This morning the EESC’s Secretary General (aka me) and the Director of Human Resources, Gianluca Brunetti, offered a small thank you breakfast to the members of the electoral committee who worked so hard both to organise and oversee the 20 November Staff Committee elections and then stayed very late thereafter to count the votes. All went well, though the President of the Committee, Luis Lobo, will make several recommendations for practical improvements and adaptations in the Committee’s final report. All of this work is done on a purely voluntary basis. Without it, our local democracy couldn’t exist.