From The President October 2019

John Hall

Volunteering for your Club

By the time you read this it will be the end of September/early October and the time for nominations for committee members will be closing soon.

 

I am very pleased to able to tell you that David Stonier-Gibson has nominated for the position of President and Stephen Zuluaga has nominated for Vice-President.

 

Those of you who have read David’s statement about his reasons for nominating as President on Yammer (or in Planning to Plan, PC Update September 2019) will know that this hasn’t been an easy decision for him and I sincerely hope that he will get great support from all of his committee members. It is great to know that Stephen Zuluaga – who has been my Vice-President over the past year – will be there to help David to settle in to his new role.

 

However, at the time of writing we do not have nominations for the Treasurer’s position or the SIG Co-ordinator’s portfolio.

 

The Treasurer’s position is fairly self-explanatory, the role requires the reporting of our accounts, profit and loss and balance sheet statements and the presentation of capital expenditure items for approval by the Committee. Whilst it would be preferable for the person holding this position to have an accounting background, the reports themselves are produced by our Quickbooks application and we have an external Accountancy firm for advice and guidance on unusual items. In addition to that, Stewart Gruneklee who has done an excellent job as our Treasurer over the past 2 years, will be staying on Committee and will (when he isn’t travelling) be able to give advice and guidance to anyone who takes up the role.

 

The SIG Group Co-ordinator’s role would probably be best filled by an existing SIG Leader who knows the type of support that is required from the committee in order to keep the local groups updated with equipment and guidance in order to support our regional SIGs.

 

This role has been filled over the past 3 years by John Morris but due to ill health John will no longer be able to continue on committee. John has been a tireless volunteer for our club for as long as I have been a member and is still an office volunteer at the age of 87 !!!

 

As you know, I have been very keen on recruiting more “younger” members to our group as MOST of our current volunteers, SIG Leaders and the like are in their 70’s or older.

 

Whilst this has been a “shot in the arm” for our club – and we can look forward to our younger members taking over the leadership of our group with renewed enthusiasm and vigour – it is also important to maintain a balance of longer term members of the club who can bring their existing knowledge of our SIG Groups, news groups and iHelp functions to the committee.

 

I sincerely hope that by the close of nominations we will have had some of the longer term members of our Club nominating for the Treasurer and SIG Co-ordinator positions and I wish all the very best of success in the upcoming elections.