Annual Review - 2011

Hello everybody! Firstly, wishing you you all a super duper 2011!

Secondly, welcome to the annual OPS review! Thank you, on behalf of John and I and of course on behalf of the charities we have partnered with this year, for your continued support. Between us, in 2010: OPS raised £12,526 for 4 extremely worthy causes. This included a £4,792 windfall from our backdated gift aid claim. Go to Finances for a summary of our accounts.

Special thanks to Nick Thompson, James Etchells and Emma Frost for running our partnerships with: SBT, The Coalition and The Choir respectively, and likewise a huge thank you to Mrs Anna Ray-Arnold for running our partnership with Seeds and having the absolute pleasure of doing our accounts! A belated welcome also to Anthony & Moira Creed who joined at the start of last year but somehow avoided a public welcome!

For those that are new to OPS this year, please have a see FAQs for information about our objectives and how we operate and are governed. The impact of our financial support to our four partner charities in 2010 is descibed below.

REVIEW 2011 (click here!) - the format is pretty much the same as last year. Based on our interaction with the charities over the course of the last year, Nick, James, Emma and Anna, have put together a summary of what 2010 entailed for each respective charity, and a proposal for how OPS could help during 2011. We also have two new interesting proposals for 2011, from Anna Arnold (Chetanar Dak - Bangladesh) and Claire Hancock (AdvocAid - Sierra Leone). Based on all of this, John and I have put together a trustees recommendation for how we think OPS funds would best be spent this year.

GIFT AID - review 2011 (click here): Last year we finally reclaimed all the gift aid that we had accrued since we became registered with Charity Commission in 2007 – this has amounted to a whopping £4792.74!. Anna is now making claims annually and the standard proceedure will be for this money to be divided equally between the charities we are supporting at that time. For example, for the period April 2009 - April 2010, the £1694.94 we recieved in gift aid, was split between: SBT, The Coalition, Seeds and Headway. For the monies claimed before 2009 which totals £3097.80, we would like to propose an alternative which we believe would put the money to better use.

WHERE YOU COME IN: When you have reviewed the proposals and the trustees recommendation there are 2 options:

1) Vote to go with the trustees recommendations (continue supporting The Choir, SBT and Seeds), then vote for your 1st and 2nd preference between: The Coalition, Chetanar Dak, Advoc Aid, for the final slot.

(for example: 'I vote for 1, go with trustees, then 1st Coalition 2nd Chetanar Dak.')

2) Vote in favour of your own choices.  

(for example: '1st SBT, 2nd Choir, 3rd AdvocAid, 4th Seeds'. You can vote for as many or few as you want, however votes are weighted by pereference so a '1st: Seeds', would have a greater weighting than a '4th Seeds'.)

Lastly, tell us if you have any views on the gift aid money (if you don't we'll assume that you are happy with our recommendation)

ALL VOTES TO: trustees@onepercentscheme.org by SATURDAY FEBRUARY 19th

WHAT THEN? We will get the results out to you as soon as possible. Any member not voting will be assumed to have voted in favour of option 1 i.e. with the trustees recommendation. As ever, we appreciate your views so if you have any thoughts on how this review process is run then we're all ears! If you have any issues with our recommendation or gift aid money proposal we will get back to you individually and any significant issues will of course be raised with the whole group.

OVER TO YOU!