New Year, New Board

Shelby Washkevich, Sara Grout and Austin Shell

YP board sees big change for second year running

January is the month of fresh beginnings and that holds true for three new directors: Sara Grout, Shelby Washkevich and Austin Shell.

The sassiest of our members, Sara joins the board after co-chairing our ChillyFest Bed Races committee, helping with Volleygrass and taking on the role of lead organizer for the Cros-Lex stop of the BWYP Community Tour. She is an attorney at Touma, Watson et al. law firm.

Shelby has previous experience helping the YPs organize our annual fundraiser, Keg N Ks. She works in sales at Radio First.

Austin is a staff accountant at Stewart, Beauvais and Whipple, and has previously served on the Volleygrass committee.

We also wished fare thee well to four board members in 2018.

As much as he didn’t like to admit it, BWYP founder and president AJ Armbruster may as well start digging his grave due to being a decrepit man of 35 years. He leaves the board for that reason. Joking aside, we wouldn’t be here today without all the hard work AJ put in to form the young professional group back in 2009, when many others were leaving for opportunities elsewhere. Thank you for your leadership over the years.

Mallory Michaluk now serves as the new president.

We also say goodbye to Kendra Lake, who joins AJ in the old folks home. For many years Kendra served as our media specialist, taking the lead on social media, eblasts and a website overhaul. She also took initiative on many other behind-the-scenes tasks and served as the group go-to, especially when it came to teaching AJ all things tech.

Both Sarah Grewe and Cameron Herrington resigned due to work obligations, which involved a move to Houghton for Cam, and passed the reins of their executive positions to other members.

Demiree Potter took over a 2-year term as board chair from Cam, and Shelby is serving a 1-year term as interim secretary for Sarah.