CLACTON DEBATING SOCIETY AGM OCT 2022
Present at the AGM were Derek Cheek (Chairman), Jean Cheek (Treasurer).
Lorry Greenall, Patricia Kubel, Jennifer Kersey, Lee Knight, Helen Rees,
Maria Skage, Diane Hannan, and a visitor Paul Jackson.
Apologies were received from Chris and Mary Lane and Gail Chapman
The Chairman opened the meeting by thanking those present, getting them to introduce themselves and re-iterating the changes that have been made over the last year.
As you know, our numbers are too small to run the club as it used to be. We in fact had 9 members and an average of 3 people each month paying their £2 monthly fee.
We started the year with a few months of questions on topical interests. Our Christmas meeting was a fun evening with one of Tony’s fun presentations, Jean's speech of “to speak or not to speak” and other subjects. We had our normal Xmas raffle and everyone enjoyed themselves.
Then Jean had the idea of reusing old debating subjects. This entailed writing the subjects out with a Propose or an Oppose heading and then inviting people to pick an unknown card. They then were given 10 mins to produce their thoughts and then we ran a mini Open Forum Debate. This meant that people gradually honed their debating skills (especially when they disagreed with the subject they had been given!) These meetings were enjoyed by nearly everyone!
We intend to continue with this, interspersed with Topical interest evenings and hope that eventually people will come up with subjects that they want to debate.
In her Treasurer’s role Jean said that our total outgoings last year with hall hire and affiliation was £283.60 and our income was £252 giving us a deficit of £31.60.
However, we still have £519.17 in hand and so we shall keep the fees at their current level until we run out of money. Refeshments will be free and Jean will reimburse herself out of club funds.
Then we all had our teas and coffees (kindly made by Maria and Lee) and debated about what our December topic would be this year.
Jean Cheek