Dear Association Member,
I wrote out to the membership on 23 January to update everyone (via both our website and social media pages) on the elections of the Chair, Sec, Treasurer, PRO and RD at the AGM we held on 22 January in Birmingham. In that letter I promised to write out to you all again once we had gone through the process of forming up the rest of Council and they had taken post. This has now been completed and the new Council met for the first time on 15 Feb. Shown below is the structure of Council as it stands today:
Firstly, I would like to thank everyone who volunteered to fill appointed roles on Council this year. Many may not appreciate the commitment filling a role on Council represents and the sacrifices individuals make to do so. I would just wish to take a moment to particularly thank those who served previously who have not been reappointed again this year. Whilst this will potentially have been quite disappointing, hopefully it might result in more opportunities to focus on your own shooting, other areas of the IPSC or indeed your wider interests beyond dynamic shooting. For those listed in the chart above; I would like to thank you in advance for your efforts in delivering everything Council intends to get after this year for the benefit of the Association and its members.
Before giving you an insight as to what Council is looking to achieve this year, I think it worthwhile to briefly unpack some of what you can see in the chart above as there are a few noticeable changes for this year alongside a few tweaks which are still to be made.
In the Secretary’s area, we have seconded Caroline Askew to work with Steve Dodd to deal primarily with club and other organisation affiliations and renewals. It is no small task that Steve has single-handedly been undertaking for the last few years; the appointment of an assistant will go a long way to easing the pressure caused by the surge in activity that inevitably presents in April each year at renewal.
In the PRO’s area, we have decided to split out the roles of Comms Officer and Media Officer. Having been amalgamated some time back into a single role, this year we have capitalised on the opportunity to bring Aryan Alipour onto Council as the Media Officer. He has the portfolio of generating and managing both our internal and external facing media content alongside other external engagement. Aryan brings a great deal to council as not only an active competitor and Range Officer; professionally he is involved with a number of modern media focussed projects which I am sure will help to really get our message out there. This leaves Alex Moreton to focus on the management of our IT back-shop and technical services whilst also maintaining our links with other organisations such as the British Shooting Sports Council (BSSC). We have also standardised the construct of the Regional Organiser (RO) /Area Ambassador (AA) networks by reducing to a single AA in Scotland (this will remain under review and should the task become overly burdensome to the Scotland AA, appointment of an additional AA may be considered).
There is one role still to be finalised – the Chair of our NROI. When going through the appointment process there was no clear candidate for the Executive Council to select. Rather than make a hasty appointment, it was decided that Richard Clifton would retain that role whilst the best candidate could be found from the ranks of the NROI. We expect to identify a candidate shortly and will publish the change in due course.
As to our forward plan for the year; we are not planning a radical departure from previous direction of travel. We are committed to continuing the progress towards delivering the strategic goals of Vision 26 (vision 26 was presented to the membership at the AGM in 2021. Further detail can be obtained from the PRO) alongside a number of smaller projects which were discussed at the AGM in Jan:
- Review and Update of the Constitution. As many will be aware our Constitution has remained largely unchanged since it was originally adopted in 1982. The only amendments were the result of incorporating a new Object and supporting changes under a Scheme in 2020. We intend to engage with the Charity Commission for England and Wales to refresh the whole document and bring it in line with their current best practice to ensure it is fit for purpose now and into the future (this will require endorsement by a General Meeting and may result in an Extraordinary General Meeting being called at some point).
- Review the Format of General Meetings. Since the beginning of the COVID 19 pandemic, video teleconferencing has become pervasive in all walks of life. Whilst once the preserve of business, it is now commonplace and was used for 2 consecutive years to conduct our AGM. Having decided to return to a traditional in person format this year, those who attended were asked for their opinions on future such meetings; should they be virtual or in person? With no clear view in the room, Council took away an action to look at introducing a format which will allow maximum engagement with the process by the membership whilst minimising the associated overheads for both the Association and individual member (this will have a dependency on the review of the Constitution).
- Female Focus Project. Started last year, Council intends to maintain the support behind the initiative to promote and enable participation alongside competition by our Lady members. The RD will maintain oversight on behalf of Council of the sub-committee who are delivering this project.
- Junior Shooter Project. In a similar vein to the Female Focus Project, we intend to launch a similar project to promote and support participation alongside competition by our Junior members across all disciplines.
- Level IV and V Match Hosting. Last year the Association made an unsuccessful bid to host a Level IV European Shotgun match. Having discussed the possibilities of bidding to host such matches in the future at the AGM, it was clear that the aspiration of those who attended was that the Association should look to bid for these in the future. Council will look to set the conditions for successful bids to host Level IV and V matches within the Region for Shotgun, Action Air and Mini Rifle when the opportunity arises.
Hopefully you should now know who your Council for this year is and, in the broadest terms, a few specific projects we are intending to get after for the benefit of the membership. If anyone has any specific questions for me or any other member of Council, please do not hesitate to get in touch via email. Getting hold of any member of Council by email is quite straightforward; simply send an email to firstname.surname@ukpsa.org to get hold of any of the team shown in the Org Chart and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
DVC
Andy Williams
Chair
