It’s once again time for our Annual General Meeting to inform our members about the health of the club, an update on current activities and our future plans. For #ThrowbackThursday, here’s look at our AGM and Pub Quiz from 2017.

18 May 2017. Review by Anne van Oorschot If you missed TIC’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) on 18 May 2017 at the Grand Café Esplanade on the grounds of Tilburg University, you missed a great time! A great time at an AGM? Yes, you read correctly!

We had a nice turnout and, after a welcome introduction to our members and guests, we began the evening as we do every year, with a short presentation over the club and how we are performing.

tíc is doing well and we can look back on a very successful year full of many fun and interesting activities, with attendance being up from last year. With the Event Director position vacant for most of the year, the remaining Board members have shared the event planning and hosting duties which has been a challenge at times. We are thrilled that Andrew Kelly stepped forward to fill this position and we look forward to having him on the Board.

All board members are still in term, so no need for a vote but our treasurer, Emerald Busser, has vacated her position and we are in search of a replacement.  Due to her departure, we do not have an updated financial overview to present this evening. We will communicate that to our members at a later date.

Anne van Oorschot, Secretary/Membership, gave an update on the club’s membership. While we have lost some members, we have gained 9 new members this year, bringing our total to 31, up slightly from last year. While that may not seem like many, when adding in member’s partners and children – who are also TIC members! – the total number of expats we serve as a club is 66. We have 20 different nationalities in TIC so we are truly an international club! The vast majority of our members work full time and while Tilburg University is the employer for about a third of our members, the remaining members are employed by a variety of companies, or self-employed.

Mala Raman, Communications and Outreach, has worked hard this past year to increase our online visibility. With a big increase in postings on our website, the number of hits we have gotten has greatly increased! Mala is active on the TIC Facebook and Twitter accounts and we recently added an Instagram account to make our club activities more visible and easier for expats to find. We continue to have partnerships with Sligro, Holland Expat Center South and P&D Care, and have added Theaters Tilburg to our list of partners to improve the expat experience of our members.

Mala also reported on the activities we have organized in the past year – a whopping 34 events – up from 26 events last year! Member Coree Forman has breathed new life into our monthly borrels, and TICMovie group has met more frequently as well. The TIC Book Club continues to have a strong and consistent membership and will have met 8 times by the summer. We visited 2 sporting events this year – the
DESTIL Trappers ice hockey, and Willem II soccer and both teams won specially for TIC!? 😉 We have a number of annual events – Sinterklaas party, Annual Christmas Cookie Workshop, Annual Holiday Dinner and the TICnic – and many new outings and events, such as our visit to a cheese farm, a chocolate making workshop, a ballet performance and a lecture on the Dutch Parliamentary election, to name a few. Next year will mark TIC’s 10th Anniversary and we have already started planning some great events for the new club year. We closed with an encouragement for members to let us know what they’d like to do – after all, it’s YOUR club.

Then came the fun part! Three teams battled it out in the chance to be crowned the Winners of The Pub Quiz.

Presented by Andrew Kelly, the questions were challenging and informative, complete with drinks, and snacks. Questions flew over 4 rounds of play. What a drama!! We had bartering for partial points, we had contesting of the answers (even though they were right there in black and white), we had debating amongst the teams and we had to do all this without looking at our phones for help! In the end, after much laughter, eating and drinking, a winning team emerged and went home with gift certificates from Intermezzo, while the Losers of the Pub Quiz went home with a “beautiful” magnet.

#TilburgInternationalClub #expatlife #TBT #AGM #PubQuiz #members