As an incorporated body, Permaculture Sydney West (PSW) have to have an Annual General Meeting (AGM) and we have ours at the last meeting for the year (ie the first Monday in December) but we still need to notify all members of the AGM so that is done with an email sent out 2 - 3 weeks before the meeting is scheduled to occur. The AGM allows us to accomplish two things –
- Conduct a review of the year that was, and
- Elect office bearers for the coming year
Conducting the Review
As president I get up and welcome everyone and then the Secretary, Treasurer and President each give a report. The secretary goes through the minutes of the previous AGM and then solicits that they be moved and seconded as accepted by the group as a true record of the meeting. This is one of the more boring bits so this year we tried a new tack and emailed out the minutes of the 2015 AGM for all the members to read before the meeting. Then at the meeting the secretary asked for them to be accepted as a formality and this was done.
The treasurer then got up and went through how much money came in during the year and how much money went out during the year. She provided several graphs and pie charts which illustrated to the members what the numbers said but making the picture a bit clearer. She then put up the various bits of documentation which the treasure deals with such as the general ledger (summary) profit and loss statement and the balance sheet. This was then moved and seconded as being accepted by the meeting.
Then came my turn, thankfully our wonderful secretary had put together a presentation for me which allowed me to go through all of the things that Permaculture Sydney West had achieved or been part of in 2016. My review ran as follows –
- Put up slides with pictures of the committee members and thank them for their efforts during the year.
- Talk about the 12 committee meetings which happened during the year (11 monthly meetings and one planning meeting).
- Talk about the 8 permablitzes which happened during the year and put up a slide or two from each one.
- Mention the 9 living skills events and a slide or two from each one,
- Discuss all of the workshops (GOOF Series as well as one-off workshops) conducted by PSW personnel for councils and other community bodies.
- Show a list of all 32 subjects which were covered by the workshops conducted.
- Talk about where we are with the GOOF series (series 1 and 2 completed and run several times during the year, GOOF 3 in preparation).
- Mention all of the meetings with councils and other community groups which PSW committee personnel attended.
- Go through the subjects, activities and speakers for all of our Monday night general meetings for the year.
- Talk about PSW special events, the seed savers team and media watch, ie PSW personnel who have been in print over the last 12 months.
It was a big year and to go through all of this took me about 20 minutes.
With the review out of the way we moved on to -
Election of new Office Bearers
As an incorporated body we must not only have an AGM but also have a constitution (available for review here). The constitution not only specifies the requirement for our 4 executive committee office bearers (president, Vice President, Secretary and Treasurer) but also specifies that each of these people may only serve for 3 consecutive years.
To orchestrate the process we needed a returning officer, they must not be a part of the committee but can be virtually anyone else with a bit of assistance. In our case it is usually one of the ladies who has a lot of experience in this area, but she was unavailable so we got one of our regular members to do it. To assist this process we have developed a PSW AGM Order of Proceedings. (Available here).
A special secretary was also nominated to record the decisions reached at the AGM, who moved a person be accepted for a position and who seconded the movement and record them in a minutes document. They also record any other salient details of the meeting. They are usually a person from the floor who agrees to act as secretary in this instance, not the usual committee secretary.
In my capacity as president, I hand the meeting over to the returning officer and then the returning officer thanks the committee members for their work during the year and declares all the positions vacant.
Where there are two or more nominations for an executive position (this is rare) an election must be held to determine who the members want to carry out the office. To this end the returning officer asks for two scrutineers to volunteer to assist with the election process if required and their names are recorded.
The Returning Officer asks if there are any nominations for position holders, starting out with the President. Prior to the meeting a list of all our executive and non-executive committee position holders and their position descriptions are emailed out to all members along with a nomination form (Documents available here). Any member can nominate themselves or anyone else for a committee position but it is up to the person themselves whether or not they accept the nomination.
The returning officer asks for nominations for president and in my case it was only my second year and I was re-nominated as the only contender, seconded and I retained my position. This process was repeated through all of the executive committee positions. He then went through the same process with the non-executive committee positions ie the team leaders for membership team, education team, living skills team, seed savers etc. and then library coordinator.
With some positions where the incumbent was retiring there was a bit of a lull where we waited for someone to nominate for the position. If no-one was nominated it was passed in for discussion later but most of the positions were had nominees and were filled.
At the end of the process the Returning Officer thanks the committee members and then hands back to the president. I declare the AGM closed and we move on to the next activity, which this year was a Permaculture Trivia Night
