Soroptimist International Great Britain and Ireland (SIGBI) > Blogs > SIGBI President’s June 2019 Blog

SIGBI President’s June 2019 Blog

Dear Members,

As a Director and part of the Federation Management Board, my role as a Director Without Portfolio (DWP) is quite a busy one.

  • Firstly, as a Director on a Board of Trustees of a Charity there are Trustee responsibilities, I support the Board as a whole and in particular the President. As a DWP, I also have a role in support the Federation Consultative Councillors (FCC’s) as their link with the Board and I am on the Visiting Rota for South Lancashire Region.
  • So far this year we have had two very busy Board meetings where we finalised plans for the restructuring of the Board to create a smaller Board with Standing Committees and Working Parties to support them.
  • I am the lead member of the Patron’s Working Party. The general membership is invited to apply to be part of Working Parties, in this way the skills of members can be utilised. I am very happy to report that my ‘Team’ of Margaret Oldroyd, Margaret Hyde and Anne MacDonald have proved to be an extremely effective and efficient working group. We have moved away from looking for a Patron to considering Celebrity Supporters and Ambassadors for specific projects rather than a Patron at this stage. The Team are working on Role Specifications and Guidelines for Dealing with our Celebrity Supporters and Ambassadors.
  • As the Designated Safeguarding Officer for our Federation, my aim is to provide training to raise awareness of the need for a robust safeguarding policy. Safeguarding is everyone’s business: we must all be able to Recognise, Respond, Record and Refer any safeguarding issues in a confidential manner and according to the agreed organisational structure.
  • I reviewed the safeguarding policy for our new SIGBI Federation Project ChoraChori. We will be working with vulnerable children and young adults and will potentially be targets for unscrupulous individuals who may try to exploit the situation, so we need to protect ourselves, our volunteers and our target group.
  • FCC role and representation is work in progress and I would like to encourage the membership to support their Regional Councillor as they are a valuable resource, and the Board is fortunate in having such a committed team to support them.
  • Please read, scrutinise and digest the Resolutions for Conference. Every effort is being made to answer queries before the General Meeting.

On a very positive note, it is so encouraging to see the support the membership gave to the #SoroptimistsThinkOnIt  initiative over the past two weeks. The results are as follows:

  • Total number of tweets: 420
  • Estimated unique reach (individuals seeing tweet): 48,804
  • Estimated total reach (how many times it was seen in total) 258,872
  • Contributors: 112

That is a fabulous result and shows the impact we can make.

In Friendship,
Shirley Jones
SIGBI Director Without Portfolio

Read previous blogs from President Sue Williams and the FMB: