The Newsletter
N EW E N G LA N D
President’s Letter
Fall Issue 2010
Hello IFDA Friends, WOW, what a wonderful event we had recently at Delia Kitchens, the Viking Center, in Westwood. A stunning venue for our vendor tables, everyone felt right at home because we were always in a kitchen, where everyone always likes to gather. We had nearly 90 members attend, both vendors and designers. The networking was so intense that we had to remind people to eat dinner! The 2nd Annual Designer Showcase was a huge success with Design New England once again being our media sponsor. Thank you, Steve Twombly and Gail Ravgiala for your assistance and many thanks to our own member, JoAnne DiFrancesco from JD Communications for promoting and organizing the showcase. Congratulations to our winners: Beverly Rivkind, her second award in as many Sue Adams years for the Dining Room category, Shirin Tahsili for Kitchen design, Karen Dzendolet and Thom Glynn for Living Space and Deborah Farrand for Specialty Space. Christine Kay won the Community Service Award for her work with the Ronald McDonald House. Good job everyone. You can see their winning entries in the November/December issue of Design New England. If you didn’t attend the Member Dinner at Delia then you should be sure not to miss the upcoming annual Holiday Party. This year it will be on Wednesday evening, December 8th at the Union Club on Park St., across from the Boston Common. You cannot imagine a more quintessential Boston location during the holiday season than this lovely old mansion. Lots of Holiday spirit abounds with our annual awards, the Angel Tree contributions and good food and friends. Stay tuned for the invitation in the mail. I recently returned from a trip to Philadelphia, headquarters for IFDA. Jacqui Becker, our President-Elect and I represented the New England Chapter at the annual Presidents Meeting. We quickly came to realize what a dynamic chapter we have and how important we are to the wellbeing of all IFDA members. There are 16 chapters, ours being the largest. We represent 17% of the IFDA membership world-wide. We have a well-balanced membership of vendors and designers unlike other chapters who are heavily weighted to one end of the spectrum. Our programming is very varied and has had some tremendous successes this year. We again had one of the most successful Walks for Education and raised $3,000.00 for the IFDA/Education Foundation, which awards the most grants and scholarships in our design industry. The IFDA National Symposium is going to be held in September 2011 in Philadelphia at the Hotel Sofitel. They have planned an amazing array of nationally recognized speakers and programs that will benefit all of us small business people. The Philadelphia Chapter has planned for a culturally enriched, unique opportunity for us to tour some of the sites that are not otherwise viewed by the public. It pays to know people in the right places! Mark your calendar for September 15-18, 2011 in Philadelphia. The Social Hotel Sofitel Philadelphia has luxury accommodations, so plan to treat yourself to a Networking special few days. During the last few months I have watched the programming of IFDA events get sandwiched between other industry happenings and our scheduling get increasingly harder because of conflicts with both national and regional design dates such as High Point or Neocon. I have also had several members express frustration with the national website, www.ifda.com, and its inability to supply a New England Chapter membership list to use for mailings. A downloadable, easily accessible list of the New England Chapter members was not available on the national website. I felt it was important to the chapter to have a user-friendly web site. These two areas of concern (continued on page 2)
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