Membership and Recruitment

For the Trust to prosper, it is essential that we have – at worst – a stable number of members, that a decent percentage of these be active on the Trust’s behalf and that, through them, we generate sufficient funds to secure our vision and goals. So, how are we faring against these benchmarks? In terms of of numbers, we have hovered around 130 individual members for many years – good but not great – whereas our partners from the business community now total 6, a great advance and all of the highest quality and mostly active in fields relating to the Trust’s work. Turning to our members’ involvement, in contrast, there is scope here for real improvement as almost all the “heavy lifting” is undertaken by the Executive Committee. We are, however, fortunate to have regular comments forwarded to us by our members on planning matters; members’ also regularly submit comments on other local issues via the Newark Advertiser. A few more volunteers would make the world of difference: the workload is not arduous and would, of course be reduced by its being further shared out. Moreover, whilst taking the tasks in hand seriously, we do not take ourselves so and thus a good time is had by all!

Finally, any organisation needs some money to achieve its objectives – we do not believe that you can ever have too much – and members’ subscriptions are by and large our sole source of income. We do everything possible to contain our subscription levels so that an increase in numbers is inevitably the means by which we build our war-chest. Therefore, any family or friends that you can direct towards us would be very well received indeed – Please download and print off this form then forward it to our Membership Secretary – for full membership details.

Finally, as alluded to above, a recent development has both bolstered our reserves and enhanced our authority in Newark. Some prominent local companies have now signed up for our corporate package, endorsing our vision and bringing their expertise and experience to our discussions where appropriate. Their details will be found within the Magazine and we have created links to their websites in order that we all may get to know them better.

Members, once secured, need of course to be retained. We hope and believe that what we currently offer the membership achieves this – we appear to suffer few “casualties” – but would welcome any suggestions as to how we could up our game. We can, all of us, always do better.

Membership and Recruitment Secretary

 
Striving to improve the quality of our built environment and the community
Our new publication: Newark Civic Trust Magazine