by Michele Newbern Gillis
Staff Writer
The Commercial Real Estate Women of Jacksonville has been meeting for over a year, but will not officially celebrate their one year anniversary as a chapter until June.
“We have had a great beginning,” said Amy Sterling of Compass Bank, president of the chapter. “We accomplished most everything that we set out to do and have created some great friendships along the way.”
The group started meeting unofficially in the evenings in more of social setting early last year.
As the group grew and they realized there was an interest in the group, they became organized, formed committees, elected officers, began lunch meetings with speakers relating to commercial real estate and became an official chapter of the CREW Network.
Since the group has not been official for an entire year, the officers were not able to serve an entire year, so they have decided to continue with the same officers througout 2003.
Those officers include Sterling as president, Cathy Disbrow Courson of Reynolds, Smith and Hills, Inc. as vice president; attorney Juliana Rowland McFarland, secretary; and Laura Head of Compass Bank, treasurer.
“All of our committees are functioning at top speed,” said Sterling. “Many of our members have already gotten involved in the various committees and we couldn’t function without them, although we continue to encourage more members to get involved. CREW, among other things, is designed to be a networking organization. The more involved our members get, the more we will all get out of CREW.”
The group will celebrate their one year together with a gala to benefit a charity that has not been chosen yet.
The local CREW chapter will meet with Linda Hollemon, executive vice president and CEO of CREW Network, to pick her brain about what they can look forward to in the coming years.
“We will then meet on a Saturday for a strategic planning session using the knowledge we obtain from Linda,” said Sterling. “This, I hope, will be great fun as well as a very productive session.”
Currently, the group has 73 members, two of which are men. Sterling said the group is growing fast.
For the new year, they have moved their meetings to the Omni Hotel and anticipate continuing that arrangement throughout the year.
“One of our primary focuses for the upcoming year will be in the planning and implementation of our charity outreach program,” said Sterling. “Rhetta Nussbaum of Grubb & Ellis/Phoenix Realty Group will head the committee to choose a charity that will benefit from our fund raising activities. Rhetta will then work closely with the other committee chairs to plan and implement events to benefit that charity.”
Other than that, the group plans to continue bringing in speakers that are related to commercial real estate.
“Our program committee’s goal is to help educate and inform our membership on issues that concern the field of commercial real estate,” said Sterling.