On 4 November the IFM-SEI Control Commission met in Brussels to go through the profit and loss 2017 and the proposed budget 2018 as well as other tasks part of our remit, which includes discussing IFM-SEI membership fees. We are pleased that the majority of member organisations have paid their membership fees 2017 and we thank you for your efforts to doing this in a timely manner. As an outcome of our meeting, we want to shortly raise the topic of membership fees 2018 in the following lines below.

Our membership system is a significant part of the budget of IFM-SEI which allows us to be able to keep up the good non-formal educational work we are already doing, run the operational aspects of the organisation and also to have exchanges between IFM-SEI as a movement and you, the member organisations of IFM-SEI. At the Congress in August 2016 we established a new IFM-SEI membership fee system which is comprised of two different parts - the fixed basic amount and the solidarity component.

The solidarity competent is explained in the membership fee paper for the mandate 2016-2019 as the following:

• A “solidarity contribution”: a flexible amount, which can be decided upon by the member organisation itself. The member organisation has to inform the IFM-SEI Secretariat until 31st December of the previous year of the solidarity amount for the coming year. If no concrete information is communicated in time, then the same amount as in the previous year will be invoiced and must be paid.

Hereby we want to remind you of this system and that you have the opportunity to both increase and decrease your solidarity contribution but you must do so in writing to the Control Commission at cc@ifm-sei.org by 31 December 2017. We'd like to encourage you to contribute at minimum the solidarity component agreed at IFM-SEI Congress 2016, as it is important to IFM-SEI and should be also a important to you in order for you to make this part of your contribution to the one and only IFM-SEI. Please consider that in your budgeting.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us at cc@ifm-sei.org.