Giving Back and Lifting Up
Rich Lee, CSMFO President Elect, Finance Director, City of San Mateo
If you can believe it, there are only eight more months until the 2023 Annual Conference. The Host Committee is in the early stages of shaping the conference experience, including finding featured speakers and finding venues for the President’s Dinner and the Thursday night event. As President Elect, I get to select the main themes for the conference, and work with the Host Committee on ways that we can promote these themes through various conference activities.
The three primary themes for the conference are 1) giving back/philanthropy, 2) going green, and 3) being present. The challenge that our Host Committee working groups are discussing is to find a way to jointly execute the first two themes. We have also been discussing various ways to continue to provide opportunities for our governmental members to have meaningful interactions with our commercial vendors while developing an alternate to the passport program.
The Charity Working Group has evaluated charities in the Sacramento area whose mission focuses on providing the most basic of human needs – food and shelter. The pandemic disproportionately affected those that were already living paycheck to paycheck. As government finance professionals, we were not personally faced with the same burden of not having a place to live or navigating food insecurity. We’ve seen the power of CSMFO’s network to help one another – whether through the knowledge base, teaching one another through chapter meetings, webinars, and conference sessions. I’m confident that we can harness that same foundation to help those in the Sacramento area that are facing hard times.
I’ve always been a fan of leading by example, so I will be donating at least $1,000 of my own money to the local Sacramento charities. In addition, I will be asking the CSMFO Board to redirect at least $25,000 that would have been spent on conference handouts (bags, towels, backpacks, etc.) and contribute to the same charities. I will be personally reaching out to every commercial sponsor and asking them to join us in this worthwhile effort. In addition, I will be asking every member of CSMFO leadership to donate at least $500 of their own money to this cause. I recognize this is a significant request, but the selected charitable organizations rely on these generous donations to serve those that need their support the most. Let’s lift them up and recognize how fortunate we have been over the past two years. Thank you in advance for your consideration, and I challenge you to join us in CSMFO’s philanthropic efforts for 2023.
Rich Lee has served local municipalities all throughout the San Francisco Peninsula over the past 17 years, including South San Francisco, Los Altos Hills, Millbrae, Foster City, and since January 2019, as the Finance Director for the City of San Mateo.
Rich was elected as President Elect of CSMFO in October 2021. He has also served in other leadership roles, including Board Member, Chapter Chair, and Vice Chair of the Career Development Committee. In 2019, he was appointed to GFOA’s Ethics Committee.
Rich is also an active freelance bass trombonist and has performed with several artists, including Barbra Streisand, Peter Cetera, Gladys Knight, Bernadette Peters, and the San Francisco Opera Orchestra. He has also performed and recorded several albums with local jazz big bands
During the pandemic, Rich developed audio and video engineering skills and received two awards from Music In Place, a non-profit organization providing support to San Francisco Bay Area musicians to continue creating music while sheltering in place. His various isolation music projects are available on YouTube.
