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Civic Voice
The Gosport Society was a long-term affiliate of the Civic Trust. Unfortunately, for financial reasons the Civic Trust folded in 2009, as many of you will know. However, the failure of the Civic Trust meant that there was no national body to act as a focus and national lobbying voice for the many hundred of Societies like ours. This vacuum is now being addressed by the formation on the 17th April 2010 of the Civic Voice.
A Board of Trustees for this new organisation has been formed and is led by Paula Ridley. Paula has over 30 years’ experience in the civic movement, including positions as Chairman of the Victoria and Albert Museum and Hon. Vice President of Merseyside Civic Society. The remaining six Trustees are all members of a Civic Society. To date 100 Societies have joined. We have been kept up to date with the gestation of the Civic Voice organisation and, from what we have seen, it looks to be a more active organisation than was experienced during the final years of its predecessor, the Civic Trust. Indeed, the early signs are that it is vigorously pursuing similar aims to those we have in our Constitution.
Affiliation to the Civic Trust was also important to the running of our Society in that it enabled us to obtain a competitive price for our public liability insurance. Your Committee tried unsuccessfully to find sensible quotations for the insurance when the existing cover ran out, but the best that could be found was an annual premium in the region of £400. Civic Voice has negotiated public liability insurance with terms and cost similar to those we obtained in previous years through the Civic Trust. We will, however, be required to join the Civic Voice in 2011, at an annual fee of £2 per Society member, if we wish to continue to benefit from this cost effective insurance.
We have a membership of 234 and, assuming numbers remain similar in 2011, the subscription to the Civic Voice will be in the region of £470, or roughly an extra £1.35 per member compared with what we paid to be affiliated to the Civic Trust. Your Committee considers that joining can only be achieved by increasing the annual subscription, if we are to avoid eating into funds we have accumulated for projects to benefit the people of the Borough, such as those described in our Chairman’s and Treasurer’s Reports. We appreciate that we had to increase the subscriptions this year to cover our running costs and joining the Civic Voice will add to the subscription you will be asked to pay in 2011 to be a member of the Gosport Society. This being the case, the Committee felt that the question of joining the Civic Voice should be decided by the Society’s members, and that, given its importance, members should be made aware of the background to the proposal before a vote is taken at the AGM on 16th June 2010. Roger Mawby Vice-Chairman
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