A Great Meeting

AGM usually stands for Annual General Meeting, the annual get-together the board is obliged to have to discuss our operations and deal with regulatory stuff. Sounds dull, huh. Well, with our directors and members living all over the UK, and one abroad, our AGM is the one time of year we all get together in one room to catch up, reflect on what we’re doing and where our future plans lie, in person. So our AGM stands for A Great Meeting – and Saturday 28th June certainly was one!

In a day-long meeting, there is a LOT to cover to review a year in the charity. So we thought we’d just give you some of the highlights!

First things first, we welcome a new director into our team, Terry Goddard. Being a group of volunteers doing this in our spare time, our board tends to see some changes over time with people’s commitments naturally changing. But this new addition brings us up to five directors, joining the other four who have all been with the charity for between 3 and 6 years, and two members. We’re so pleased to have him alongside now and look forward to our roles developing.

An extremely positive outcome to note between our 2013 meeting and 2014 is a significant increase in our regular donors who are giving monthly donations to help cover core costs at CALM Africa. This is absolutely fantastic; these regular donations are what will help CALM Africa sustain their operations and standards.

Across the day we discussed ways to improve our internal communications as this is always a difficulty for a geographically divided group! We reviewed what fundraising activity has been done and where we need to focus our efforts. Some volunteers have been absolutely brilliant supporters over recent months in running their own activities to raise money for various areas of CALM Africa’s work and we can’t thank them enough for their proactive effort!!

Our focus as we set out at the beginning of 2014 remains the same for this year, to increase the level of unrestricted funding we raise. Fundraising for specific projects is always fantastic, but our constant need is for funding that can be provided to CALM Africa to be allocated to priority areas of work at a given time.

We’re also so pleased to see an increase in the number of our supporters as well. Our followers on our social media channels have grown hugely this year – join us if you haven’t already at www.facebook.com/childrenfirstuganda or on Twitter @childrenfirsug! This year, our social links have even created connections with other charity organisations who have just visited CALM Africa in June to see about working together in future! Helping us grow further on social media is invaluable in raising awareness of our cause.

Needless to say there were many ideas flying around for things we can do, so watch this space for what we manage to put into action over coming months! A great meeting full of positivity and on-going support for our friends at CALM Africa, finished off with a lovely view of the river to unwind!

Our next newsletter will be out later this summer. To receive your copy of news and updates on activities at CFU, please email media@childrenfirstuganda.co.uk to get onto our mailing list!