Treasurer’s Report - Finance Committee

Greetings from your Eliot Board Treasurer! 

As we look into the rear-view mirror of our 2022 return to three—count ‘em, three—in-person summer camps, the overall Eliot financial picture is a heck of a lot better than it was this time last year.  One measure I’ve found helpful for gauging our financial health is the size of our unrestricted assets.  Unrestricted assets are funds that allow Eliot to make strategic investments in our future, including putting $6,000 during 2022 towards improvements to the Meeting House A/V system and Eliot’s $250,000 contribution to Seabeck for the new Pines building.  They also allow us to weather unexpected storms, like a certain thingy that kept us from meeting in person for two years.  

As you may recall from previous newsletters, we ended our 2021 fiscal year with ~$92,000 ($92K) in unrestricted assets, down a huge chunk from the ~$157K level we’d achieved at the end of 2019 (our last year with in-person camps).   That drop would have been far, far worse had it not been for the tremendous generosity of our Eliot community, to the tune of $18K in 2020 and $37K in 2021.  

So, where are we now, I hear you ask?  

We’ve not yet closed the books on 2022 (Winter Eliot 2022 here we come!) so it’s a tad premature to break out the dancing shoes, but right now our unrestricted assets project to be something around $110K by the end of 2022.  In other words, not only have we stopped the bleeding, but we’ve started replenishing our reserves.  Huzzah!!!  

However, we’re not 100% out of the woods yet.  Two of the primary factors behind the increase in our unrestricted assets this year are:  1) The Board budgeted $3K per camp for COVID-related expenses, such as providing in-camp PCR tests for those who needed them, money that largely went unspent because such testing thankfully became unnecessary by the time camps started; and 2) The Eliot community once again showed tremendous generosity in 2022, to the tune of $26K in donations to Eliot’s unrestricted funds (THANK YOU, BELOVED ELIOT COMMUNITY!!).  If we’d needed to use all those COVID funds and there’d not been any contributions from Eliot campers in 2022, I’d instead be telling you that our unrestricted assets had dropped to around $75K.  

So, pretty good news overall – but I hope you’ll also agree that we’re still not all the way back, and won’t be until we can balance the books without depending on camper contributions.  The primary way we get there?  Increased participation in camps!  So, if you’ve not yet signed up for Winter Eliot 2022 or a 2023 camp, go do it now!   You know it will be awesome.  And if you’ve already signed up, then refer a friend and get that $50 referral fee from Bev!  A win-win-win situation if ever there was one.  

Seth Moran, Treasurer