Annual Secretaries Report February 21, 2011
Well, I must be starting to sound like a broken record, as the same seems to come up every year. We are now at the beginning of the 79th year since this Club was begun and, as you all know it has been on a downward slide for several years now because of falling membership. Eleven more members have departed since our last AGM last February. Moreover, in the past we used to have as many as 12 committee members and as many as 500 registered members. Look at us now. Those committee members who are continuing to give service have been sitting here for a long time. Most of us have run out of steam and badly need replacing. Myself, I have been here for more than eleven years as Secretary and 16 years as a member. Over those year’s I have kept us together through four different venues.
Now for some facts and figures. The total attendances for the last year were 551 while the total for 2009 was 657, down 108 on the previous the year. I thank you the membership for your faithfulness to our club.
The highest meeting attendance, which is here at this venue, was on March 1 when a Lady talked about the ECO village attracting 30 attendants. Our usual Christmas Lunch had the second best overall with 38 diners taking part. But the best attendance for the whole year was the 100th Birthday luncheon for Mr. Ron Fitch when 42 diners helped him celebrate his birthday.
Regarding our membership, we had one new friend member joining us this past year but we lost 11 members making a total membership for the present of 204.
Mr Fitch who will be 101 in June this year is still our oldest and also longest member. Of those 204 members, 120 are over the age of 80 and 30 of those are over 90. That is more than half of our membership over 80. Makes you think.
Lastly, I hope all of you will continue to support our Club in the coming year. This will be the 79th year since our Club was began in 1932 and it would seem a pity if it was to fold up now after such a lengthy time. As we have few speakers booked for this year, I will encourage you to come to the meetings, as we will endeavour to get speakers on an ongoing basis, which seems to be easier than booking speakers a long way ahead. That is getting speakers last November to come to us next June. That is just to far ahead and many have neither plans nor indeed calendars that far ahead. If any of you have photos or even movies on CD or DVD, we can arrange to show them to our members on the screen. Please let me know in advance so we can arrange a date.
As I now have the Treasurer’s job given to me as well because of lack of interest by anyone else I can report on that as well.
After some initial puzzles to work out the balance as left by the previous treasurer I now have this under control. The 2 biggest expenditures for the year were the two lunches, Birthday and Christmas. The Christmas lunch including drinks was a total of $2137.50 while members contributed $1140 towards this. That means $997.50 was subsidised out of our Club funds. Our patrons Birthday lunch including drinks was $2220.50 fully paid for out of our funds. After some minor expenses we still have a present bank balance of $3066.42. The total of the admittance money minus the raffle prizes received here at the venue was $822.50. The Christmas raffle at the Pavilion produced $71.50. Donations towards the birthday dinner totalled $362 and a new member donation of $10 made a total of $372 in donations.
Thank you to those who helped.
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