12 Oct Minutes of CF Committee Meeting – 12 October 2020
Attended via Zoom: Marielle Drier, Elizabeth Mackie, Georgia Norton, Andrew Day, Mel Solomou, Andi Voros, Ayla Us, Joanna Shakhmin, Leon Choueke, Cindy Dos Santos, Alan Midgely, Lorraine Gerrard, Enrico de Vita, Louise Foulkes, Sarah Wiley, Victoria Roberts and Katie Belkin.
Finances
The bottom line from Liz’s update is that we have unallocated funds of around £10k. Although there is still a large amount of money in the account this mostly consists of allocated/saved funds for specific projects (playgrounds, completion of Y3/4 loss, clean air, Learning Enhancement Fund etc) plus the reserves.
We have already had very significantly reduced income due to lockdown and this will continue for the foreseeable future.
We approved £500 for merchandising (Andi) and £500 to top up a grant for a new piano.
Events
[This was a long and wide-ranging discussion so apologies that this summary only skims what was said] Because we’re reinventing events to move them online or socially distanced, they
are basically new events. This means reps may need more support and timelines need to be thought through: do the teams have enough time to organise, is there enough notice of the events? Also budgeting needs to be carefully considered. Upfront expenditure is a bigger risk if we haven’t run the event in that format before Etc.
We will need extra people to support Mel and Ayla, who are dealing with Reps and Events.
We should be up front about asking people to donate in lieu of the spending they would have done at eg. Summer Fair, Fireworks, pointing out that otherwise there will be a shortage of funds. The link to fund raising sites we use (EasyFundraising, Amazon Smile, Givey etc) needs to be strategically placed in the Newsletter and in a separate message to the reps to send to their classes.
Single-issue fundraising (e.g. clean air, playground) seems to get a good response so we might want to hold some events or donation drives in aid of particular objectives.
Some updates on specific events:
- Some form of Winter Bazaar looks possible! We need to make it COVID compliant but there may be ways of doing this. Leon asked us to note that no detailed planning or announcement should be made until the school has approved the plan.
- Christmas parties are viable (Leon)
- Yr 5 have planned a pumpkin spotting exercise + prize draw per year group, during half term week, suggested donations of £1
- Coleridge Cookbook planning is underway. Georgia is leading on this.
- Quiz will be online.
This is just a taster and there were a lot of ideas bouncing around. It was agreed that we should have a separate meeting to canvas ideas, and throw it open to anyone with an idea who would like to join in. Leon emphasised that the community cohesion that CF can provide is at least as valuable as the fundraising right now. There were some embryonic ideas about how
we might be able to expand into that area more – providing we can find people to drive it. Andy offered to lead on that.
One idea is a series of Welcome meetings on Zoom for new families. A group of us could just be on there to chat and answer questions. Another idea is to have a series of talks on interesting subjects not necessarily all parenting.
Sarah reported that there was good progress on the website and this should be ready to launch soon.
Handovers
- We are going to find out if Anna Maria Volaric can take over from Peter Salerno on Accounts. The Treasury team are going to move forward with getting online banking.
- Andi is happy to continue this year on merchandising but we need someone to shadow her with a view to taking over. Victoria Masters is interested in helping on this and will contact Andi.
- We didn’t get a new volunteer to liaise with Martyn Gerrard so one will need to be found.
Andrew Day 13.10.20