AGM 2021

AGM Minutes - 8th June 2021

Welcome and Apologies for absence

Gill Dean chaired the meeting and welcomed everyone attending. Thank you to Dick Richards for hosting via Zoom due to COVID-19 restrictions.

There were 36 attendees including clients of TAB.

Apologies were received from Sarah Steel.

Minutes of the special meeting

The Special meeting was held on the 15th September 2020 as a replacement of the AGM. Minutes from last meeting were approved.

Matters arising

No matters raised.

Trustees Annual Report

The chair introduced the reported and highlighted our successes over the past year. Thank you to all supporters over the past year. You have enabled us to continue our work and even expand our work. Thank you to those who supported our fundraising for the new premises.

Our staff have been incredible, adapting well from face to face work to at times, completely online sessions. Thank you all for you hard work and for making this work for our young people. Our Group sessions will be increasing, and our outreach team will also start running sessions. A new addition for this year was our parent programme, offering support to parents and carers. Thank you to Gary who has been an outstanding leader of the team, always enthusiastic with a “can do” attitude.

We now have a team of volunteer receptionists who work in our new premises, they are vital in ensuring we can deliver our work successfully. We record our data on ‘Views’, Howard is key in our reporting from this system and ensuring we can understand the data. Thank you to Roland for his work completing our DBS checks and also to Pat who will soon be back running cooking courses.

We have worked hard to create a great fit for purpose new premises. A lot of work has been put into this piece of work and thank you to those that have supported including the Coventry Building Society, Andrew Snowdon and Steven Pain. We hope to welcome you all to this premises soon, COVID-19 dependent.

Whilst COVID-19 has had a huge impact on our work, we have managed to continually work throughout the whole year.

Impact report, current issues and future priorities

Impact report was delivered by Gary Hibbins, Manager of The Abingdon Bridge. Input also from Melanie Richards, clinical lead, Justin Langford, Healthy Lifestyles Co-ordinator and T’Quan.

It has been a challenging year:

There has been an increase in referrals.
Having to adapt to change.

The impact and aftermath of the three lockdowns.
Facing the new normal and the fear of the unknown.
Learning to be seen and in public again.

We supported more young people and delivered more sessions than ever before. The types of referrals we have received have also been more complex with a particular increase in over 18’s.

Although our waiting list for counselling is much shorter than other services, we want to decrease it further. We are going to alter our triaging system to ensure that those most in need are seen promptly.

Our healthy lifestyles and wellbeing team are crucial to building up relationships with young people and moving them away from county lines and involvement with other risky behaviour.

Key impact figures presented, of those that complete our programme:

92% of our clients have a greater sense of their emotional wellbeing and are less anxious and stressed.
73% of our clients have improved aspirations and are more confident about their futures.
97% of our clients who were previously engaged in risky behaviours or self-harm now show increased resilience, participate in less risky behaviours or self-harm.

Billy from our Youth Ambassadors team spoke about the work they have been doing. There are 5 members on the team, each with their own passions and areas they focus on. They help bring different views, awareness of current issues and a perspective to The Abingdon Bridge that we would not otherwise have.

Looking toward the future, we are looking to be more proactive. Preventative interventions and collaborative working will help reduce the demand for our reactive work.

Annual Statement of Accounts

Tim Eustace presented the financial statement for 31st March 2021.

The accounts show that our total income increased by 34% to £247K, at the same time our expenditure increased by 29%.
A slide showing our income sources was presented.
Expenditure is primarily on Counselling and Healthy Lifestyles. COVID-19 Next Steps and Youth Intervention Programme are our other programmes.
A slide showing the huge amount of growth that TAB has experienced was presented, this represents the huge demand for TAB’s services. The chart also shows that the majority of spending is on staff costs (over 90%) with minimal admin costs.

This year we also raised £120,000 to meet the refurbishment costs of our new premises.

Download full details of TAB's finances here.

Election of Officers for 2021-22

The trustee nominations had been circulated and those proposed were re-elected for 2020/21. They were Chris Bryan, Mike Brown, Laurence King, Luke Mattam, Steve Oakes, Dick Richards, Hillary Daffern, Tim Eustace, Sandy Kruger, and Sarah Field.

Election of the Chair

Laurence King took the chair and explained the process of electing the chair. Dick Richards nominated Gill Dean as chair for the forthcoming year and Chris Bryan seconded his election. Gill Dean was duly elected by the AGM.

Appointment of the Independent Examiner

Tim Eustace proposed Mr Stephen Lawrence as Independent Examiner. Seconded by Laurence King

AOB

No other business raised.

Annual Trustees Report for The Abingdon Bridge - 2021

This year has been a challenging one for all age-groups in the community. TAB has risen to this challenge and continued to deliver support for the young people of this area going from strength to strength. TAB used online facilities such as Zoom and Facetime to support clients during the two lockdowns, some staff being able to work face-to-face with their most vulnerable clients during the last lockdown. We ensured that our premises were COVID-safe. We have never been as busy as we are now and during this lockdown year we have watched referrals grow in number. This has necessitated us taking on more staff and being innovative in how we have delivered support to those who have requested it.

