Management Committee Update
A new year has come around, and so it's time to welcome a new Management Committee, who've just had their first meeting of the cycle.
The MC at the Forum 2008: Kate Hand (outgoing), Joe Bardwell and Alex Wood
Image © Rich Lott
First item of business was to greet Joe Bardwell and Alex Wood as newly elected members. We are still a couple of members short of the required 7, and so at the Summer Gathering and since we’ve been encouraging keen P&Pers to think about volunteering. At the meeting, then, we also discussed what process we’ll use to get new members — we’re awaiting a final decision, but it’ll either be through co-optation or, if possible, through an election at Shared Planet. We’re also going to be looking at appointing more non-student members to improve the skills range of the committee.
One of our major jobs this meeting was to study P&P’s finances so far this year. We were pleased to see that we’re in a comparatively strong position — we’ve secured most of the expected money from trusts, foundations and sponsors. However, we also recognised that our fundraising from the network and other unrestricted sources is still behind, and so we agreed on some action points for trying to improve our performance here.
We discussed our campaigns, noting the success of the new Green League, and also spoke about the Ditch Dirty Development campaign and its tackling of RBS, recognising our need to build alliances for the campaign — so our student members are going to seek out strong contacts in the NUS. Finally, we were sorry to note that we still haven’t secured funds for our new campaign on corporate power, and so we discussed what process we’ll undertake to develop it: we’ll be making decisions on that outside the meeting within the month.
At the moment, People & Planet has a long-term Strategic Plan for all its operations, and we looked again at this in the light of our recent restructuring. The Plan still provides our framework, but we agreed to undertake a full review of the Plan and the restructuring next March, when we’ve had enough time to see the organisation develop.
The last few jobs of the meeting were mainly administrative — we chose a chair for the next meeting (Harry Giles), divided up areas of work among the student members, agreed on an annual cycle of meetings, and discussed dates and locations for future meetings.
A version of the meeting minutes is available on the Management Committee pages if you’re interested — in the mean time, stay tuned for further news on our decisions and chances to get involved further with P&P.