Newark Civic Trust
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 170 individual members for many years – good but not great – whereas our partners from the business community now total 8, 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” on committees, at Newark Open Day and when presenting our story to other organisations is undertaken by, at most, by 6 willing workhorses. ( The exception here is our Planning Committee where as many as a dozen will turn up on a wet Monday in January to offer their views on whatever is in the development pipeline.) 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 – as a Scotsman, quite naturally, I 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 this form – 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 hope soon to create 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.
Peter Duncan
Membership and Recruitment Secretary