As you can see from the Summary document we have supported several hundreds of young people with 1-2-1 support and many more in groups. A parent group started in January to support the parents of our clients and to help them understand how TAB works with their children, this received excellent feedback. We have run some groups online, but workshops have been fewer due to restrictions.
We are now offering both face-to-face and online support.

Holly Freeland, one of our wellbeing practitioners put together a Wellbeing pack which has been given to hundreds of young people during this last year.

Projects

As well as the Counselling and Wellbeing work TAB has successfully bid for and is now funded for the Youth Intervention Project (YIP). This work is funded by Oxfordshire County Council and is about working with the hard-to-reach young people. If they would like to access support this is provided in 121 sessions, group or gym work. In addition, TAB is training 5 youth ambassadors who are committed to supporting TAB.

We are receiving Children-in-Need funding both for an extension to the Counselling funding we have had for the last 3 years and for an emergency COVID project for 18 months (Next Steps). This has enabled us to enlarge our counselling team to cope with the increase in referrals.

Staffing

Our staff team is led by our manager Gary. He has done a truly fantastic job over the last year. Not only has he worked at our office for all of lockdown to ensure calls are answered, but he has enabled the smooth running of TAB. He has been ever present in our move to 3 Market Place and has driven our funding bids. He is totally committed to TAB and is enthusiastic in all he does. Thank you Gary.

As already mentioned our staff team has grown in the last year and is now 14 in number. Only 2 people work full time, the rest working between 4 and 30 hours weekly. They all bring something unique to TAB and I would like to thank all of them for their hard work and ability to adapt to change. We do our clinical supervision in-house thanks to our clinical lead Mel. We offer some training for the staff and hold regular staff meetings. We also have 3 students working with us.

Premises

Our big news is the move into permanent premises at 3 Market Place (3MP) above the Coventry Building Society. It was at the award ceremony for the Queens Award for Voluntary Service 2 years ago that the seed was planted. After what seemed like months of negotiations and planning we moved into 3 MP in February. It has not been plain sailing as, with all building work, there have been teething problems. We are nearly there now and most of our staff are working at 3MP.

We are hugely grateful to the Charitable trusts and individuals who gave us the means to refurbish the two floors. It is a quite superb space with five counselling rooms, two office spaces, reception area, kitchen, meeting room and toilets. Thank you to the Coventry Building Society for enabling us to lease this space and being generous in their support.

We are hoping to hold an Open Day in July to show our supporters around the premises.

Funding

I am pleased to report that TAB is in a healthy financial position. We are very grateful to our two national sponsors, Children in Need and the Big Lottery Fund. As you can see from the financial report between them they are funding 40% of our work.

We are very grateful for all the local organisations who contribute to the running of TAB with 45% of the funds coming from individuals, local churches and councils. Thank you to First Growth for their generosity in supporting the healthy lifestyles team and to Christ’s Hospital for their valuable contribution.

The majority of our funds are short term, and we continually search for and bid for long-term funding so that the work can continue.

Aspirations

For the past three years we have held a Future Directions meeting to look at where we are now and where we are hoping to be over the next 12 months. This is always a productive meeting and draws on ideas from all the staff and trustees. Although in 2021 it had to be held remotely we were still able to discuss the issues we were concerned about and think about new ideas. We are committed to our core work and hope that we can work collaboratively with other charities this year. We hope to increase the number of groups on offer and would like to do a lot more preventative work in the schools.

Statistics

TAB has been using “Views” as our database for three years. Howard Spencer has guided and supported us in developing this database to help us record and improve our service. He has been invaluable in streamlining the information we can get using Views and we continue to look at ways that TAB can respond to client’s feedback.

We look at our data and performance quarterly to know how many clients have been supported in the various projects. The change in our client’s emotional wellbeing, resilience and aspirations are collated. We look to improve our service and Views is helping us do this. We are aware that not all clients complete the second questionnaire which means that we lose their feedback. Our documentation has improved over the last year. Future challenges include recording feedback from workshops on Views.

Trustees

There are 12 trustees all of whom contribute to the smooth running of TAB. They are a very dedicated, hard-working team and I feel privileged to be one. My special thanks to Chris Bryan as past chair and Hilary Daffern as vice-chair for their support this year.

We have an excellent new website thanks to Steve and Sarah plus a little help from their friends.

One of our trustees Trevor Wood is leaving us this year. Thank you Trevor for your commitment to TAB during the last 6 years and good luck with the travelling planned.

Volunteers

We now have a team of volunteer receptionists who are vital to the smooth running of TAB at 3MP. They are led by one of our trustees Sandy. We are very grateful to them for giving up their time.

Our other volunteers are Howard Spencer and Roland Knight. Howard is our Views expert and Roland makes sure that we are all DBS checked every two years. Pat our cookery expert has been unable to run classes this year but hoping to restart them soon.

As we are reaching the end of restrictions in England the effects of the pandemic continue both on the physical health of many people but also on their mental health.

With your help TAB will continue to support and reach out to those young people in the community who are struggling to cope.

Thank you for your support,

Gill Dean

Chair of the trustees at TAB