Dear Members,

Jai Jinendra,

We welcome all our members to our long awaited 8th AGM. First of all please accept our sincere apology for this late meeting and the presentation of our annual accounts.

We normally send our final accounts with our AGM notices. Due to circumstances beyond our control – we could not send the accounts earlier. These draft accounts are now available at today’s meeting.

We will ensure that shortly all the members will receive the full set of accounts. Once again we ask you to forgive us for this delay. Let me assure you that this association is very transparent and can assure you that all affairs of the association are ethical and abide by our rules and constitution.

I would also like to take this opportunity to raise the subject of purchasing property by our association. This is a huge task and needs serious consideration and thoughts. We have nearly 2100 members with average age of 70. We are pleased to inform that our assets are nearly £1,50,000.

We have to ask many questions, discuss pros & cons of having our own property. We all know that property prices today are very high indeed. On a rough guidance we will need to spend over £2 million to acquire a reasonable property of perhaps 6000 – 8000 Sq feet.

Most likely any property we do buy will need major refurbishment to meet our needs. Our needs will range from lunch meetings, day centre activities like health classes, social gatherings.

At weekends we will probably hire out to earn some income. On our current membership spread – it would be sensible to purchase the property in North London area. As you all know the main committee including the co-ordinator reside in South. We will need to have members, volunteers and also fully paid staff to man the centre.

Briefly –
Our current needs are:
Rental paid during 2006 was £7,260. We also conduct monthly meetings for Asian Cancer Support groups in North & South.

We will have a huge task in raising funds. Two years ago we bid for a property in Edgware for £5,50,000. We made an appeal and we only managed to have just under £5,000 pledged fund.

Action Planning

This is a commercial company who specialise in helping to raise funds for charitable organisations such as ours. The committee have met this organisation once in April 2006. They would do in depth review of our association, our needs, and our resources and then produce a package to be put forward to individuals and corporate companies asking for donations.

They do not guarantee any funds / donation. We also believe that they have not done any ethnic community fund raising. Their cost to produce the report would be £25,000.

What we need to ask ourselves
- Do we want to buy a property?
- Will we be able to handle and operate?
- Can we raise the funds?
- We will need ongoing dedicated committee to continue the work.
- We will need to arrange for huge mortgage possibly £1.5 million for £2 million project.