Dear Friends,
I
t is hard to imagine that 7 months passed since we took responsibility of TACAM for this year. Our organization, TACAM, has been a home for many of us for years. As the new board of directors, we have worked very hard to bring new faces and members to TACAM. We certainly believe that we have accomplished many of our goals. We also realize that we have a lot to do.
We have completed numerous successful events, the Father’s Day Picnic, Traditional Turkish Breakfast Day and Victory Day celebration, İftar dinner during Ramadan, the opening of the Turkish school, Republic ball and Yeni Türkü concert. I hope that you attended at least one of these events to support your local organization if not all of them. As you think about the events that you attended, I would like you to remind that board of directors, their families and other volunteers spent hours and days to prepare for these events. We certainly do not expect anything from anyone but a strong attendance for TACAM events. We believe attendance was very good and we hope to increase it for the coming events. We are listening to our members who are open and make constructive criticism to our organization events. They ask us to bring more cultural events, more international events to Michigan. There is no question that this is also our goal. When we plan on these events we know it is going to take a lot of time and effort to make it happen. Our board is willing to spend all the time necessary as long as we have support from our members. Yeni Türkü event is a primary example for this. We needed a strong sponsorship in order to take on this event. After we made personal calls we were able to find enough funds to continue for this event. In order for us to bring more events to Michigan, we need to increase membership to TACAM and have broad sponsorship for the events. We will organize numerous other projects throughout the year in an effort to bring many new faces to TACAM and create strong ties among the all members and non members. There are many people show up in our events that are not member for various reasons. We can not force anyone to become a member however, what we can do is to ask and encourage them to become one. A newer initiative TACAM has taken up is the “Turkish School.” The goal of this program is to create a semi-formal setting where students will feel comfortable and be encouraged to speak Turkish. We plan to have fun activities, games, discussion groups, and perhaps even a Turkish poem reading night, to make this learning experience more enjoyable. We encourage everyone to take advantage of this school and bring their kids and non-Turkish speaking family members. For more information please visit the related section in our web site. For those planning ahead, we will be organizing a New Year dinner and entertainment night for the new year. The New Year dinner will take place at the club house near 12 mile and Telegraph on December 31st. Details will be posted soon. We also plan to have a Turkish Music and Dance night in February. As you can imagine we will also have a Spring Ball planned for April 2007. Dates and places for these events will be posted as soon as they are finalized. As I finish my message here, I would like to encourage all our non-member readers to become a member to our organization. We look forward to having you as a member. We also thank our current members for their continuous support.
President’s Letter
Mehtap Aksoy 2006-2007 TACAM PRESIDENT
Anatolian