Co-Chairs Annual Report for 2004

AMED has emerged strengthened from another difficult year in 2004. My fellow Council Members stuck to their guns, and I believe, that we have survived that struggle, and emerged more financially secure than for many a previous year. We have also taken measures towards a real re-vitalisation of our Association.

At last year’s AGM I expressed optimism that, thanks to the idea of seeking Gift Aid relief, which our Office Manager, Concepta Waiment suggested, we would move from teetering on the verge of insolvency to having a surplus of around £10,000 which we could spend on development work.

Earlier in the year we had made the decision to dispense with the services of the Accountant who was also our Auditor, and instead to engage a book-keeper and seek the services of an Auditor with experience of working with Charities. Sandra joined us as our book-keeper in January 2004 and Prentis & Co were appointed auditors for the year ended 2004. Thanks to the sterling work of then Council Member Paul Knutson we began to get grips with our poor financial and management information systems.

During the early part of the year my then co-Chair Helen Roome, put much effort into negotiations with CMI on a potential merger. Your Council saw the potential of this merger as providing a resolution to our financial problems, a way of providing good administrative services to members and opening the potential for a wider network. We had decided that during these negotiations we needed to ensure that the unique values and identity needed to be preserved. By May we had reached the conclusion that is was inappropriate to seek financial salvation through such a merger and Paul and Concepta had launched the Gift Aid initiative. Further we did not see that preserving our values and identity would be served by such a merger at this time.

I wish to heartily thank Helen, for her sterling efforts in the Development Group and then as my Co-chair who had provided much needed leadership for AMED. She put in great effort on CMI negotiations but also in helping draw up last year’s Report and Annual Accounts. She decided that she needed to step down from Council at last year’s AGM. Similarly Andrea Bugari who had been doing sterling work with the previous Council and the Development Group stepped down from Council last July. We have missed Helen’s and Andrea’s presence on Council and I am sorry they have not been able to share with us in the pleasure (as well as in the pain) of working to engender this year’s renaissance. Paul Knutson also stepped down having found a position in the NHS where he had found an outlet for his project management talents from which AMED had benefited.

The Annual Event on 15 July 2004 proved that we were able to generate ideas and enthusiasm for AMED’s survival. Council Members from then have been Frances Grant (who has given up her valuable time travelling between Aberdeen and London for Council Meetings), Bob MacKenzie, David McAra, Merilyn Parker-Armitage and John Wilkes (who acts as our Company Secretary. I would like to thank them warmly on behalf of AMED for the immense amount of thought, effort, time and commitment that they have devoted to securing the continued viability of our association. In August we were notified by the Inland Revenue that they had agreed to AMED receiving Gift Aid support. During the autumn we realised that we were still struggling to put ideas for revival into action. We did action the offer made at the Event by Actors in Management and sponsored an Event put on by them in the Autumn.

During the year the identity of AMED has been kept alive by the sterling efforts of Terry Gibson who has continued to edit O&P and AMED News with verve and enthusiasm, thus proclaiming to the world that AMED still lives! Terry also gives us his time by attending Council Meetings. He is one of the few repositories of the Corporate Memory of AMED, something that any organisation is foolish to loose. Further I must acknowledge the work of the Sustainable Development Group. There have also been many unsung and unrecorded initiatives and activities that have happened in the name of AMED, and we would like to see if there are ways of being these more visible and acknowledged in the year ahead.

As promised at last year’s AGM we have pursued a more rigorous approach to the contract with EMCC, to provide administrative support for their October Conference in Brussels, safeguarded the AMED cash flow. We also said goodbye to Judith on 31 July last year, who had provided Concepta with solid support through a difficult first year running the office, under new outsourced arrangements initiated by our previous Chair Clive Morton. Concepta recruited Debbie who has helped us to begin to improve our service to members in later part of the year. These efforts have continued this year as we attempt to update outmoded administrative systems.

An important turning point was reached in November when Council faced up to the difficulty of understanding why we had struggled to define what we wanted a part-time Development Director to do. We did this by:

• thinking through a skeleton business plan for the next two years and where we need to put our efforts and resources.

This led to a realisation that:

• we needed to draw on the talent within the membership to help the Council to push forward with some concrete action to put ideas into action and
• we should use some of the financial windfall afforded by Gift Aid and tighter financial controls to pay for such support.

In December we contacted the membership asking for this support. The work that we have done from January 2005 is outside the scope of this report. I did write about what we were doing in March AMED News and John Wilkes followed it up with an article in the July edition. The event that Mark Lowther is organising in Bath on 7 September stemmed from Mark’s response to our request for help in December. The Annual Event on 21 July is an expression of our action and desire to move forward. You will also have heard by now about another major AMED-sponsored event in October 2005, Unimaginable Solutions about using the process of Constellations in Organisations.

So in conclusion, I believe that AMED has come through a difficult year with renewed energy, focus and promise. I have no doubt that 2005 will prove to have been an even better year, and I commend this Report to you.