Over the last eight years, Wendy has participated in and contributed to many different CMG projects, adding value to every effort she undertook. And she did it in a way that, to quote one of her co-workers, “…has been a brilliant and rare gift to the Comal Master Gardener organization and the Comal community that she’s served. Wendy’s character shines bright.”
She first volunteered to co-chair CMG involvement in upkeep and maintenance of the Tye Preston Memorial Library Butterfly Garden. She helped plan the work to be done in maintaining the large garden and its native plants, gave assignments to CMG volunteers on workdays, and was especially effective in orienting the new trainees each year to the garden and its plants. She also helped in reporting the CMG volunteer hours for the library’s volunteer records.
Wendy also volunteered in the Junior Master Gardener program at Hoffman Lane Elementary School. She was the driving force behind gardening activities at the school and helped teachers and parents start an after-school gardening club. Wendy also wrote an article for the CMG website that described the after-school club and how it functioned so other teachers could profit from Hoffman’s experience. She was active at the school up until her retirement and move to Virginia.
Wendy has been instrumental in maintaining and updating the 80+ email addresses used by members for association business. The updates become especially active at the end of the calendar year when some current members change positions—vice-president to president, other officers, committee chairs, garden chairs, etc. swap positions. She also documented the procedures for updating the Google-based system emails used by CMG prior to her own departure and provided training for her successor. By far, Wendy’s biggest impact on CMG has been her amazing work on registering the approximately 250 people from all over Central Texas (and sometimes beyond) who attend CMG’s annual Spring Seminar. When she took over the task, registration was completely manual—paper registration forms with several data fields, paper checks for paying registration fees that had to be aligned with the registration roster and occasionally refunded when someone had to withdraw their registration, tracking of lunch preferences and devising methods to keep the chaos to a minimum when 250 people all wanted to eat lunch at the same time. She and co-workers physically registered attendees handed out name tags, seminar materials, etc. in the morning before the first speaker. She did this for several years and became totally familiar with the needs of the seminar.
She used her knowledge of the seminar registration processes to develop a set of requirements for an automated system. She and a co-worker then used the requirements for an e-commerce system to search for available software solutions in the marketplace. They selected a package for testing, but a conflict arose between the website’s existing software and the new package. Wendy went to another software package they had rated highly, procured, and successfully installed it. It tested out and she implemented the package for the 2024 Spring Seminar where it was lauded by everyone. (The new capability is also used to collect annual dues and volunteer forms from members each year and is now in use to enroll community members in the upcoming Beginner Vegetable Gardening Series.)
For the Spring Seminar, it automated the manual handling of the registration steps, greatly improved data quality as information was entered once by the attendees and used for all the registration processes and saved many hours of time for the registration committee, the treasurer, and the attendees. In the words of the now-Emeritus member who headed the seminar committee for six years, “She (Wendy) always did her job with a smile and no complaints. She was very easy to work with. She is very deserving of emeritus standing.”