Organising Group Meeting

The organising group for Springfield Beech Hill and Gidlow CommUnity met on Thursday lunchtime between 12noon and 1.30pm. The group meets once a fortnight – either on a Thursday afternoon between 12-1.30 onland or on a Wednesday evening between 7-8.30 on zoom.

The people who come are usually people who are running good stuff in the community, and agreed to get involved at the AGM held as part of the community party in May, or have been involved for a while.

We try to avoid having meetings where only one person does all the speaking and we don’t have a chairperson or roles where a few have all the power. 

We have someone who makes notes of decisions made and usually someone facilitates the meeting to make sure everyone has a space to talk.

This week we started with a check in. This helps us all to take a minute to settle in and it also lets everyone know how people are feeling. 

Then we each spent a couple of minutes sharing news about the work we are doing or involved in in the community before getting on to the agenda. 

We have a signal group and so we’d talked about the things we’d like to talk about beforehand. 

We were going to talk today mainly about finance, the awards and the repair cafe and record any decisions we made.

We looked at the bank account. There’s £7080 in the bank. £6000 of that is Brighter Boroughs funding that’s been given towards the application to improve Diggle St park.  If we don’t receive the other funding then we need to return it. There’s £885 owed which once in the bank leaves a balance of £1965. We have running costs of approximately £690 a year. 

These are some of the  decisions that we made together on Thursday. 

1. We agreed to shift from the credit union bank, Unify, to either Lloyds or Metro. Ben and Gill would action this. We decided to keep the unify account too.
2. Ben had looked at open collective as a tool for being really transparent with the money we have and also helping those who we give money too to keep good records and be transparent with the money. Ben recommended that we look at Trello. We agree that Ben would try it out with Phil and the bike recycling group. We agreed that this would be offered and / or a book to all groups / individuals that receive support from the cash events.
3. We talked about the Repair Cafe idea. Ben was keen to get this going on the last Sunday of each month, starting from the end of August. We agreed to promote it in the group and that the invite would be mainly for me, although not exclusively.

It was good to be together and we all left feeling a bit better from having been in each others company.

This meeting was attended by Lisa, Ben, Phil, Sandra, Sam, Brenda and Angela.