After four decades of designing, building, and renovating Highland, our community consists of hundreds of Members. Although our current Membership represents half of what we ultimately envision for our Club, it is nonetheless a large enough base on which to build an ideal self-sustaining community of passionate and caring members. 

They say “it takes decades of hard work to have overnight success.” It took Moses forty years of wandering in the desert before he found the promised land. Similarly, we have been striving to create our “ideal community” for forty years, and are still excited about the idea every day.

With our culture well established, Highland Institute successfully launched, and Dustin fully in charge of the Club’s operations, we are now focused on growing our membership without compromising our quality, aesthetics, or culture. Therefore, I am soliciting your help to reach out to potential new member candidates in your network, and invite them for a tour and lunch as a guest of the Club.

I am also asking all our members to re-commitment to the club, whether by way of reading our weekly Newsletters or simply visiting more often to dine and socialize, thereby maintaining and expanding our great food tradition. Membership in a community with minimal participation yields the equivalent of putting a book under one’s pillow at night, expecting it to yield knowledge.

The pandemic has forced all of us to question who we are, where we feel at home, what we stand for, and with whom we want to associate. And so it is with our club in the midst of this pandemic as it forces us to rethink how to preserve and focus our limited resources. 

One element of this transition is the likely abandonment of certain old programs, like the Friday night Happy Hours which is rarely attended by more than half a dozen members; instead, we are investing time and energy in re-inventing our programming, providing our members with more opportunities to celebrate, engage, learn, and connect. Additionally, we are focused on adding new services and benefits to the Club, one of the most exciting of which is the addition of Cocktails to our daily offerings. More on this in January. 

In the meantime, thank you for your continued moral and financial support of our shared community to date, and best wishes for a safe, healthy, happy, and prosperous new year.

— Sina.