Message from the President

Join me at our Fall Meeting and Auditions!

As we leave the warm days of October and move towards November, I remain thankful for the work of Torin Chiles as he completes his term as District Governor for Ontario. Torin has been a wonderful mentor to me personally and has always worked diligently to keep the best interests of NATS Ontario as a priority in his conversations at the NATS National level. I will miss Torin’s gentle wisdom and guidance and hope that as members, you will join me in thanking him for his tremendous service!

Taking up the torch for the NATS Ontario District Governor position for the next term is someone who is no stranger to all of us, Barbara Dunn-Prosser. I am thrilled that Barbara will be bringing her leadership experience to this important position.

We also experienced a change at the Regional Governor level with Laurie Lashbrook finishing her term as our excellent leader. I am grateful to Laurie for her leadership and patience over the past few years! In her place, Brian Horne, a wonderful teacher from Indiana University, will be taking over the helm. You can read his introduction letter below. Brian has been doing amazing work with the NATS Foundation as well as serving as Faculty Advisor for the SNATS IU team.

This Newsletter has a great deal of information including some important communications on mandated changes by NATS National on how Chapters renew their membership fees. This has created significant work on our end and we hope you will be patient with NATS as we move forward. That being said, once we have our new system in place, things will get much easier at the Chapter level! You can read more about the details later in the newsletter.

Recently, I had an interesting meeting with former Artist Agent Ann Sommers Dossena, the Founder and Director of the International Resource Centre for Performing Artists. You can read more about her ongoing initiative to provide training and guidance to pre-professional singers In Our Community section below.

Finally, I am excited about our upcoming Chapter Auditions and Fall Recruiting Day being held Saturday, November 15 at York University and our Fall Meeting being held Friday, November 14 at the Canadian Music Centre. As of the close of registration on Friday, we have over 280 singers registered to perform that day making it our largest auditions yet! With these numbers, I hope that you will consider donating to the Scholarship Fund in order to support our wonderful young singers.