Home

A message from our President,
Barb Angus

I am honoured to have been elected as your president for the upcoming biennium. And I am very, very happy to be working with such a great slate of officers.
First, I want to thank all the DKG presidents who have gone before me. Together you have brought us across sixty years to become the very professional society of educators we are today. I especially want to thank our outgoing president, Bev Townsend, for all her work in our last biennium. Bev has significantly, and almost single-handedly, increased our membership; she has focused on professional practice and obtaining funding for classroom projects; and she has brought us a full year of sixtieth anniversary celebrations. Celebrate the past, enrich the present, ensure the future. That was Bev's vision for her biennium and she completed it in spades.
We changed the name of our society this biennium from Delta Kappa Gamma Province Quebec to a simpler, more modern DKG Quebec. When Dr. Mildred Burns heard about the name change, she reached me by phone, very pleased and very excited. DKG Quebec, she said. D- K- G. Dare to Kindle Growth. Mildred’s words are perfect. Today I take them as my vision statement for the new biennium, a vision on which I will build in order to honour Mildred, my DKG sponsor, and her ongoing contributions to DKG Quebec.
Bev grew our numbers. Now we need to grow our leadership. Today I urge all of you to step outside your comfort zone and take on a leadership role, however minor that may be. Becoming president is not in my comfort zone - I am normally a back-ground person; my career was as an educational consultant, not a school administrator. With your support, I now challenge myself to develop new skills over the next two years. Tara and Sylvie have also taken major steps in DKG leadership by accepting an executive position despite their busy working lives. But we still have one more key position to fill, that of 1st Vice President. This position is the stepping stone for our next president in 2019. Who will dare to kindle her growth for that key role?
You don’t have to join the executive to kindle your growth, however. You might simply join one of our committees, or become the chair of a committee. Or you might develop a classroom project and submit an application for funding. You might even go on to write up your project and submit it to the Gamma Gamut or to one of the DKG International professional journals. Or prepare a presentation of your work for your DKG sisters at one of our evening programs.
The success of any organization does not lie with the executive but with the membership. Each of us has unique skills, talents and abilities. It is when these resources are combined that we are best able to kindle growth. I ask all of you to join together to give DKG your best so that we will become the best we can be.
I leave you with the words of the poet Everett Hale: “I am only one but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can.”