We stagger on...

Many thanks to everyone who turned out on a damp evening to support our second attempt at holding a valid AGM. We were successful in getting the required seven people elected, so the branch remains in being for another year.

PLEASE! Persuade, badger or cajole your animal-loving friends and relations into joining the RSPCA.

Adult membership is £25, of which £5 is passed on to support your local branch and keep its welfare services running. 

My personal goals for 2012 are to see the branch able to:

• Save all healthy and treatable animals that we take in for rehoming.
• Continue to offer low-cost veterinary treatment for responsible pet owners in financial need.
• Offer rehoming as an alternative to euthanasia for pets belonging to owners who cannot afford to pay for even reduced-rate veterinary treatment.

Repeat AGM

We didn't get the 10 members needed to hold a valid Annual General Meeting, so will be trying again on 2nd August. If you are an adult member of the branch you'll receive your notification by post towards the end of this week. 

The repeat meeting will be at 61 Burleigh Street, and will be slimmed down to the bare minimum required to elect a committee to keep the branch in existence, so it should only take about 30 minutes. 

I very much fear that the problems with branch AGM's are just symptoms of something wider and more troubling. In our area, roughly 5% of the population make use of some of our branch services during the course of a year (this isn't just the clinic; it's also things like helping with injured stray animals, advice and so on and it's not necessarily the same 5% each year). 

Roughly 0.2% of the same population are branch members, and roughly 0.02% are active volunteers.

Either we convince more people that we are not a statutory service and without participation there will be no service, or in a few years we will be a "downed branch" with no help for owners with sick animals and minimal ability to rehome animals from the inspectorate.

If you are not a member of the RSPCA, please consider joining. You can do it online by going to www.rspca.org.uk/membership, or pick up a leaflet from any of our charity shops. Membership gives you a vote at branch and national level and means you can (if you wish) stand for election to your local branch committee and to regional and national trustee boards. 

Branch AGM and committee nominations

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The Cambridge and District Branch's AGM will be on Tuesday, 28th June at the Friends' Meeting House, Jesus Lane, Cambridge (map)

Anyone interested in the work of the branch is very welcome to attend, but only RSPCA branch members are able to be included in the vote to elect the committee of trustees. 

If you are a branch member you will shortly be receiving the official meeting notice by post (some time next week as we are planning to stuff envelopes on the bank holiday Monday).

If you are a member and would like to stand for election, or to nominate another branch member, please take a look at the information about trusteeship on our main website. This page has a link to download an official nomination form.

If you are not an RSPCA member, but would like to join, you can do this via the RSPCA national website. It's too late to be eligible to vote in the current elections, but you would be able to next year.

AGM results and some thoughts on "governance"

A total of thirteen members attended our branch AGM yesterday, so we were comfortably quorate and everyone standing for re-election to the committee got in. However, thirteen people out of a branch membership of roughly 300 people is really not all that great, and a total membership of 300 isn't ultimately going to be enough to sustain services to 4,000-odd people long-term. Add in the wider population who expect us to be able to help with wildlife casualties, injured strays and so on, and it's just impossibly top-heavy.

The RSPCA is a very democratic charity—if you want to get rid of me, you can vote me out—but it depends on people being willing to participate, put in some work to achieve our goals and accept that majority decisions must be final. The idea of working within a structure of rules puts some people off because they think it's "bureaucratic" but without rules to decide who can make decisions and when a decision has been made the result would be chaos and nothing would ever get settled.

To participate in the decision-making processes of the RSPCA the first requirement is to become a member. Anyone with a genuine desire to help animals may join, although application from someone who wanted to use their membership for an ulterior purpose might be rejected (for example someone who joined in order to reverse the Society's policies against battery farming would have their application refused).

Three months after joining a member is entitled to receive voting papers for National Society elections and to attend their local branch AGM and vote in the election of the branch committee. They are also entitled to stand for election to their branch committee, but are not eligible to stand for election to the National Society's ruling council until they have been members for at least five years.

Branch elections do sometimes result in policy changes (although a lot of the time just getting enough people elected to form a committee is a struggle). Thirty years ago this branch did no rehoming at all, and this was only changed when a group of new people were elected to the committee. What happened wasn't exactly like a parliamentary election as members of both the old group and the new group were elected at the AGM (creating a much larger committee than before), but the new group formed a majority and put through the policy change. This kind of sudden shift is comparatively unusual and most of the time committees gain just a few new individuals each year.

