Leigh on Mendip
Memorial Hall
Annual Report
2007-2008
30 September 2008
The Managing Trustees present their Report for the year ended 30th September 2008, which should be read in conjunction with the separate Statement of Accounts for the same period.
The trusteeship
of the Charity was transferred from Leigh on Mendip Parish Council to
the Hall
Committee on the 22nd of October 1996. The Parish Council remains Custodian Trustee of the
Charity. The
Charity Commission number is 304574.
The Trust is
established to provide and maintain the Village Hall for the benefit of
the
inhabitants of Leigh on Mendip without distinction of political,
religious or
other opinions with the object of improving the quality of life for the
inhabitants. The Hall is available for hire by any individual or
organisation
in accordance with the standard hiring agreement and scale of charges
adopted
for the year. It is
intended that the
scale of charges be sufficient to generate enough income to meet the
ordinary
expenditure incurred in providing the Hall. Significant improvements are funded by specific appeals,
fund-raising
and grants. The
Management Committee is
elected or appointed on an annual basis, with the officers being
elected from
the membership of the Committee. The
Annual General Meeting is usually held in November.
1) Maintenance etc: This year we finally began the project we had been thinking about for some time, the building of an extension. We had Hall funds saved for this and grants were obtained from Somerset and Mendip Councils, the Aggregate Levy Fund and our own Parish Council, without which we would not have been able to proceed and we are very grateful for all the help given. We now have a much needed storeroom leaving the Hall and stage uncluttered and a very pleasant small meeting room which we hope the village will enjoy using.
2) Bookings: As always there have been a few changes and currently there is a new dance and exercise session on Thursday afternoons with the prospect of regular monthly bookings from the Active Living Centre and Gardening groups in the near future and possibly a small computer class too. More general computer courses may be arranged from next year, a telephone line to enable this, which will also be available for emergency calls, will be installed shortly. Existing hirers include the WI, Parish Council, Toddler Group, Art and Yoga Classes and the Short Mat Bowls group. In addition the Hall continues to provide a valuable facility for one off or yearly activities in the village such as Christmas fairs, children’s parties, musical evenings, Burns Night celebrations and many more.
3) Fundraising: Firstly a brief mention of the 100 Club which has been running for many years now and continues to provide a modest but valuable contribution to our funds, many thanks to Keith for all his work running this. The first fundraising event of the year was the Big Band concert in February, originally planned for October 07, which was a very pleasant evening with a good attendance. We were very grateful to Des and Wendy Worley for once again running the village quiz in April and I hope to persuade them to do so again in 2009, however if anyone would like to volunteer to give them a break one year I’m sure they would be very grateful. The Village Fair this year was hit by poor weather, something we all got very used to in 2008 but in spite of this raised a good amount for each group. Many thanks to all committee members who helped with the refreshments, but especially Gill Baker.
We then tried to organise a Mice Racing evening which was to be run by the Masqueraders Carnival Club. This turned out to be doomed as sadly just before the first date planned in May the organiser from the Masqueraders was killed in a farming accident and we cancelled the event. Unfortunately the re-arranged date in August proved to clash with holidays etc for many of the people who had reserved tickets in May and in spite of efforts to sell tickets it became clear that not enough people would be going to make the evening a success so once again we had to cancel. The jury is still out on whether we try a third time! However we did go ahead with the raffle planned to run with the event and with some super prizes all obtained by Marsha Read and all tickets sold by her and Sue Vaughan, we made several hundred pounds on this which was a great help for the carpeting and decorating of the extension and partial re-decoration of the main Hall. Finally, although strictly speaking it was outside our last financial year, a mention of the Take Art show which took place just over a week ago. We had a wonderful turn out for this, largely due to Take Art’s advertising bringing in people from outside Leigh and we will have made a reasonable profit on the evening, not always the case with Take Art events who provide professional acts and great publicity but do have a minimum charge which can be hard for small villages to meet.
4) Personnel: I have already mentioned Marsha Read who is the Parish Council rep and would like to thank her for her excellent contribution in her first year on the committee which has been in both ideas and effort, I’m glad to say she is continuing as Parish Council rep this year. I am also pleased to say that for the coming year we will at last have a representative on the committee from the Under Fives group and hope to see Vanessa Barns at future meetings.
5) Future plans: the Active Living Centre group is planning to put in a bigger cooker in kitchen in the near future which will become part of the Hall’s equipment for others to use too. Future plans for the kitchen include a storage unit to replace the current tables and re-decoration. We have had problems with damp in the kitchen recently but think we are now on top of this so should be able to go ahead with re-decoration once all other changes are in place. At the moment our next big maintenance project is the re-surfacing of the wooden floor, which we hope to have done next spring. There is the possibility of some grant aid for this but even if this is not successful we should have enough in Hall funds to have the work done. It is 10 years since the floor was last treated and the result of this can easily be seen with the many patches of bare wood visible. All 4 companies who have given us quotes are confident there is enough depth of wood to take a re-sanding but have all warned we need to monitor the floor once treated and have a simple, relatively inexpensive, re-seal every few years as necessary. These plans are all part of our committee’s ongoing duty to keep the Hall in good order and improve it where possible.
The separate statement (available from the Committee) shows the current state of the finances, which the Committee consider satisfactory. The Bankers are HSBC Bank plc, Frome and the National Savings Bank.
The members of the Committee during the year and their appointing body if appropriate were:
Name Office Appointing body
Gill Baker W.I.
Sue Cambourne
Keith Cockroft Treasurer
Roger Orpwood
Brenda Wigmore Booking Clerk
Marsha Read Parish Council
Sue Vaughan Chair, Secretary
We also thank John Phillips for his input.
Our constitution allows for up to 6 members representing other groups plus up to 8 non representational members giving a maximum of 14 but also allows us to co-opt a further 2 members if required.
Approved by the Committee
3rd November 2008