Hello OVWG Members:

  I would like to introduce myself to the club. My name is Doug Glessner, and I am fortunate enough to have been appointed as the new Chairman for our upcoming 2025 OVWG Symposium - “Turning 2025’.

  I’ve been in the OVWG since 2021, since relocating back to Ohio after living in San Diego for the past 42 years. I currently live just North of Dayton. Besides being a member of OVWG, I’m also a member of the Western Ohio Woodworking Club, as well as the San Diego Fine Woodworkers Association.  I have been doing woodturning since 2002, but have started to get serious at the hobby in 2015, after I took some instructional classes in San Diego’s Palomar Community College.  While I love turning, I also enjoy other forms of woodworking where I can incorporate my turnings into other work  .

  My purpose in writing today is to seek out volunteers whom can help become part of the Turning 2025 Leadership Team, and to help produce another great event in our long tradition, dating back to 1999. You may be surprised to hear about this now, but each Symposium takes a lot of advance planning. You also might be surprised to hear that each event does take a full 2 years to plan properly to achieve the success that we have had in the past.

   As the old saying goes:  “Many hands make light work”.  In asking for members to take on certain roles, I’ll also tell you that we have a lot of background, experience, and helpful notes and information to support those who step up for each role. And those who did the work over the past several events are ready to help with a transition to help you learn what to do.  So don’t feel that if you decide to take one of the roles to assist in the symposium, you are not going to get all of the assistance you need to be successful.

  Here are the roles that we are looking to fill at this time, and a brief description of each. There will be more later as we continue to plan for further details leading up to the symposium!

Please contact me at dkgless@yahoo.com or call me at 619-933-9550 to talk about becoming part of our team. I really am looking forward to working alongside each of you as we plan for another great event.

Doug Glessner

Trade Show & Advertising:  Recruit around 20 different vendors to come and sell their products at our event. Also, sell ads in our symposium book to those same companies. Work on this starts “now” as vendors tend to set their schedules out well in advance.

Guest Demonstrators:  Select the local and regional woodturners to demonstrate. These folks supplement the rotations that our invited, featured turner perform. The work is to seek these folks out, put a contract in place, get a description of what they will demonstrate, and obtain pictures of them and their work for our symposium book. The work will start later this year.

Marketing & Promotion:  This involves creating and sharing emails, flyers, and other methods of promotion. There are lots of past examples to learn from. We contact regional woodturning clubs in states around us and leverage our own email list of over 1000 names and prior attendees. The AAW also helps with publicity. The work starts this coming fall.