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| Volume 6, Number 9 - Winter 2007-2008 | |
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From the Acting ChairmanThe coincidental timing of the last issue of Canal Cuttings and our former Chairman's resignation, meant a separate flyer had to be composed from your new Acting Chairman – hopefully this time I shall get my piece in to the magazine proper before the printing presses start to roll!
While I hope that the above indicates an enthusiasm for and not insignificant experience in canals, it would be remiss not to note that:
The reality is that as Acting Chairman I am not going to be able to devote anything like as much time to the Sankey as the post deserves. The Society has always relied on a handful of committed members to try and keep the future restoration of the Sankey in the public eye, and that is as true now as it ever was. Around half of the Exec have full-time or part-time jobs in fields entirely unrelated to the canal and its environment, and that does inevitably limit what we can do.
Andy (centre) with Exec. Members Dave Smallshaw and Colin Greenall publicise SCARS at Spike Island, 2005 My flyer in the last issue indicated that the Exec Committee was looking to break the Exec down into smaller subgroups, so that other Society members could get involved in small projects in areas they were particularly interested in, without the full-on responsibility of being trustee of a registered charity. It has to be said that despite providing postal addresses, email addresses and phone numbers to make it easy to contact us, the response has been... well, disappointing. Hopefully that is just shyness and reticence that can be overcome! At this year's AGM we will try to put some more meat on the bones of what we are trying to achieve, and I would like to think that a few other people will be willing to come forward and offer to help. I have long held the belief that organisations like SCARS (and I am an armchair member of over 30 other canal restoration societies) are there primarily to restore a canal, and that every member of those societies joins to help achieve that goal in whatever way they feel able. Those who give their time (and in some cases, large parts of their lives) over to a good cause should be encouraged to use what skills and other resources they have to help attain those primary goals – that is what they joined for, and that is, implicitly or explicitly, what other members should want them to do. With the very limited person-hours available to the SCARS Exec, I do not believe we can afford to allow ourselves to be overly distracted by peripheral activities. I would go as far as to say that in recent years, that is probably what has happened within SCARS. It is notable that while the response to the recent Member Questionnaire (limited though that response was) seemed to indicate strongly that members' evenings should continue, our pleas for a Social Secretary to organise such evenings fell entirely on deaf ears. Is the Exec's time to be taken up looking for speakers for members' evenings or should we try to restore the canal? Personally, unless a Social Secretary comes forward, I do not think we have the resources to do both. I believe we have stark choices, and need to start making brave decisions. If this all starts to sound like campaigning for the post of Chairman at the AGM, then I suppose, after a fashion, that is what it is. Having agreed to take on the role of Acting Chairman, I can hardly not put myself forward for the members' vote in March. But the Society's membership needs to know the mandate on which I will be standing, and that mandate will unequivocally be that those few hours a week that I can dedicate to the Society will be spent wholly on pushing forward the cause of restoration. Other candidates may well put themselves up on a different mandate – it is for you, the members, to determine where you think the priorities of this organisation should lie. Whatever happens at the AGM, the Society will find itself with a new Chairman for the first time since its formation in 1985. To marry with this 'new broom' philosophy we shall be holding the AGM at Halton Stadium; let us not forget that despite the post-railway era name of the St Helens Canal, it does pass through two boroughs other than the one where we have held most of our AGMs, Exec meetings and members' evenings in recent years. It may well be that we have members in Halton (and Warrington) champing at the bit to get involved if only we would land on their doorstep every once in a while. SCARS enters the new year having had a very quiet 2007, with little real advancement on any front in restoration terms. It is my firm belief that we have every prospect of moving things forward in 2008/09, but that this depends on either (or both of): others being prepared to give a little of their time to help the Exec, and/or the Exec being allowed to concentrate their resources on what really matters. I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible at the Halton Stadium on 13th March. Best wishes, Andy Screen
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To those who don't know me, I am 46 and hail from Sussex, having moved to the North West in 1987. After a brief stint living in Manchester I moved to New Mills just over the Derbyshire border in 1991; I have worked in the occupational pensions industry in and around Manchester for the last 20 years. Soon after moving north, I helped form the Towpath Action Group (TAG; a sort of Ramblers Association for the canals), a small national organisation of which I am Secretary and Newsletter Editor. In 1995 I joined the national Restoration Committee of the Inland Waterways Association (IWA), and soon took on the roles of Deputy Chairman and Funding Advisor for that committee, posts which I still hold. It was wearing my IWA hat that I became an observer on the SCARS Exec almost ten years ago, though I had been an armchair member of the Society* for some ten years up to that point. (*I did bring a few TAG members to a Newton Common lock dig in the mid-1990s, so maybe not totally armchair.) 