March Monthly Meeting
Here is the update on our March Monthly Meeting. We did not have a speaker at this month’s meeting, as it was our annual Programme Action Review. Jenny Cathcart, the incoming Programme Action Lead, described the varied things we were able to despite the limitations of the Covid pandemic. These have been described on the news blog through the year, but it is always useful to remind ourselves of what we have been able to do, especialy for our main charities this year, Just-The-Job and Colburn Foodshare. As always, we seem to have been able to do much more than we remembered. Let us hope that we are less subject to restrictions this year, and can return to full throttle.
Members have been active this month alongside others in this area in donating food and baby supplies to the Ukraine Crisis initiative based at Colburn Community Centre. The Community Group led by Angie Dale appealed for donations, and worked hard to sort and pack the resulting supplies. They deserve great praise for gathering together an enormous amount of food, clothing and other supplies from the area and organising their transport to the Ukraine. It was wonderful to see the response their appeal received.
It was also good to report that we have almost reached our target for the Toilet Twinned Town project. This was started prior to the pandemic, but had to put on hold. The plan is to make Richmond a Toilet Twinned Town in association with the Toilet Twinning charity, by “twinning” toilets in 20 locations across public buildings, schools and businesses. We hope to have this complete by the end of this Soroptimist year.
Members were also encouraged to use our EasyFundRaising page when shopping on-line. A small percentage from every transaction is donated to our funds by the retailer, and this provides a very useful additional income stream. This enables us to give some additional donations as requests come in during the year.