All of our tomorrows
Hello 2024! When the schools open for the new academic year, to me it signals that the new year is truly underway. At the time of writing, God willing, we have another 350 “tomorrows” ahead of us.
For myself, it’s going to be a milestone year – in another 22-odd days’ time, I’ll have celebrated my 60th trip around the sun. It’s an interesting age to be at – an opportune moment to “take stock” before setting one’s gaze forward again, though with a greater clarity that it’s now towards the setting sun.
For the immediate future, there are another 60 months (five years) in which I can continue what I started six years ago at the Community Chest, namely, ensuring that it is financially strong, ethically principled and passionately caring for our community, especially for those in need of support, of every kind.
It’s also the time in which I will have to decide about some personal matters, in particular – retirement! Forgive me if I chuckle at the word “retirement”, as I type. It sounds so “not me”, but wisdom dictates otherwise so I’d better start getting used to that word appearing more frequently in my everyday vocabulary as the days’ pass.
For the Community Chest, with just under three months left to our 2023/24 financial year-end, its still touch-and-go to meeting our targets for the year. The good news is that we have already honoured all of our 2023/24 pledges made to our partner organisations. This was possible because of reserve funds available. The challenge that remains is that of still reaching our donor income for the year so that before the new financial year starts, our “chest” of donor funds is replenished and ready to be dispersed to our partners, once again.
I hope you, dear reader, if you have not already done so, remember the Community Chest and add your hand to the wheel with your donation towards assisting those less fortunate than yourself.
I’d like to believe that at the Community Chest, we consciously practice gratitude with thanks.
It’s hard not to do so in an environment in which all of what we do and achieve is purely the result of the goodness of people; people who recognise that their abundance, material and otherwise, is not for further self-enrichment but rather for the opportunity to experience that higher level of blessedness that comes from being a source of blessing to others.
So as we continue to contemplate all of our tomorrows, even as we pick up speed into the hurly-burly of dealing with “today”, I look forward, together with the rest of the team of Community Chest, to having you join with us once again, to be of service and blessings to our community.
By Richard