I summarized the state of AERC at the midyear board meeting in three parts:

-- services

-- governance

business of AERC.

AERC is delivering more and better services led by the efforts of our excellent national office. Endurance News provides superb coverage of our sport, great pictures, and valuable educational information. The great work of many committees such as the Ride Managers, International, Junior, and various trail committees are regularly reported in EN columns.

Other committees provide equally valuable services that are less visible. For example, the Welfare of the Horse Committee quietly counsels riders who are overstressing or otherwise endangering their horses.

Due to the space limitations of my column, I will highlight the recent work of just two of the committees that provide services to members.

The education section of www.aerc.org has a new look and a lot of new material on everything from starting in endurance to advice for those wishing to move up to 50- and 100-mile rides. We now have reference pages on anatomy, physiology and care of the endurance horse, as well as some of the latest studies applicable to endurance horses. I hope it will be of use to you. The Education Committee (EC), led by Dinah Rojek, is to be commended for their work on this program. Dinah gives credit to Mike Tomlinson, DVM, for sharing photos he took at the 2006 AERC National Championship and Mike Maul for his patience with the tech side of the update.

The EC has the mentor liaison program up and running (see "Find a Mentor" on the web page). The EC has also developed course material for briefings and seminars, from a new rider briefing that can be used at every ride to a multi-day "beyond the basics" seminar.

The Veterinary Committee (VC), headed by Melissa Ribley, DVM, has instituted a voluntary certification test. The purpose of the program is to encourage veterinarians working endurance rides to familiarize themselves with the AERC veterinary handbook and AERC rule book. The vet page of our website lists around 100 names of vets who have already passed this test. The VC is also now producing an quarterly newsletter for our vets. Members of the Vet Committee, together with John Parke, chair of the Legal and Governance Committee, are leading the work to revise our drug policy, rules, and testing processes.

We are also revising Rule 14 on protests. We have now have a Protest and Grievance Committee that is comprised totally of non-board members to provide a clean separation between the hearing of a protest and the hearing of an appeal of a protest by the board. More generally, John Parke will be leading an effort to rewrite all of our rules to make them more understandable.

One area of AERC service that needs further work is how to fulfill the research mandate in our charter. We significantly cut back on research programs when we did not generate positive cash flow in the 2005 fiscal year. I am asking a small group of people to rethink how we can best meet the research mandate given the expense of funding substantive research vs. our limited funds. The key may be to make our horses, our information, and our time available to partner with researchers who have external funding sources.

We are working to improve the governance of AERC in several areas. Earlier this year, as discussed in the May EN, we developed a new committee structure with groups of committees to facilitate managing and leading a more complex AERC.

Board members worked to recruit an excellent slate of candidates for Directors-at-Large so that the board that will serve you starting next March will provide strong leadership for our future.

Moving on to the third item, the "business of AERC," our membership in early November stood at 6,573 compared to 6,566 a year ago. We are undertaking a program led by Jan Stevens for membership retention and recruitment.

Through the leadership of Patti Pizzo, our financials are healthy, both in terms of annual cash flow and the balance sheet. In terms of our position in the market, AERC is the single dominant leader in North America. We cannot take our position for granted as seen in the competitive trail riding world where there are many smaller organizations but not a single dominant leader in the U.S.

Other organizations have the motivation and capability to sponsor endurance events. AERC has reached out to embrace these organizations and include them in our "big tent." For example we are working closely with others such as the Arabian Horse Association, Endurance Canada, USEF, and the Great Santa Fe Trail Horse Ride organization so that events sponsored by these organizations are also AERC events, run under our rules and standards and not a competing alternative that would draw members and participation away from AERC.

In closing, Matthew Mackay-Smith, DVM, AERC Hall of Fame member and past president, and the first person to win Old Dominion and Tevis on the same horse in the same year, gave a talk at the midyear board meeting on the challenges and possible future directions of the sport of endurance riding. He concluded by stating, "Organizations cannot remain static because the external forces do not remain static. Therefore an organization can try to proactively shape its future or just reactively allow external forces to shape its future." I am pleased that we in AERC are proactively shaping our future.