Dear Members
Annual Membership
I hope you are all keeping safe and well. Hopefully lots of you will already have had your vaccination and others will be waiting for the call. What a strange year we have all been experiencing. Last Spring when we had the original lockdown it was something of a novelty but now, I’m sure we would all like to return to some sort of normality.
Your committee met recently (via Zoom) to discuss the renewal of subscriptions due at the end of March 2021. You will recall last year, as the pandemic problems were becoming apparent and many of you were renewing your subscriptions for 2020-21, we could not foretell what the final impact of the pandemic would be upon our U3A’s finances. We therefore continued with renewals at £15 (£11.50 for Associate members) with a view to monitoring the situation as it progressed. On this basis the vast majority of you kept faith with your U3A; some groups even managing to meet in some way or other throughout the past year. The committee has done their sums and we are delighted to tell you that we can repay your loyalty with a FREE YEAR from April 2021 to March 2022. This will make a slight dent in our finances as we still have financial commitments that have to be paid to National Office etc, however, we hope to be able to welcome members back sometime in the coming year.
The committee hope that those groups who have continued to meet, in most instances via Zoom, will continue to do so. When we are allowed to meet and exercise again those groups that can do so will be able to start again, although meeting socially inside will probably take much longer to achieve.
The committee has also agreed to hold a virtual AGM for 2021 and further details will be circulated in the near future by the Business Secretary. Effort will be needed to resume our U3A and all it has to offer, so if you feel you could help by joining the committee, we would be delighted to welcome you.
In the meantime, although it would be easy to assume you will all be happy to take up this FREE membership renewal, some of you may not. Therefore, to ensure that our membership records and financial liabilities continue to reflect active members (we have to pay annual fees on the number of members we have), would you please confirm your wish to enjoy continued membership of Ramsey & District U3A by either emailing membership@ramseyu3a.org.uk, or contacting me on 01487 814984 / 07779 101493.
I do believe the light is at the end of the tunnel and we cannot wait to welcome you all back. We joined the U3A to Learn, Laugh and Live and although a year has been ‘stolen’ from us we can look forward to better times. I have really missed the many activities that I belonged to and the social interaction that so many of us enjoyed – I’m sure a brighter future is round the corner.
Kind regards
Jane
Jane Cusworth
Chairman
Ramsey & District U3A