Dear Friends and colleagues,

Greetings from Canada, where we are at the start of our descent into the depths of winter. I was elected as Treasurer of IUIS at the Melbourne International Congress of Immunology about two years ago and I am delighted to bring you an update of my role on Council and where we currently stand financially. As a member of the IUIS Executive Committee, my responsibility is to ensure that we have the financial resources to accomplish our goals, and importantly to do this in a way that is transparent and fully accountable to the IUIS council and our member Societies. The 2018 IUIS budget and accompanying notes can be found here.

IUIS Income
IUIS draws its revenue from three main sources. National Societies pay membership dues to IUIS, and this represents most of our annual income. I am delighted therefore to see the recent introduction to a group of new National Societies into IUIS. We also derive income from our association with Frontiers in Immunology. Our income from Frontiers is related to the amount of activity we have in developing special topics for Frontiers, and I would take this opportunity to encourage IUIS members interested in developing content for Frontiers to contact iuis-central-office@kit-group.org with a subject “RE: IUIS Research Topics”. In addition, every three years the International Congress, Melbourne in 2016, generates revenue for IUIS. The scale of this revenue depends on the success of the Congress and is largely driven by the amount of sponsorship and the number of exhibitors with displays at the meeting.

IUIS Supported Activities
The revenue generated is largely spent on the activities of the various Federations and Committees that are part of IUIS. We use IUIS resources to support the growth and development of Federation meetings, in particular in Africa and Latin America, and it has been great to see the increasing strength and participation in the meetings, both from scientists from the region as well as elsewhere; the FAIS and ALAI regional meetings are becoming excellent international conferences. IUIS supports the activities of about 10 Committees with a range of mandates. Each Committee presents its annual report to the IUIS Council who then have the responsibility for approving Committee budgets. As Treasurer, I ensure that the resources are available for the Committees and also make sure that there is full accountability with respect to how the money is used. In most cases, IUIS funding provides seed money for wide ranging initiatives and by providing this seed money, Committees can approach other organizations for further funding. This model has proved to be extremely successful for the Education Committee, who have used their status as an IUIS funded Committee to leverage these resources into further support from organizations such as the Gates Foundation. One of the most rewarding aspects of my position as Treasurer is to see how creatively the Federations and Committees use the funding we provide to catalyze such a wide range of initiatives, and I would encourage you to explore these activities on our website.

With best regards,

Michael Ratcliffe