ABC Night and Scholarships

By Joelyn Carr-Fingerle

September finds us coming up fast on our biggest event—ABC Night. The committee has done a wonderful job of lining up sponsors. Indeed, we have more than ever, which means we should raise even more money for our scholarship fund. I hope to see many of you at our Giant Networking Event for Attorneys, Bankers (and financial advisors) and CPAs Sept. 29. There will be lots of food, drink and opportunity. Please come and mingle. You never know who you might meet and what opportunity will arise.

The ABC Committee is also considering adding a second networking event in the spring. Would you come? What are your thoughts? Tom Bret and committee members Scott Haislet and Rob Anderson would like to hear your thoughts on expanding ABC Night to include a date in early May, perhaps in the Oakland area.

CalCPA Chair Andrea Cope was at our July meeting and challenged us to each contribute $100 for 100 years of CalCPA to scholarships. We have a good program to identify the students, we just need the money to award them. Please give generously! Soco will gladly accept your checks or you can contribute through the CalCPA website.

ABC Night provides much of the scholarship funding for the chapter and given the increases in tuition this year, scholarships are more necessary than ever. Last year the Accounting Education/Scholarship/Student Outreach Committee had its most applications ever and we awarded seven substantial scholarships to students from UC Berkeley, CSU, East Bay and St Mary’s College. We expect the same response this year. It is not easy to select the best students since there are so many deserving students. There are written applications and then interviews with the most promising students.

Our committee and its chair, Joe Mori, are also working on a mentoring program for students. Please let Joe know if you are interested in mentoring and being a resource for these students. The students are eager to learn and eager to help. You will meet this year’s scholarship recipients at our January meeting.

Another program affecting all of us is our legislative effort. CalCPA has four bills of interest this year, covered in detail in the August issue of California CPA. Please put Wednesday Jan. 20, on your calendar to join us in Sacramento for CPA Day in the Capitol. You will be briefed on the issues facing us in Sacramento, and appointments will be set up for groups of constituents to meet with their legislators to discuss those issues, and you will get to see government in action. It is always an educational day for new and not so new members. Of course learning how laws are made is sometimes a little frustrating, but no more so than understanding the tax code-and we already deal with that in some form or another almost daily, even when not in the tax department.

Our Grassroots Committee is new this year and chair Tom Parry is looking forward to our participation. We encourage all members to come. The Legislature responds to numbers of constituents and the more of us that show up, the more they will listen to us. And if you are worried about speaking to them, the group visit usually has an informal spokesperson that does most of the talking, so if you want to absorb the atmosphere rather than talk, you can. Please put the date on your calendar now.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 12:18 pm and is filed under President's Message. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.