Trustee Meeting Wednesday 15 July 2020 6.30pm on Zoom

Brockwell Park Community Greenhouses
Trustee Meeting held on Zoom
Wednesday 15 July 2020 6.30pm

Agenda

Chair’s remarks
The charity has met its short term objectives of maintaining the garden and reimagining volunteering during the lockdown. We are successfully operating public opening at the weekend whilst protecting volunteers. Distanced Family and Childrens activities have restarted and more are planned. We successfully transitioned to online retail during lockdown and back to point of sale on opening. We have also been awarded several grants for project work.

Charity operations have gone through a period of considerable change in the last 16 weeks. Both staff and the volunteer operations team have had to work exceptionally hard during this period and are still overstretched. We are grateful to them.

Whilst the charity is currently not depleting reserves we remain concerned about the medium term future. Even if a second wave of Corona Virus is avoided we are entering a recession in the UK which could be deeper than any of us have experienced. This may be worsened by our eventual relations with the EU.

Our community’s discretionary spending is likely to be reduced and this may impact our retail and events revenue. Grant-aiding trusts’ funds are also pressured in a falling market making core funding even more difficult to find. We will still need to conserve our resources carefully. It is likely that we will need to deplete reserves during the winter months.

However we remain committed to investing to restart our education programme and hope it will be possible to do this in the spring of 2021. It is clearer than ever that we will need to rethink the economics of our education programme for the longer term.

Director’s report – Kate
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q8pftbGkjUUaM1J-5-u4phs0utmqiL8d/view?usp=sharing

Management accounts to June 30 2020 – Andrew
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11a2FUR4aRuWX0ExgF3DMBGLQUjeKV4eV/view?usp=sharing

Trustee development

As this is the penultimate meeting in our term we would like to know which trustees intend to stand for reelection so as to facilitate search for replacements if required.

Membership 2020

Under the terms of clause 31.7 of the articles the charity updated the members register in the fourth quarter of 2019. 166 people qualified for membership under the terms of clause 31.4 and will be deemed members for 2020. Further volunteers may qualify for membership during the 2020 year under this clause.