This poses a problem in itself because new members are essential if committees aren't to wind up composed entirely of octogenarians, but being the only person who doesn't understand what's going on can make newly elected members feel the rest are forming a clique to exclude them. If you join a branch, be patient, and don't expect to understand everything immediately. Branches are complicated organisations, handling substantial amounts of money and requiring a lot of sustained work to keep them going. If you join in and help with existing activities you'll find it all gradually falls into place (and you'll have a wonderful command of acronyms—NCC, IET, RTA, RHQ—just like everyone else!)

Join the RSPCA

If you've ever grumbled that, "the RSPCA doesn't do...." you should consider joining so that you have a vote in the selection of the governing council.

If you join now you won't be eligible to vote in this year's ballot, but you will next year, and you will also be eligible to stand for election to your local branch committee and to vote at their AGM.

You can apply to join online via the National RSPCA website  and unless you specify that you prefer NOT to join your local branch, a proportion of your membership fee will be given to the branch where you live.

Ten of the 25 National RSPCA Council members are elected by the branches on a regional basis, so branch membership also feeds back into National policy making.

And handover to the newly elected Council is, well... rather more rapid than after the other election.

Branch AGM provisional date

The provisional date for Cambridge Branch's Annual General Meeting is 30th June. 7.30 p.m. for 8 p.m. start at the Friends Meeting House, Jesus Lane, Cambridge. This the time when branch members have their chance to elect new committee members to run the branch in the following year. 

 
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We need to elect a minimum of seven committee members, and at least ten adult voting members must be present for a valid election. If we fail to achieve this (fairly low) standard, then the meeting fails and we will either be asked to try again or else dissolve the committee and hand control over to the National RSPCA until such time as a valid committee can be elected. 

If you are a branch member, please do try to attend your local branch AGM — apart from other considerations it is very embarrassing, and a waste of time and money, when senior staff from the Region turn out to an AGM and the branch can't even muster ten members to make it worthwhile.

The RSPCA is very dependent on volunteer effort. If you've ever thought "the RSPCA ought to do more about..." this is your chance to make a difference.

Branch committees

If you think you might be interested in standing for our committee this year there's still time. Branch committees are elected each year by the local branch members at the Annual General Meeting. In our case, this is normally late June, as branch accounts and an annual report on the previous year have to be available at the AGM, and ours haven't usually been audited by our accountants until early June. 

To stand for election, you need to have been a member of the RSPCA for a minimum of three months prior to the AGM (this is mainly to make it possible to ensure there's time for everyone eligible to have got onto the membership lists and been circulated with the correct AGM papers.) Before the AGM the existing committee circulate a notice of the time and place to all branch members and include nomination forms so that members can put candidates forward for election. Members of the RSPCA automatically become members of the branch where they live, unless they ask to join a different one - for example the branch where they work.

To form a committee the AGM must elect at least seven and not more than fourteen people. As it's quite hard to get as many as fourteen volunteers willing to stand, most of the time we want the meeting to vote in everyone who comes forward and is prepared to work. It's not absolutely unknown for elections to be hotly contested, but it usually only happens where there is some point of principle at issue - for example whether or not to keep a particular branch facility open.

If you think you are a member of the RSPCA and have never been circulated with AGM papers it's likely that you are actually a "supporter" instead. In this case, if you want to become involved with your local branch, the best thing to to is to contact RSPCA HQ at Horsham and ask to be switched from the supporter category to the adult member one.

Speaker meetings - any interest?

One of the discussion items at Saturday's Regional Board meeting was the question of why attendance at the Society's AGM is so poor. HQ recently sent a questionnaire to a fairly large sample of members and regular donors and from the answers, it appears that there's a fair amount of interest in hearing more about what the Society does, but that a large proportion of people are quite limited in terms of possible travelling distances.

Would anyone out there be interested in speaker meetings which were organised at the other end of the scale (so to speak), purely for supporters (and anyone else interested) in our own local branch area?

The rather low attendance at our branch AGM suggests there's little or no interest in the purely administrative/organisational aspects of what we do, but would there be any support for periodic meetings with a speaker (probably from the inspectorate or one of the animal hospitals) as a chance for people from the branch to get together?