Apologies members my July update is very late!! I blame school holidays and going away. I did think on the 1st August that I needed to do the update and then clearly got distracted by the 100th request for a meal from one of the kids and it has passed me by.
I hope you are all well and those of you with younger children are enjoying the school holidays. It is a bit of a balancing act in my house as I am still working 3 days a week, so I am trying to do that with all 3 kids and keep them entertained. Not much different to the last 17 months but forgive me for trying to excuse my lateness.
As you are aware the AGM was held on Saturday 17th July. The trustees were at the Hilton at Coventry when this was held as we met with the hotel to discuss the next Family Weekend and also had some training. We feel that the AGM went well and hope that you as members were happy with the format of it. The AGM is the most important meeting we as a charity hold, and due to this we propose to run it yearly as opposed to 18 monthly going forward. This gives the trustees the opportunity to report to you on the Chair’s report, Treasurer’s report, Accounts and allow you to raise questions of us and how we are working and driving the charity forward more regularly and show more transparency. It will again be held over Zoom and the next proposed AGM date is 2nd July 2022.
We appreciate that it was run via Zoom, and this is a completely different way to which it has been done previously. The attendance was good, and we hope that next year it is even better.
The Trustees were all voted in as follows :-
- Marie Cavalier – Chair
- Antonia East – Treasurer
- Carolyn Burns – Secretary
- Lisa Massingham – Fundraising Co-Ordinator
- Lynn Buchanan – Social Media Co-Ordinator
The new constitution was approved and is being submitted to the Charity Commission. Attached at the end of the report is the presentation that was given to those in attendance to allow those that couldn’t attend to view this.
The training that we did was a SWOT analysis of the charity. It focused the trustees on what we thought are the charity’s Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats. It was a fabulous piece of work and we now have the job of reviewing the outcomes and moving forward to put these in place. I will report to you further in these separately.
I would like to thank Nicola Colenso for offering to run this training. All of the trustees came away feeling really pleased that we had taken the time to do this training. By undertaking training this allows us as your board of trustees to develop and will allow us to work more effectively for you our members and the charity.
Antonia, Carolyn, Lynn and Lisa also had a meeting with the GOSH team via zoom this month. I will give further details of this separately so watch this space. Needless to say they were very pleased with the meeting and felt that there are positives steps being put in place for transition.
Congratulations to Caity Downes who received a C in her Childcare results and to Eve Bleasdale who did superbly in her A levels. Thank you to Peter Steele who is raising money for the charity by doing 60 miles in August. Apologies if I have missed any of our members off who have recently received exam results and good luck to any members waiting for their GCSE result on Thursday.
I will be a little quiet in the next few weeks as I am having an operation on Monday but will be home Wednesday to field any calls or concerns should anyone have them. Enjoy the rest of August and holidays if you are off. If you are staying at home I think we are due a heat wave for 2 weeks which will be nice after we have had so much rain recently.
Take care and get in touch if the charity can help you at all.
Marie