Faith & Flowers - October 2020

A few words from our National Secretary
Council met via Zoom on 26th August to consider several issues and to
receive the annual accounts from our treasurer. This is a summary of the
important decisions.
Finances: Our income in the year ending 31 March 2019 was £2309 and
our expenditure £2736 a deficit of £427. In the last five years we have
only once shown a positive balance and, in the last three years, we have
consistently shown a deficit; £68 in 2018, £1757 in 2019 and £427 in
2020. Council felt strongly that we cannot continue to run year after year
with a deficit of expenditure over income. Our main income is from
membership subscriptions and from new memberships and our main
expenditure is our “Faith & Flowers” magazine and our website. We are
extremely grateful to Mark Edwards for keeping his costs on the latter to
a minimum.
Increases agreed: Our current membership fee of £10 for a full year has
not changed in many years and Council took the difficult decision to
increase membership subscriptions from the Current £10 to £15 for a full
year from 1 April 2021. New memberships will be pro-rata depending on
the date of joining (as now) but the registration fee will increase from £2
to £3. We have also been selling our lovely CEFAA badges at far less than
it costs us to have them made so the decision has been made to charge £6
per badge.
Council appreciates that these increases may cause concern for some
members, but we simply cannot allow the Association to continue losing
money each year.
Recruitment: Our membership numbers have been steadily falling in
recent years and we are not recruiting enough new members to replace
those leaving us. Our discussions on finances and membership costs led
to us to talk about the need to run a recruitment campaign and Council
will be looking at a strategy to take this forward. For instance, if 50% of
our current membership were to recruit just one person each, we would
have around 100 additional members. So please don’t wait for Council
or your branches to come up with ideas, which we will in due course, but
get talking to others in your churches who you might encourage to try
flower arranging.
National AGM 2020: It was, of course, greatly disappointing that we
could not gather in June in Birmingham. Obviously with the continuing
restrictions due to Covid 19 it is difficult for us to have a proper AGM.
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