Welcome everybody to this year’s canoe club AGM. We’ve got an exciting agenda not only covering the mechanism of the AGM, which is primarily to elect new members onto the committee and to present our highly coveted trophies. We also have a presentation by Julie and Mark Hamilton for their amazing participation in the Yukon 1000 race and we have food available, plus some time for questions from the floor to allow you to hold your committee to account.
It’s been a very eventful year for the canoe club and indeed the committee. Firstly, I’dlike to welcome Greta Chudley and her family. We are all aware of the dangers in anyactivity of life, but Colin’s passing early this year certainly brought home the personalrisk that we all take when even paddling on the placid waters of the Avon. So, let’s take a few moments to remember Colin while we show a short video of the commemorative paddle we had on Sept 14th.
Thank you Mark for putting that together.
So back to the business of the AGM and the Minutes of the last AGM. Do you all accept them? So, my report as chair. The headline news is Bristol canoe club continues to grow; wehave over 165 members and I’d like to extend a very warm welcome to all those whojoined during the year. The club continues to oVer opportunities in canoeing and kayaking, especially for those living in central Bristol and adjacent areas – as stated inour constitution. I should add we seem to have a growing cell in the northeast of England too. We are primarily an adult club, which is run by volunteers and have developed four key disciplines:
• white water if there’s rain
• polo for those of us who can shout!!
• racing – which has certainly grown considerably this year, and I’m really pleased to see the continuation of regular training sessions and the huge turnout at last weekend’s regatta.
• general paddling: this is the largest group on Spond of people and covers everything from coastal paddling to flat water paddling, organizing picnic paddles on the Avon, surfing or those simply paddling from their armchairs! For each of those disciplines, I’d like to thank all those people who’ve organized those events and trips during year.
On the committee, my biggest challenge has been keeping the committee meetings running to 90 minutes, which is something I set out as an objective when I took the position 2 years ago. We’ve had a lot to do this year, and I’d like to thank everybody who’s participated on the committee since bravely volunteering at last year’s AGM. The committee sat in 10 meetings and all members contributed a lot in each of these meetings as well as outside the meeting, such as the implementation Spond, our club management app. Spond took a lot of eVort to do and particularly Anne, Ben, Jenny and Tom were very instrumental in that. Dave Brain has been a super star working with Coln in updating our storage and maintaining our equipment.
The committee this year adopted a Modernizing & Improvement agenda to drive club improvement. This agenda has worked on producing internal recommendations and procedures to align with Paddle UK and ensure the smoother running of the club. You can all view these documents which are stored on the website and in Spond – I welcome any suggestions, corrections or other feedback.
With over 165 members, a bank balance sometimes exceeding £X, ever larger equipment assets and long-term lease & payment commitments on storage and the pool, as well as recognising the importance of the safety and welfare of members in our sport (which we are all only too aware), we need to improve our club management. The outcome of customising our procedures to national recommendation from PUK will ensure we have properly benchmarked our management capability and hopefully allow us to become accredited as a PUK Quality club. The benefits of being a Quality Club enable us to demonstrate good governance, respect for safety and the safeguarding of our members, which is the bedrock for any successful club. It will provides a solid foundation for, amongst other things, recruiting, retaining and developing members, improving our volunteer workforce, developing higher quality paddling activities, improving facilities and potentially future fund-raising.
Now some of you might debate whether as a committee we should spend more time on this type of club management, rather than developing canoeing. I think on balance it’s the role of the committee to do this and the Discipline Leads along with you the members using tools such as Spond & our recommendation documents, to plan and schedule more paddling activities for your chosen canoeing discipline.
I said earlier, we are a volunteer run club. Apart from coaches we have hired in the past for beginners’ courses, no one gains benefits or financial compensation. However, for the record we have developed a travel expense policy for volunteers organising events. The committee has also decided to provide Pizza during meetings – now there’s an incentive to sit on the committee and any you qualified club coaches volunteering to support our summer beginner’s courses will receive a free year’s club membership. We need volunteers to organize more trips participate in races, tournaments, competitions, teams, and indeed social events – so that we can gather and gossip about what happened at the latest race or river trip. I am very pleased to see more ad-hoc trips to rivers with water, CardiV, Surfing locations etc appear on Spond – thank you to those organising them. We also need volunteers to sit on the committee to ensure we continue to grow, improve and develop the club for the future.
From a canoeing perspective, I will leave our discipline leads to provide in-depth analysis of our canoeing over the year. However, I would like to mention the many people in the club who have taken recognised 3rd party course in better paddling, coaching, activity leading and First Aid. Thank you to all of them. If any you want to pursue any of these courses to help you and your fellow paddlers, we oVer bursaries to cover your costs.
This year we had our first Activity Day where we brought the disciplines together and showed oV our diVerent styles. Many thanks Mark for organising this event. The pool has been well attended and again I’d like to see more people turning up to pool sessions and Racings’ weekly training, as they are both valuable social resources, where club members gather weekly to paddle and socialise.
We have implemented Spond and had numerous members welcoming the usage for messaging, membership groupings and calendar, with only one or two dissenters. We can still gain more benefit from Spond with better targeted messaging, polling and payments to possibly enable us to replace PayPal AND WEB Collect. Our intention is keep using Email for important announcements alongside Spond, while also using WhatsApp for groups chats on a club activity or within a discipline.
Assuming I’m re-elected, plans for next year include aiming to complete Quality Club. We are planning to reengineer our website to make it more modern with a more attractive landing page to attract people into the club. We will accept proposals from any web design members, so please come and see me. However, back to the volunteer theme, we will need volunteers to write content for publishing. We also intend growing our storage facilities by extending the cage so we can store more club boats for new members and provide more space for personal boat storage, for those of you who have difficulty storing their own. Again, we will need volunteers to design and build this structure. We will also continue to replace club kit as needed across all disciplines, but we do encourage new members to acquire their own kit, so again use Spond to advertise your requirements or what you want to sell.
Lastly, I’d like to thank all the committee for their contribution and especially those who are prepared to stay on for another year!! I want to stress again that we are a volunteer club and if the members don’t volunteer to organise or participate, we don’t have a flourishing club, so I really encourage all of you to put your hand up to support activities. Please also accept or decline invitations in a timely manner when you can on Spond, enabling organisers it to make sure that we have the right facilities in place to run the activity. We have a range of policies and recommendation documents to help you organise an activity. I’ve also published a Club Manual, or as it’s an oVicially called a standard operating plan, which is basically an overview of how we run this club, what’s available e.g. boat storage and boat rental, types of membership and bursaries for training. Other documents include updated Risk Assessments, how to run a trip, Safeguarding policy, H7S, Code of Conduct for members, Membership terms and conditions and Committee responsibilities. These are NOT mandated rules but recommendations and guidelines.
So, in conclusion I wanted to thank you the members for continuing to enable this club to grow and flourish and I do hope more of you will stand up and participate in not only organizing activities but also joining those activities across the various disciplines.
Thank you very much and over to our Treasurer.
Mark Gillett BCC Chair.