Please welcome the new Chairman of our newsletter, Nicki Esdorn. Nicki is on the B.R.L.A. Board and will now also be a very enthusiastic and capable person to take over this important job. It has been ten years since the birth of our very popular homegrown publication. I must say in my defense that my spelling and writing ability has improved. You will now have the benefit of someone who loves to write and will add her own personal touch and exciting new ideas. I also want to say how grateful I am that the feedback has been positive and constructive over the past years.

The newsletter was started by the Membership Committee ten years ago because the Board and the committee chairs needed a vehicle to communicate important information to our ever growing membership. One of the biggest concerns we heard repeatedly from our membership was that they felt they were not in the “information loop.” Anewsletter would remove this sense of separation from the organization they were members of. The original Membership Committee consisting of Joan Cirillo, Jacqueline deBar, Robin Zablow and myself were given the task of increasing our membership base. One of our first recommendations to the Board was that a newsletter was absolutely necessary for the future growth of the B.R.L.A., so we could inform and educate the membership and community about our organization.

Hiring someone for the job was the only solution because using volunteers was too big a commitment and had failed in the past. We were immediately given the go ahead. With a recommendation from Sherri Sferra, we interviewed Helen Morvillo and hired her to take everyone’s articles and pictures and format them into a newsletter we could take to a printer. We started out small with barely eight pages and have since grown to 16-20 pages per issue. The newsletter also started out with three issues, but we quickly eliminated the fall newsletter as unnecessary. Helen, from the beginning, has been completely committed and a good friend of the B.R.L.A. She and Accel Printing have since modernized our method to take advantage of the newest technology. We are so grateful that Helen is still with us doing a superb job, always with a smile and good cheer.

To continue to make our newsletter more interesting and informative, we added “Open Spaces” and “Spotlight” articles. The Open Space articles are for you, the membership to tell us about your most remarkable horse experiences. Just like the fisherman, we all have a tall tale to tell. Our Spotlight article helps educate our membership and community about the history of our sanctuaries, preserves, large parcels of land we ride on and past Bedford residents who have made our trail system possible. We are constantly being told by our membership that ride and walk our trails that this wonderful gift touches their lives and makes living in this community an extraordinary blessing.

We must never forget that the B.R.L.A. does not own any property. It is because of the landowners’“Gift of Passage” through their property as a guest that we have this unique experience. Because we treasure the opportunity and always look at this gift from a very grateful heart, that we now need to remind and educate others of the vision the people who came before us had for this area. We now carry this legacy started almost 90 years ago forward. Our current membership

Source: BRLA 2007 Fall Newsletter