AGM 24 Secretary’s Report

Secretary’s report for AGM 2024: March – February

Another busy and interesting year with Committee and Members working well together, our monthly members meeting seem to run themselves!  That’s down to our dream teams. Raffle Team Diana and Hazel, and our Tea Team of Maureen, Brigitte, Zandra, Beverly. 

We welcomed 6 new members joining us throughout the year. All down to word of mouth and Alan’s poster campaign throughout the community.

We are hoping to restart our campaigning which stopped  because of the pandemic. We are planning to hold pop up shops in local libraries and SAVS during the spring to let people know what we do as group.  If you would like to help please let a member of the committee know.

We have a full programme of speakers again this year, our community is very generous in spending time with us and very rarely charging. I try to mix the serious with entertaining and we have another full programme planned for this year.

Roger Savage from SAVS is a constant support particularly with IT and marketing.  He set up a new email address and showed me how to use it!  He is patience personified but it remains the case that currently I am the only committee member using technology to communicate with members and speakers, plus monitoring incoming messages from our networking partners.  

I have been working with Garda, a local marketing company facilitated by SAVS to improve our presence in the community and increase our membership. They are working on overhauling and updating our website to make it more user friendly for those not so familiar with using the internet, plus appealing to those who have recently retired. Support for our IT would be most welcome.

I am looking forward to another year as we work together as the voice of older people within Southend area.

Jean Howes

Hon. Secretary.    January 2024