GWC Charity Support

Paul van Haver

Hello fellow GWC members,

As introduced by Andy in our last club night, this month we are changing our charity support programme. Firstly, I am dlighted to be taking over the baton as Charity Officer and looking forward to the continued success of the programme and your generous support. Secondly as you probably know we have supported Headway for many years and we feel it is time to change the way we run our charity support.

The main change is that we would like to involve you all in deciding what charities we support over the year, and as such spread the monetary or in-kind donations to local causes. The general principle is that we'd like to support local charities who have an impact on local communities where we all live. These tend to be smaller charities rather than larger national charities with a local branch.

So how will this work?

Well, we will be running a quarterly cycle to decide where to donate. This will start by asking you to nominate a charity you would like us to consider. There is a form on the website to nominate a charity. The form captures the basic details of the charity, like name, location and mission. We also like you to give us a motivation as to why you think we should support your nominated charity. I will send an email at the beginning of each quarter asking for your nominations.

At the end of the quarter I will have gathered all the nominees and I will send out a poll allowing members to vote for their favourite for the quarter. The outcome of the poll together with the details and motivation for each nominee will feed into our committee meeting agenda following the quarter end. The committee will then review all this and make a decision on how to use our funding.

I will then communicate the decision via email and will publish this on the website too, so we are fully transparent. Then of course the cycle starts again for the following quarter.

It's great that we can do this as a chapter as it supports our vision to have social impact as a community.

I hope this all makes sense.

The first email will go out in the first week of April, but if you already have a charity in mind, you are free to use the form now.

The nomination form is on the website here...

I hope you will all support this new way of running the programme and I am looking forward to your nominations. If you have any questions then of course feel free to contact me.

Your Charity Officer.

Paul van Haver

07976839630

pvh@greatwesternchapter.uk