April 2019

Well, the new committee has been in place for a few weeks now and lots has changed behind the scenes (but not in the Hall itself for now). We’re all newcomers to running both a village hall and a charity so the learning curve has been steep but lots of work has been done to understand how the place runs and to make plans for the future. For starters, we’ve tried to make sense of a thing called the Conveyance which directs how the charity should be run. Two issues with this – it was written in 1950 and none of us are used to reading the legal speak! We think we’re getting there and there’s a strong case to re-write parts of the document to reflect the modern age but our expertise in this is limited so it might take a while. Speaking of modern times, the website has proved to be very successful and rooms in the Hall can booked via www.svhall.co.uk and now also outside of normal hours via a mobile (details in the contacts section at the back of the Newsletter). The WiFi has recently been upgraded so you can now FaceTube, Tinder, Youbook, Tweet to your heart’s content!

A spring clean was carried out in March and lots of friendly volunteers pitched in to give the place a freshen up – we’re advertising for a regular cleaner to keep the Hall spick and span. Lots of ideas for the future keep being submitted and they are all being considered. The bar selection is being increased and we now have a wider range of gins and two ciders from Dunkerton’s Cider – we’ll see how popular they are. I get asked a lot about reopening the bar and it is something we’d like to do but we’re limited to opening after 9pm to avoid conflicting with regular users of the hall on Friday nights. Volunteers would be needed too so perhaps a monthly opening would be a start – you can follow us on Facebook for updates. A grand plan to segregate the Hall and develop a second entrance would solve problem of simultaneous use by different groups, enabling more people to use the Hall at the same time – an early plan at the moment but hopefully a direction that we can take the Hall in. If you’ve got an area of expertise that you may be able to help us with then please get in touch.

I mentioned last month that I’d introduce each of the committee over the following months and I may as well start with myself. I’m a newcomer to the village but a resident of Cheltenham since 2010 when I moved here during my RAF days when I flew VC10 and TriStar jets, I left the service in 2015 and now work in the airline industry. We have two small boys who I’m looking forward to joining the beavers and attending the village school when they’re old enough.

Ben Williams, Chair.

April 2019

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