Maine Elks Association

Public Relations Committee Newsbriefs -04/24/08

Maine Elks Association Newsbriefs

New Officers at Sanford Elks Lodge



Back L-R, Riley Greenwood - Chaplain, Roger Normandeau, Trustee, Michelle Hulker
Tiler, Richard Simpson - Trustee, Ashley Baker, Inner Guard, David Pray, Treasurer
Front L-R: Jordan Landry-Esquire, John Caron-Leading Knight, Carol Spellmen-Exalted Ruler
Peter Baker-Loyal Knight, Christine Baker-Lecturing Knight.

Maine Elks Ritual Team Readies for PER Contest

The Maine Elks Association Ritual Team has been practicing, and is readying itself for the Area 1 Interstate Relations Past Exalted Ruler Ritual Contest to be held at the Nashua Elks Lodge, in Nashua, New Hampshire on April 27, 2008. Past Exalted Ruler’s from several states in Area 1, which include New England and New York will be vying for the top spot of Area 1 PER Ritual Champions.

Last year, the Maine Elks Association team won at Danielson, Connecticut. This year, they will continue their quest for retiring a third trophy after three consecutive wins. This year, the team is dedicating its efforts to retiring MEA Ritualistic Committee Director Phil O’Brion.

The team consists of:

Grand Lodge Releases New Chicago Lodge Membership System

The Grand Lodge has been beta testing its new Chicago Lodge Membership System over the past few months. Using input from over 250 Elk Lodges, the new program has received excellent reviews, and has now been released to the Lodges to maintain their membership data. The program called CLMS is available through a download via the Secretary’s section of the Website. There is no cost to the Lodges for this program.

The program, formerly called Yuma 6 was donated to Grand Lodge at the 2007 Convention, and has been updated and tweaked for maximum performance. Though some problems may still exist, Grand Lodge will continue to work on those to improve services to the Lodge Secretaries.  If you do not have Yuma 6, you will need to enter all the data manually into the new program.

Each State has a coordinator to answer questions, and to assist Secretaries with getting acquainted with the new program. Our coordinator will be Roger Sicard. He can be reached at rjsicard@maine.rr.com

Grand Lodge anticipates that all of our Lodges will want to take advantage of the Grand Lodge sponsored program since there is no cost to the Lodge for the software purchase, upgrades or maintenance support and CLMS is the only Lodge Membership software that integrates with the Grand Lodge databases in Chicago. The expectation is that this will greatly reduce the workload of Lodge Secretary’s over time, improve accuracy and simplify record keeping at the Lodge and at Headquarters.

If you have news or information of interest to the members of the Maine Elks Association, please send your articles to Public Relations Director Wayne Cotterly at meapr@fairpoint.net for inclusion in the MEA Calendar, Newsbriefs, and/or Website. Also, if you would like to be removed from this mailing list, please send an e-mail to Public Relations Director Wayne Cotterly at meapr@fairpoint.net. In addition, if you know of someone who would like to be added to this list, please have them forward their e-mail address to the same address. All information provided has been read and approved by the MEA State President