General Council Update December 2011

Kit Jones, Vice-Chair (Centres) give you the low-down on the latest General Council meeting. Where we talked about:

• Our relationship with the Co-Operative Group
• The TREE programme and New groups
• Members Communications
• Strategy for supporting Groups
• Occupation movements and other campaigns
• Cocamp evaluation

See the "The Final Voice: a View from the Chair" here.

With Cocamp now a distant memory, last week the General Council met to evaluate the camp and look forward with what we have to do. At our meeting we focused on:

-      Our relationship with the Co-operative Group and other co-operative societies is growing. We welcomed our new Co-operative rep, Barclay Davis, to his first meeting. Barclay is on the Co-op values and principles committee. Jon has also been working with Barclay and others on our involvement in the international year of co-operatives – watch this space.

-      We took an update from the TREE programme; which is doing lots of exciting events and projects working on the ground with groups. Their support is always there if you would like it. Please contact Chloë and Rebecca in the office. This project is also going to be focusing in particular on opening new Woodcraft Folk groups and GC has asked for a detailed plan for this to come to our next meeting.

-      We will be introducing some major changes to our member communications in the new year. I don't want to give away the surprise but we can tell you that a newspaper is back!

-      The group of general council that work on our strategy for supporting groups is launching two special interest groups: one to work on songs and one to work on badgework. Please get in touch with Ghee Bowman (ghee.bowman@woodcraft.org.uk) if you are interested in joining either of these groups.

-      We discussed our stance on the Occupation movement. We have agreed a statement on the issue encouraging members to use it as an opportunity for education. We also intend to have an area on the website dedicated to campaigns like this to highlight work that local groups are doing and we will be running a workshop on it at Annual Gathering. In a similar vein, we launched a right to strike pack containing educational activities for groups in the lead up to the 30^th November strikes. We are really keen to support groups to do educational work on contemporary grassroots politics.

-      We evaluated CoCamp. We thanked everybody involved, and Zoë in particular, for creating such a vibrant and successful event. There were too many brilliant things to list! A very comprehensive report has been written and is available by email on request from the Woodcraft Folk office.

This is by no means an exhaustive list and the full minutes will be published on the website in the next few weeks, but I hope it gives you a flavour of some of the things we discussed.

We were also delighted to be hosted by Stanley District (near Durham) Woodcraft Folk. It was truly inspiring to be staying with these members, who are doing amazing work. In particular, they run a building called The Activity Den – a youth centre with a deep Woodcraft Folk ethos. They run activities there every day of the week (except Sundays) including dance, music making, a youth club and traditional mixed Woodcraft Folk group nights. The Activity Den is an amazing project – they took over an old building and put young people in the driving seat to create a space that is truly “owned” by the young people.

Since the idea of a national co-operative campsite was mooted at CoCamp under the banner of “Koodoo” there have been a number of members, as well as our cooperative partners, identifying sites that might be opportunities for us to get involved in. The example of Stanley's Activity Den shows us how creating our own physical spaces can be a powerful way to grow our reach and benefit thousands of new young people. Our conception of Koodoo is evolving; it is likely to focus far more on a plethora of local approaches and less so on a single national site.

It's also worth noting that we answered some important structural questions at this Council meeting. We agreed a number of changes to our own General Council structure that we think would help us to be more effective and we would like to bring to Annual Gathering. We also got to see, for the first time, the new Woodcraft Folk constitution based on the principle that we implement a branch structure in Woodcraft Folk for the purposes of accounting. We came up with a number of changes that need to be taken away and made but it feels like it won't be that long until it is circulated to members for consultation now. We also elected a new Chair, Pat Hunter will be taking over from Lloyd in the new year to allow him to return to his studies. Lloyd deserves huge congratulation for doing a brilliant job as Chair, and congratulations also to Pat for being elected to take over until Annual Gathering.

The minutes of the meeting will be made available in the last week in December.

Speed the adventure,

General Council