UPIEAA Holds 2015 General Membership Meeting

UPIEAA held the 2015 General Membership Meeting last October 21 at the Cardona Room, Valle Verde Country Club, which had been earlier announced via the UPIEAA.ORG website and Facebook page, in addition to direct e-mail blast. Directors in attendance included: Bing del Rosario, Benjie Mirasol, Eugene Gonzales, Liza Ting, Marton Banson, Kevin Hartigan-Go, Ting Joson, Kenny Bulahan, and ex-officio and immediate past president Elise del Rosario. Regular non-board members who came included: Wins Mirasol, Rowena Cortez, Tito Alejo and Malou Esguerra.

Bing del Rosario gave the President’s Annual Report. He informed the non-board members that in the past 12 months, the board:

• Prepared the UPIEAA annual report for Ingenium 2014 last October, 2014.

• Revisited and restated the UPIEAA mission, resulting in a much clearer statement of direction and priorities

• Continued to regularly updating the UPIEAA website – upieaa.org – with new content in order to create the “sense of community” as reaffirmed in the mission. Among other things, we featured Jeng Pascual who has just been awarded FINEX CFO of the Year; appointment of UPIEAA board director Bess Yap to DPWH Assistant Secretary; UPIEAA luminaries’ involvement in the IE Club’s IEngage school year-ending event; profiling distinguished alumni Pong Ejercito who had recently transitioned from Unilever to SM; etc.

• Liaised with UP IE Club and CIEM, the two IE student organizations. This  included sharing of alumni databases, since the two student orgs had historically poor records of “old” alumni, i.e., 70s to early 90s; posting regular columns of IE Club and CIEM at the UPIEAA web site; funding for more expensive student org programs, such as for the grad ball; providing distinguished alumni for speaking events as well as hooking them up to potential event sponsors (done for IE Club’s IEngage); providing alumni names they could honor during their foundation days (done for CIEM’s anniversary bash), etc.

• Assisted Professor Mitchay Pacia find company clients for the terminal IE 155 course on Total Systems Design. The board volunteered four sections of DPWH – HR, Procurement, Records Keeping, and Customer Relations, through director Bess Yap – and Toyota Pasong Tamo through President Bing del Rosario.

• Started on the massive task of cleaning and updating the alumni database, including a mail blast to all e-mail addressees on file; integrating the IE Club and CIEM databases; inclusion of Facebook group e-mails; strict implementation of the “one version only” that resided with the secretariat; and start of identification of batch reps to facilitate broadcasts.

• Reviewed the original 2006 by-laws and made large-scale amendments to make it consistent with current practice and clarify gray areas.

• Dealt with bank, SEC, and BIR issues, such as transferring banks, changing signatories, getting out of the blacklist, etc. Bing mentioned that the board will soon register UPDIEORAA which passed the online screening and if there’s a new set of officers different from the old group, he was guardedly optimistic it might get through.

• Donated P70,000 to help defray the flight and hotel costs related to the Bandung, Indonesia competition.

• Initiated research into costings of “soft infra” items – tables, chairs, tiles, ACs, LCD projectors, screens, etc. for the almost-finished IE-ME Building along Magsaysay Avenue.

• Assisted the IE reps to the ESC organize the IE Graduation Ball, held last June 26, 2015, and donated P30,000 so it could be held at Celebrity Sports Plaza.

• Conducted – through outgoing board director Drake Lopez – the Behavioral Competencies (RCTLCL) Workshop for graduating students, held last August 24, 2015.

• Formulated the fund-raising strategy, identified target beneficiaries and donation amounts for Training & Research Grants as well as student financial assistance. But before this could be finalized, the board took a step back and decided to embed this into a larger “awareness and public relations” campaign. Videos, website posts, and mail blasts will accompany the formal launch late in the year.

• Identified the UPIEAA nominee – Mr. Jose Jerome “Jeng” Pascual of Shell Phils. Exploration – for UPAE’s IE departmental awardee for the 2015 homecoming, and beyond that, lined up possible candidates for 2016 to 2018.

• Conducted the Annual Membership Meeting tonight, October 21, 2015, as prescribed in the amended by-laws.

• Prepared a State of the UPIE Alumni Association annual report for Ingenium 2015.

On behalf of Treasurer Eugene Gonzales, Assistant Treasurer Elise del Rosario presented the Treasurer’s financial report. To summarize, we started the calendar year Jan. 1, 2015 with P589K in the bank and as of September 30, we only have P482K. This does not count the P20K we’re still expecting from Shell Philippines Exploration that was pledged for the Graduation Ball. Nor does it include the P120K we had committed to the UPAE for 66 raffle tickets to next year’s grand raffle draw. We can recover most of this cost if we can sell most of the tickets as soon as possible.
Bing then presented the specific amendments to the by-laws. These included – definition of “members”; treatment of UPLB IE grads; members’ rights and privileges (missing from all previous versions); date of AMMs; number of trustees on the board; how many directors get elected when; term limits and years per term; nominations to the board; start of fiscal year; specified only President, VP, Treasurer, and Secretary (who is always the department chair) and other roles optional depending on board preferences; homecoming specified for even years; voting; dates of monthly board meetings. The amended by-laws was approved by the membership.

B. del Rosario opened the floor for nominations to fill the seats to be vacated by Eugene Gonzales, Ting Joson (both completing two successive terms), Marton Banson, Kevin Hartigan-Go (both completing their first two-year term), and Drake Lopez (resigning after the first year of his second term).

• Kevin expressed his desire not to be renominated for a second term since he’s had a difficult time attending the board meetings and contributing, given his workload. Marton accepted a renomination for a second term.

• Lourdes Esguerra and Tito Alejo were nominated and accepted the nominations.

• Liza Ting nominated Edwin Reyes and Jop Yap, with the assurance that she had already talked to the two individuals and they had agreed to be nominated and to serve if elected. With the number of nominations equal to the seats to be filled, the body agreed to close the nominations and with a simple show of hands, all those nominated were elected.

Bing del Rosario was reelected as UPIEAA president, Benjie Mirasol was reelected Vice President, and Liza Ting was voted to be Treasurer. Lowell Lorenzo, IEOR Department chair, remains, as per by-laws, the UPIEAA secretary.

The membership decided to do an informal self-introduction before adjournment, which was missed at the start since the members arrived at different times. With nothing further to discuss, the annual membership meeting was declared adjourned at 9:30 pm.