Welcome to the new Board!
Following our General Assembly on Friday 28th August, Blue Shield is delighted to welcome its new Board members.
Professor Peter Stone, former Vice-President, was elected to the position of President.
From the National Committees,
- Kidong Bae, from the Republic of Korea Blue Shield Committee was re-elected
- Hamady Gaye, from the Senegalese Blue Shield Committee, was elected
- Lidia Klupsz, from the Polish Blue Shield Committee, was elected, and
- Klaus Weschenfelder, from the German Blue Shield Committee was elected.
The founding four organisation have nominated the following representatives:
- ICA will be represented by Emilie Gagnet Leumas, Chair of the ICA Expert Group on Emergency Management and Disaster Preparedness
- IFLA will be represented by Gerald Leitner, IFLA’s Secretary General
- ICOM will be represented by Peter Keller, ICOM’s Director-General, and
- ICOMOS will be represented by Bijan Rouhani, Vice President of ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Risk Preparedness (ICORP), and Vice-Chair of the ICOMOS Working Group for Safeguarding of Cultural Heritage in Syria and Iraq.
We are delighted to welcome them to the new Board – you can read more about their backgrounds if you would like to Meet the Board.
The General Assembly
The Blue Shield General Assembly was recorded and is available on the Blue Shield YouTube channel.
In order to allow everyone to hear, Members were asked to put comments and discussion in the Zoom Chat window, which were read out as relevant.
All Chat comments are also available here as a downloadable text file: GMT20200828-122225_Blue-Shield Chat log.
Blue Shield was delighted to welcome more than 40 representatives from its national committees, committees under construction and all of its founding four organisations to its first ever virtual General Assembly. More than 26 countries from around the world were able to attend the online meeting, hosted via Zoom.
The meeting began with a welcome from the outgoing President, Karl von Habsburg. He thanked all the Members of Blue Shield for their incredible work and progress during his tenure as President, noting of the key highlights of the work of the organisation. Karl promised Blue Shield would always be “close to his heart” and he insisted that even though his tenure had come to an end, he would be delighted to continue to help however he could.
To ensure anonymous voting, votes were handled via the Electronic Platform, Election Runner. For ease, voting was split into three blocks. Results of all blocks are available online.
Block one:
The first order of business was to approve the Blue Shield 2020 General Assembly Agenda, which was unanimously agreed. This was followed by a vote on whether Terms of Office for the Board were to begin in 2014 or 2017, decided to be 2017.
Voting results (and more information) are available via Election Runner.
Block two:
The Vice-President, Peter Stone, presented the Report of the Board 2017-2020 and Annual Report for 2020, and the 2020-2023 Strategic Plan, and the Secretary, Manana Tevzadze, presented the Financial Report 2017-2020. These were circulated to all Members in advance, and members were asked to submit questions – none were recieved.
All reports were approved by the General Assembly. Voting results are available via Election Runner.
Block three:
All candidates for the Presidency and the Board had circulated a biography and candidate statement in advance, for all Members to be able to asked ask questions in advance, with answer circulated.
The candidate for President, Peter Stone, gave a brief presentation, followed by 5 minute presentations from the candidates for the Blue Shield International Board. The members were given the opportunity to ask the candidates additional questions, and then asked to vote on the new Board.
Results of block three are available Election Runner.
The meeting concluded with a brief address from the new President, Peter Stone.
The Blue Shield would like to take this opportunity to thank the outgoing Board.
We express our deep and sincere gratitude to our outgoing President, Karl von Habsburg, and to our Board members – Nancy Wilkie, of the United States Committee of the Blue Shield, and Manana Tevzadze, our Secretary and Treasurer, of the Georgian Committee of the Blue Shield. Your contribution to the Blue Shield has been significant, and we are very grateful.
We look forward to seeing you all in person next year at our Extraordinary General Assembly, hopefully in Prague, where we will be hosted by the Czech Republic National Committee of the Blue Shield.
