Press Release October 30, 2023 – MEMBERS VOTE TO CONTINUE EBMA

MEMBERS VOTE TO CONTINUE EBMA

At the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the European Bluegrass Music Association on October 25, 2023, the members voted for the association to continue and the Board of Directors stood down. The outgoing Board had announced in January that they would recommend dissolving the Association. In response a small team asked for a delay in order to prepare and present a project1 for the association to continue. The project was put to a vote during the AGM and the motion was carried.

The project included the nomination of an interim board for 90 days to oversee the process of electing a permanent board and to recommend a list of immediate tasks to be undertaken. The Interim Board is composed of the 5 people behind the proposal to continue:

Piero Biasi (Swiss-German, outgoing board member and event producer),
Guido de Groot (Dutch, Chair Rotterdam Bluegrass Festival),
Christopher Howard-Williams (Franco-British, Chair Bluegrass in La Roche),
Nadia Sardjoe (Dutch, singer-songwriter) and
Angelika Torrie (Swiss-German, co-founder of EBMA).

They are joined on the interim board by three other members also elected during the AGM: Lilly Drumeva (Bulgarian,  musician, radio DJ and event producer), Ronnie Norton (Irish, outgoing board member and radio DJ) and François Vola (Franco-American, musician).
At its first meeting after the AGM, the interim board named Christopher Howard-Williams as Chair, Angelika Torrie as Treasurer and Nadia Sardjoe as Actuary.

The EBMA is now open for new member registrations and all members, new and old, are invited to apply for board positions or other opportunities to serve. Details of the board structure, constituencies, election process and a candidate form can be found on the website.
It is expected that the new board will be in place by February 1, 2024, ready to lead the Association into its next phase to help grow and strengthen the European Bluegrass Community, based on activities already in progress and further recommendations made in the manifesto and raised during the AGM.

The Interim Board
www.ebma.org 

1) The project manifesto sent out before the AGM and the slides presented during the AGM can be viewed and downloaded from ebma.org