Minutes for GREN board meeting held on 21st March 2012
GREN Board Members: Michele Atkins – Chair; Paul Harper – Secretary; Oonagh Kelleher – Treasurer; John Hoggett.
GREN members in attendance: Ornella Trevisan; Summreen Sheikh; John Booth.
- Minutes of previous meeting
Minutes of members meeting in January 2012 were agreed.
Matters arising:
Proposed GREN Newsletter: Michele & Paul want to contact Mary Paul about this – John B. to provide them with Mary’s contact details.
Website and member communications: discussed whether members received copies when material posted to website, and if website had ‘Yahoo-like’ messaging features.
On sign-up (or later) members can opt to receive by e-mail copies of postings to the site – 3 categories:
- Events – received by many
- News – received by less
- Messages – received by few
Originally defaulted to ‘No’ – which may explain why relatively few people receive suchcommunications - but default when new members sign up now changed to ‘Yes’.
Users with Admin rights (all Committee) have facility to e-mail all members – this is used sparingly.
Agreed: Michele and Paul to contact members to suggest updating their Account details to receive more information from GREN.
Website has facility for themed messaging but this has seldom been used and is only visible to logged-in members.
- Proposed Networking Event
Summreen and John H. reported on proposed event in May-June 2012.
Purpose seen as for people and groups to connect and share. Proposed 2-hours on a weekday evening.
Needed to be attractive or people would not come to it. Suggestions included:
- Feature a Group (or groups) that wanted help with some activity or campaign
- Have a social element
- Structure it e.g. ask pairs of normally un-related groups to work together on an issue
- Provide food
Summreen said some people at Friends Meeting House were thinking of running a similar event.
Oonagh said funds stood at £90-90p. RISC hall hire was £22-50p.
Agreed: Summreen and John H. to investigate possible co-operation with Friends Meeting House people and to prepare costed proposal by 4th April for Board to discuss by e-mail.
- Reading Climate Change Partnership (RCCP) and CC Strategy Revision
Using outputs from workshops held at the “Reading Means Business on Climate Change” meeting on 12th January the RCCP Board had chosen 8 themes for chapters of a revised CC Strategy (to be owned by RCCP – present strategy was owned by RBC) and theme leads to co-ordinate the work had been appointed for seven of the themes.
Paul was joint theme lead for two themes, and John B. was theme lead for another.
Input to development of themes to be obtained via Reading Green Business Network (RGBN) website – intended to go live before Easter. There will also likely be face to face meetings of groups interested in a particular theme and more public events to consult on development of strategy more generally e.g. Green City Forum or GREN event.
Timescales were – Draft of Themes by June; Draft Action Plans by September; Final Draft Dec/Jan; Launch April 2013.
Agreed: Paul to circulate details of the themes.
Ornella asked if there had been any follow-up from RCCP meeting on 12th January. John B. said e-mail had been sent by RCCP to attendees giving link to Reading Green Business Network website where the presentations and workshop outputs were available However there had been no further communication either to attendees in general or to GREN members.
The meeting felt that GREN members would like to be kept better informed of progress on these matters.
Agreed: Paul and John B. to prepare proposals for the next GREN Board meeting for a GREN event to encourage participation in the Strategy Revision for the next GREN Board meeting.
- Fundraising
Paul said there was a deadline of end April for applications for six-monthly tranche of grant aid from Co-operative Bank to organisations (such as GREN) that banked with it. But it wasn’t clear if this funding was for ‘events’ or could be used for routine costs, and it wasn’t clear when any money granted would become available.
Agreed: Paul and Michele to find out more and apply if appropriate.
- Any Other Business
Agreed to defer other discussions because some members wished to attend a Labour Party Green Policy Forum which started at 20:00.
- Date of next board meeting
Tuesday 1st May 6.00 p.m. BTCV offices – Oonagh to provide details of location.
The meeting closed at 8.15 pm.
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