Autumn is always busy for the St Albans Soroptimist Club – keep reading to find out more!
The Abbey Theatre in St Albans generously gives local organisations and charities the opportunity to sell the tickets for the first performance of their productions. Thursday 10 October was World Mental Health Day so the play “The Father” was a poignant reminder of the stresses of living with dementia both for the sufferer and the people around them. Members of Soroptimist International St Albans and District were able to sell tickets and hold a raffle raising £500 to be shared between the Alzheimer’s Society and Herts Viewpoint (working for better mental health). Soroptimist Barbara Saunders organised the event and spoke to the audience at the end of the play “thanks so much to everyone who has supported us, and for their generosity to these charities for the excellent work that they do. We have all been touched by this terrible disease and will have been moved by this first class production”.
Click here to read a full review of the play in the St Albans Times: https://stalbanstimes.co.uk/review/theatre-review-the-father/
Please check out the Club Programme to make sure you don’t miss any of our activities and events! https://sigbi.org/st-albans/club-programme
Club Meeting Mon 14 Oct – We were fortunate to be able to welcome three guests to our Club Meeting on Mon 14 Oct. Nonhlanhla Nyathi was a member of the Vabatsiri Club in Harare Zimbabwe before relocating to St Albans earlier this year. Cecile Hodoul was with us from our Friendship Link SI Victoria, Seychelles. Closer to home, Christiana Ashare works for Viewpoint with Kat and we were delighted that she was able to join us too.
New Member Induction: We were thrilled to start the meeting by officially welcoming new Member Councillor Dr Allison Wren to our Club. We met Allison at our “Orange the World” launch event last November. Allison is a pharmacologist and medical device entrepreneur, starting companies in the UK and USA where she worked 
for 27 years. She was a District Councillor for 3 years before being elected the County Councillor for “Harpenden Rural” in December 2023. She was a Soroptimist in the USA so it will be interesting for her to see how differently we do things here. The photo above is of Jane Slatter, the Club’s Membership Officer, extending the Soroptimist “hand of friendship” to Allison.
Our Member Katherine (Kat) Clark works for the mental health charity Herts Viewpoint and was able to give an update on the work they have done with the women’s refuge. Kat is pictured above on Jane’s right. The programme was set up as a result of a conversation with one of the Refuge Managers at a Soroptimist meeting earlier this year. Kat’s colleague Christiana Ashare (seated next to Kat in the picture above) was with us for the evening and was also able to add to the update. The refuge found that they needed to bring in expertise in mental health care to provide trauma support for their clients. Viewpoint’s work is led by the clients with peer support. It is important that victims of domestic abuse have their voices heard and learn self-care. Kat said that the facilitators found out a lot about their own resilience and empathy from delivering the programme. They started with one refuge and there are plans to work with more.
Cecile Hodoul was visiting from our Friendship Link, SI Victoria in the Seychelles. It is her Club’s 30th Anniversary this year and we were able to present Cecile with two books about St Albans and a birthday card to take back with her. Cecile talked to us about some of the challenges in the Seychelles with healthcare and the environment and the Club’s projects in these areas. The Club had also worked to support displaced people following the floods and explosion on Mahé last year – click here to read more about these catastrophic events 2023 Mahé explosion – Wikipedia.
We had a table top “bottle sale” (you can see the bottles on the table behind Cecile in the photo above) – people were very generous with what they brought and what they bought – adding a lovely £28 to the Club’s charity fund.
Our Club Secretary Katherine Clark has had to move away from St Albans and now lives in Baldock so can’t usually make our face-to-face Club meetings anymore. We were delighted that she made an exception this time so that we could celebrate her “big” birthday with her in the traditional Soroptimist way with cake! Happy Birthday Kat! Sadly Kat is standing down as our secretary at the AGM in April – it’s a great opportunity for a Member to get involved with how the Club runs.
We also galloped through Club Business – Sarah Lichman reported on the Club’s new Sustainability Policy which will be issued as a “living document”, and we heard some great ideas from Linda Middleton for a “sustainable” Christmas. Sarah reported on the charity night at the Abbey Theatre (see above) and Jane Slatter reported on the inspiring Region meeting on Sat 12 Oct. Jane is the Club’s voting delegate at the Soroptimist International Great Britain & Ireland General Meeting at the Conference in Edinburgh 1-3 Nov so went through the resolutions. Club Members agreed to give Jane discretion to listen to the arguments and vote accordingly. Jane went through the Club Programme to the end of the year – click here for the detailshttps://sigbi.org/st-albans/club-programme – please make sure all the dates are in your diary and that you’ve emailed sistalbans@hotmail.com to confirm attendance at the events.