help to maintain and increase unity.

Atom Bomb that destroys Unity:

Ego is an Atom Bomb that can destroy Unity at the root level.  Ego= "I am something", "I know everything", "How you can do without asking me", "I will see how you can get it done without my help", "Why I should be here if you do not want to take my opinion",  "I am very busy to answer", "How you can tell me like this", in short any sentence having" I, Me, and My ( Hoo, Me, Maru)" world  is the egoistic sentence and will definitely (101%) lead to destroy unity. Our scripture quoted that "Ego is root of jealous, jealous is root of anger, anger is root of negative thoughts and negative thoughts are root of unity distortion and unhappiness.

At the end we all should pray God to give us strength to dilute our ego, to think always positive, to communicate as needed, to encourage who working for Samaj, to stay calm in any circumstances, to respect everybody, to trust our volunteers, and ultimately stay united, work together to achieve our SPCS goal as written in by-laws.

Thank you all and appreciate for giving me this opportunity to serve our Samaj. Your co-operation and help will be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely and God Bless All of Us,
Ramesh S. Suhagia
Apano Sevak

Founded in 1980, Saurashtra Patel Cultural Samaj of USA has been actively involved in preserving and promoting the history, culture and values of Patel society.