On 14 May, 11 of us gathered in Friends House, opposite Euston Station, for the 2008 AGM of AMED.   John Wilkes chaired the meeting, due to the unavoidable  absence of the Chair, David Shepherd.  John managed to lead us effectively through the formal business in just 35 minutes: a record!   Important points to emerge include:

• we have improved on the previous year’s performance by ending the financial year with a small surplus;

• we have reduced the overhead of our Office and administrative cost from 85% of our expenditure to 80%.  We aim to reduce this further in the current year;

• there is real optimism about our future and we are focusing our energy and resources into:

  • refreshing our membership database, which we knew has let us down in the past and

  • delivering a new AMED website, which is an essential part of a determined effort on how we present ourselves to the outside world.

• members voiced that they belonged to AMED because it is a meeting place for the unconventional; that the people who one meet at AMED are open and ready for new ways of thinking and learning.

• Our principal route to financial security is a growing Membership base, and we invite all existing Members to see if they can help us to recruit four new members a month.  

Following the formal business, Belina Raffy and Paul Z Jackson led us through an Improv session which looked at our attitudes to leadership and got us thinking about the leadership of AMED.   These two pictures were produced by

participants. On the left we have the idea of the leader who switches on everyone’s ideas and makes it possible for people to achieve.  On the right we see the leader as tour leader (with red umbrella!) enabling a diverse group of people to move forward to the dawn of a new future! 

We all had great fun in this session, and we all gained some personal and organisational insights.  Once more AMED has proved that AGMs do not have to be boring, and that they can be unconventional and successful simultaneously.