• The Mentor Program was launched to pair successful, talented members with our young adults to give them a leg up on their careers. To date, we have 21 mentors and 20 mentees on our roster. I urge all of you to visit our website, www.pancretan.org, and sign up for this important program. Under the leadership of Angela Katzakis, I know that this program will continue to grow over the coming months and years and greatly enrich the future of our members— young and old. • The Minoan Village is a project near and dear to all of us, looking to provide a home away from home for our families and for generations to come. With the appointment of a marketing manager, Ms. Renee Copeland, along with changes in how we structure purchase plans, we can visualize this dream becoming a reality more and more with every passing day. • Our Archives: With Erasmia Novotny at the helm, important documents, letters, photographs and memorabilia of our organization have been collected, organized and digitized. You can go online and search for stories and names from our KPHTH magazine going back almost to its inception. • We have also documented the decisions and resolutions passed at conventions for the past 50 years. Our Strategic Planning Chair, Helen Ranney, compiled this information and has cross-referenced it by convention, board member and subject matter. • Ms. Ranney has also gone back and researched financial records of the PAA to identify and quantify the support we have received from generous donors over the years. This has been a very long and tedious task and one that I thought could not have been accomplished. We thank Helen for the incredible amount of time and her patience in accomplishing this major task for our organization! • Our 2nd Vice President, Stavros Antonakakis, in the two short years he has overseen the publication of KPHTH magazine, has had outstanding success with the Holiday issue. He has interviewed and hired a new publishing team, and has managed to get the magazine back on track timing-wise, while improving its overall quality. I also would like to extend my appreciation to the Editorial Board—Helene Semanderes, Rema Manousakis, Zaharoula Marmatakis, Tina Katsounakis, Helen Ranney and General Secretary Erasmia Novotny—for their commitment to producing a first rate product, with special thanks to Helene Semanderes for championing the holiday issues. And thank you to all of you for supporting the magazine with your ads every year. That effort keeps us above
8 KPHTH | July/august 2013
water and allows us to share our news and culture with all members. • With our 3rd Vice President, Niko Verikakis, we boast the start-up of a new chapter called Therisso of East Bay, Calif. We welcome them and look forward to working with them to continue to increase their membership. • The Cretan Alumni Network has served to bridge former youth and adult members with today’s organization. CAN Chair Diane Kounalakis created events across the country to bring together “lost” or inactive members and spark their renewed interest in the PAA. She recently launched the Cretan Alumni Directory, which will further serve to build this network and ultimately increase our membership. • We can and should take pride in our youth. Their commitment to the PAA is reflected in the participation of the youth chapters in their national conferences, and in their support of many philanthropic efforts. The most recent and very successful PYA Clothes Drive sent a co ntainer of clothes and toys to Crete just last month and it will be distributed this summer. PYA President Chris Marangoudakis and our Youth Supervisors Xanthippi Gelasakis and Mike Detorakis have worked to cultivate a sense of belonging with our youth and to position them to be our leaders of tomorrow. • Our Women’s Executive Director has raised the bar one more time in the very important role of representing the women’s chapters of our organization. Mrs. Maria Stratoudakis visited all of the chapters, completed new initiatives and supported all their programs. We could have not had any of our accomplishments without her. • Hopefully, our grants of over 70 scholarships have helped our youth with their continuing education. It’s an important resource for our youth. I encourage them to also strongly consider furthering their studies in Crete. We have scholarships and programs available to assist them. Please take advantage of this great opportunity. With continued funding and the growth of our endowments, we hope to be able to raise the amounts of our scholarships we grant as well as increase the number of students who receive them. • Our organization is financially strong, as it was setup correctly from years ago with restricted funds that allow us to grow our funds while at the same time giving us the ability to disperse funds to our programs. Our treasury began at $1,840,000 and is currently at $2,182,000, an increase of approximately $342,000. From that, the investments began at $1,452,000 and