A Message from the President
Dear members and friends:
Greetings!
I hope everyone has had a lovely summer and is looking forward to fall. I have many exciting updates for this President's Message.
First off, I would like to announce in this message that we will be bringing to the Washington, D.C. area its first Italian festival in 15 years! AMHS is working with the Order of Sons and Daughters of Italy in America to make this a reality. The festival will be October 4th and 5th at National Harbor. There will be another entire article in this newsletter edition dedicated to the festival. Please read, share, and attend!
Second, on September 21, we will celebrate our society’s 25th anniversary. This event will feature several speakers that will highlight different aspects of the AMHS. Speakers will cover the founding of the society, the galas, memorable events, our scholarships, the newsletters, and our archives, in addition to a statement that I will make on the future of the society and different initiatives that we are engaging in. This will be a great opportunity for older members to relive the heritage of our society and also for younger members to understand where we come from. You can register for the event at https://www.abruzzomoliseheritagesociety.org/events#!event/2025/9/21/amhs-25th-anniversary-celebration
Relatedly, I have been working with Board Member Teresa Black to digitize an archive of our society. We have been collecting CDs and papers from various members and cross-referencing to make sure nothing is missed. From there we have been scanning the CDs and papers onto a computer. From there we are uploading all of these documents by year into a Google Drive which will be accessible online in perpetuity.
During the September event, I will talk more about the archive and we will bring many physical documents for review and discussion. It will be a great opportunity for older members to connect with past memories and for newer members to learn about our 25 years.
Third, we are continuing to modernize the society on the back end. Although it looks very similar, we have rebuilt our entire website. This will make the website easier to manage and save the society tremendous amounts of money. It will also open up new opportunities. For example going forward we will be able to accept credit card payments in person and automatic payments for membership renewals, all while lowering our transaction costs.
While this will greatly benefit the society, we will have to change how memberships are renewed. I will talk more about this at the September 21st event and we will include detailed instructions for renewing through the new web page via the newsletter in October and emailed renewal notices. Although it will require a little more work the first time, it will make renewing and paying annually much more simple.
We have as a new sponsor of our web page AMHS member Phil Micali of Philitaly Cultural Exchanges. Philitaly offers small group tours of Italy and of particular note to members, he has an April 16-27, 2026 ,trip to Abruzzo and Molise! Click here for more information
These sponsorships help us fund our activities and things such as our website modernization. So check out the sponsor page and support them!:
https://www.abruzzomoliseheritagesociety.org/partners-sponsors-1
Fourth, I am happy to announce that the AMHS store is live again! A few years ago we launched an online store and for some unknown reason, it was closed. I have been working to recreate an online store option with more features and logo options than before.
Fifth, in the past year we have been engaging a bit more with other media organizations and have had articles about our society in publications such as Primo Magazine and We the Italians. I would like to add to that list that we were featured in the spring edition of the Fly Washington Magazine! This is the magazine published by the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority. It highlighted the local Italian American community and listed us and our attendance of the Washington Nationals Italian Heritage Day. You can read about it below:
https://viewer.joomag.com/flywashington-magazine-spring-2025/0952989001747778322/p49
Finally, we are looking to get back to doing our online events that started during the pandemic. We are trying to use this opportunity to engage with interesting speakers from outside our area. We will be hosting events such as featuring an author who writes children's books featuring Abruzzo and Molise, an event highlighting the changes and impacts of the recent citizenship decisions in Italy, and some of our well-loved movie events.
There's a lot to look forward to and the lot still in store for the society in 2025.
I hope to see you all at our 25th anniversary celebration on September 21st,
Chris Renneker
Content goes here.
Best regards,
Chris Renneker
Fall 2025