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• held ten board meetings at monthly intervals. Individual directors try to attend as many other programmed events at the fort as their time allows. • elected Stephen Otto an honorary member of The Friends of Fort York and Garrison Common in recognition of his long and distinguished service to the fort. • convened meetings of our Precinct Advisory Committee to deal with issues such as Councillor Layton’s proposal for a park at 28 Bathurst St. and the Wellington Destructor. • received regular reports from our Finance Committee on its oversight of our investment portfolio. • participated in planning for The Bentway by attending meetings and briefings. • served on the Guard Committee throughout the year advising the twenty young men and women selected for the Guard. They participated in major heritage presentations at Fort York, Old Fort Erie, and Fort George as well as working with military animation staffs at Forts George, Malden, and Erie. Responsibility for the Guard is shared between the City of Toronto and The Friends who provided about half its operating budget this year. • published four issues of Fife & Drum, full of news and articles of interest about the fort. Close to twenty different authors had bylines in the issues of 2017. • our volunteers in the Resource Centre devoted a day a week to organizing the collections of reference materials for the use of fort staff and visitors. Areas of the collection we developed this year were regimental histories and culinary history cookbooks. • recruited four members to the Editorial Committee of Fife & Drum: Daniel Dishaw, Adrian Gamble, Robert Kennedy, and Carole Stimmell. • welcomed collaboration with the University of Toronto Map and Data Library to provide image hosting for the Fort York and Garrison Common Maps site developed by Nathan Ng.
• accepted with regret the resignation from the board of Jennifer Chan; welcomed new director Robert Kennedy, incoming managing editor of Fife & Drum. • celebrated the naming of director Ceta Ramkhalawansingh as a 2017 Woman of Distinction by YWCA Toronto. • approved plans for an anthology of articles from Fife & Drum to be edited by Adrian Gamble, a member of the Editorial Committee. • appointed six members of the new Fife & Drum Editorial Advisory Committee: Carl Benn, Karen Black, Matt Blackett, Gary Miedema, Christopher Moore, and David Roberts. • tallied 84,406 visits on our website www.fortyork.ca, 445,735 hits since its launch May 2012. The site serves as both an educational resource and a marketing tool for Fort York. It is also a source of donations; it enables new subscribers to sign up for our newsletter; and it helps new members join and current ones renew their memberships. • initiated some eight years ago by The Friends, the Fort York Community Citizenship Committee successfully hosted two citizenship ceremonies at the fort. The 16th special ceremony in September, coinciding with the celebration of On Common Ground, included such highlights as Indigenous performers and a cake marking Canada 150. • organized a dinner on a cost recovery basis for current and past directors of The Friends. • encouraged donations to support the rebuilding of the fort’s honeybee program vandalized over the winter. • continued as a community of members and donors to fund essential programs such as the summer students hired for the Guard. We can renew online at any time of the year. For comparison, our accomplishments for 1994-2016 can be found on our website http://www.fortyork.ca/ about-us/our-accomplishments.html
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