Showcasing our year of connecting and collaborating
For a small charity, an Annual General Meeting is a chance to showcase everything they have achieved during the previous year. New trustees are often welcomed, and finances for the past year are reviewed. It’s a time to celebrate achievements and catch up with supporters.
Harrogate & District Community Action’s AGM took place last month in a fantastic venue, the Wesley Centre, where we were warmly welcomed. Our meeting was attended by around 65 people, representing a wide variety of local organisations, all working to help our community.
We shared how our partnership projects like “Help out Harrogate” are boosting volunteering, making a positive impact and enabling volunteers to move easily between lots of different groups, providing extra capacity for special events.
We were all inspired by Zoe & Bethany our amazing young Ambassadors for our youth volunteering project, the Power of 10, who explained how they had got into volunteering and the different ways they had helped. We heard from Janet, who found joining our Community Fit crew was a life changing experience, leading to a trip to South America with our friends at local charity Artizan. Our Community Fit volunteers run together to a different local community venue each week, help out for an hour and then run back, combining exercise and volunteering.
We explained how our dedicated Harrogate Easier Living Project staff team and volunteers continue to provide both practical and emotional support, making a real difference for people who don't know where else to turn.
All of this is set out in our Impact Report, the document we launch this time each year, where we try to bring our work to life. If you would like a copy, please do call in to Community House on East Parade, or if you are online, you can go to: hadca.org.uk/our-impact
Finally, we welcomed Jackie Rowbottom who explained how the Macmillan Cancer Support team at Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust is working with us and other local organisations to connect people living with and beyond cancer to support and activities for their physical and emotional recovery.
The date we had chosen for our meeting was World Homeless Day, so we were pleased to be able to share the opportunity for attendees to go along to the Harrogate Homeless Project's Open Day after our meeting. It was also World Mental Health Day and we displayed information from mental health charities. Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do, and we strongly believe that charities and community groups thrive when they help and support each other.
Local charities are always looking for new people to join as Trustees (the volunteers who lead a charity and decide how it is run). If you think you could spare some time to help steer a local charity, there are 14 different organisations on our website currently looking for help. See hadca.org.uk/volunteer or call in and see us at Community House for details.