Newsletter To Members 8 March 2023

The Annual General Meeting date has been set for Friday 26th May. Nominations for Board positions and selection committees will open on Monday 3rd April and close on Sunday 30th April. A 2022/23 End of Financial Year Calendar is at the end of the newsletter.

A number of newer members have asked how the Board is made up and what their responsibilities and portfolios consist of.

To start with we need people who have the long-term interest of the club at heart. Ideally they should be forward thinking and bring forward ideas about how we can improve the club and gain more younger bowling and social members. This is critical for the long term survival of the club.

A Board member should also be able to manage people. Most Board members are allocated a portfolio. They need to get together and manage a sub-committee to discuss and carry out the work.

A brief summary of the various positions on the Board and their responsibilities is as follows:-

1. President and 2 Vice-Presidents – General responsibility of managing the running of the club, dealing with any issues that arise, possibly being involved in chairing or sitting on sub-committees – for example, Greg Donohue chairs the bowling sub-committee.
   
   
2. Secretary – The most onerous job which has been done by Jeff Newton for many years. This involves being across all issues within the club, looking after all the correspondence with the club, agenda for Board of Management meetings, liaising with Bowls Vic on all bowling issues, managing member requests and invoicing member fees, handling all new member nominations etc. etc. He also processes, into the Xero accounting system, any invoices received from suppliers.
   
   
3. Assistant Secretary – At the moment the sole responsibility is the Minutes of Board of Management meetings. Andrea Shaw has also volunteered to look after the printing of the fixture booklets. This position could be extended to assist the secretary in some of his tasks.
   
   
4. Treasurer – A position that Daryl Wilkinson has taken over from Mike Kadniak. Managing all the finances of the club including preparing monthly reports for presentation to the Board, weekly banking, wages, processing all income and expenditure to the correct accounts in the Xero general ledger, quarterly BAS reports and PAYG payment to ATO, budget for the year etc.
   
   
5. There are then 6 general Board of Management positions. Elected members are generally assigned a portfolio to manage. The portfolios we have at present are:
   
   
   1. Bar – This has been looked after by Roy and Mats. Responsibility is to form a bar committee to ensure the effective running of the bar. The bar committee is responsible for ordering stocks as required, setting prices so that the recommended markup is achieved, organizing bar staff as required, cashing up each evening, making sure together with bar staff that the Responsible Serving of Alcohol rules are followed, etc. They are invariably the last to leave each evening.
      
      
   2. Bowling – As mentioned earlier, Greg looks after this portfolio with his committee. They organize all the social Wednesdays and Saturdays, events during the year, nominated triples, club championship games etc.
      
      
   3. Communication – This is a portfolio that has been neglected over the years. We need someone to take ownership of this. The responsible person would form a sub-committee which would be responsible for the preparation of a regular newsletter to members, communicating with our website manager to update events and general news about our club on the website, preparing a welcome pack for new members (social and bowling), feeding information about coming events to TeamApp manager (Sharyn Wilkinson), etc.
      
      
   4. House and Surrounds – This involves the managing the maintenance of the building and gardens. Alec Inglis has been managing this with John O’Keefe, Graham Clark, Barry Herbert, Bob Evans and helpers. Part of this job is liaising with Hobsons Bay Council as certain repairs are their responsibility.
      
      
   5. Finance – Apart from the job that the treasurer does, the finance committee also evaluates grants we can apply for and prepares the required application, prioritizes requests for capital expenditure and sees if these can be done through a grant application, discuss the reports prepared by the treasurer and see where we can improve, recommend where to invest the surplus funds etc. The finance committee will at some stage also be responsible for looking at sponsorship, an area that is very well looked after by Peter Bowyer at the moment.
      
      
   6. Social – This subcommittee looks after all the social functions we have at the club. June and Bruce Emmett, together with Peter Bowyer and their group of helpers, have been looking after this for many years.
      
      
   7. Region – 2 Board members are appointed as representatives of our club to attend Metro West regional meetings.
      
      
   8. Greens Director – Liaising with David Zitter, the greenkeeper, about the greens. John Cassidy is the present incumbent. He is not a Board member but the Board receive and send information and requests through him via Eric.
      
      
   9. Coaching – There is a coaching portfolio but we have not had a coach for many years. It is an area that the Board will be discussing before the AGM.

These are the main areas that the Board manage. If you would like to know more than please speak to one of the Board members.