Julie Delbridge, President
Tracy Chan, Head Rep. for Singapore
Web: IPF Singapore and Asia
Every second year since 1992, a Pen Pals United (PPU) has been held in various parts of the world, including Chicago USA, Banff Canada, Kent UK, and in 2002 - Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania USA.
The Destination for PPU 2004: Melbourne, Australia!!!!
Melbourne, home to IPF's Head Office, has many exciting things to offer as a tourist destination.
PPU 2004 will also have many exciting things to offer IPF members and their friends, including interesting talks and presentations by well-known writers, workshops, sight-seeing, prizes, competitions - and more!
Unfortunately, IPF does not have the budget to sponsor members or guests, everyone must make their own travel arrangements and there will be a convention fee to pay, but we are trying to make that as reasonable as possible.
Australia is a long way to travel for most members, but please let us know if you think you will be able to attend the convention. We would love to meet you there!
Further details will be posted on this website as they are confirmed so WATCH THIS SPACE!
Admission Fees
We will soon be reviewing admission fees for all services. One of the challenges of this year has been that the exchange rate of the US$ against the Australian dollar has been between 15-20% lower compared to the previous two years. That is, when converting US$ to Australian dollars we are receiving around 15-20% less, and we receive a lot of our admission fees in US$. Other currencies, such as our Singapore dollar, have also been around 5%-10% less.
The admission fees are set to make allowances for some variation in currency exchange, but the lower rates do impact on our cash flow. Last year postage rates also increased by 10%.
Despite increasing costs and lower exchange rates, we don't want to increase all of our membership fees, as we want IPF to be affordable for as many people as possible and we can appreciate that everyone has a budget to balance.
We envisage that there will be a very small increase for our school class service fees (most of those rates have not increased in over four years) and a small increase for the admission fees in a few countries.
New admission fees will be sent early in the New Year.