Decisions at our AGM

The following are the decisions made at our Annual General Meeting. Since the minutes I took are rather illegible, and my memory is known to be fallible, please notify me if you spot any errors or omissions. There were 16 members in attendance and one apology for absence.

The annual membership fee remains at £5, and the cost of attending a meeting will be £2 (this is to cover the cost of the room which is currently £30 for two hours but may go up next year). The start-time of meetings will be 7 pm instead of 6:30 pm in future.

The Chair, Stephen Milton, and Secretary, George Jelliss, were reelected. Lesley Arnold-Hopkins stood down as Treasurer but becomes Deputy Chair. Duncan Cleverly becomes Treasurer as well as Social Secretary. Helene White remains formally Assistant Treasurer.

Lesley and Duncan will open a twitter account (@HastingsHumanists). Helen Mitcham will act as a Group Representative at GRAM. The decision whether the group should be an Affiliate or Partner of the BHA was postponed, and Felicity Harvest agreed to examine the BHA proposals in more detail and report back to the committee. We will continus to send Humanist Observers to the East Sussex SACRE, and lobby for more formal recognition.

So far only two meetings are definite for next year: January will feature a formal Debate between Joe Fearn and Stephen Milton on "Is a Disembodied Mind Possible?". June will be a talk from Barbara Burfoot about the Sea of Faith organisation. Enquiries for other outside speakers are in progress. Offers of talks from members (Joe Fearn on the Anthropic Principle, George Jelliss on Rewriting of History, and on Scepticism) are so far available to fit in the programme as needed.

SACRE Meeting in Lewes

On Monday I went to Lewes for the East Sussex SACRE Meeting at County Hall. I was there as a Humanist observer. Any member of the public who has a sufficiently high threshhold of boredom can attend as an observer! I've made a formal request to be appointed as a Humanist Representative on Group A of the SACRE. This will now be considered at the next SACRE meeting in February, it may require revising the constitution.

Unlike the meeting last February in Uckfield this meeting was well attended, with 16 people in all round the table, although the Council personnel running it have now changed. A draft version of the East Sussex Agreed Syllabus for Religious Education (86 pages) was distributed, although it contains a lot of extra material, in blue, added by the new Local Authority Adviser to SACRE, Lilian Weatherley. The Foreword by Councillor Matthew Lock, does mention the need for "considering other secular beliefs such as humanism and atheism" though I have not yet examined the text in detail for its references to Humanism.

There is a meeting in London at Conway Hall on Saturday for SACRE Representatives which I propose to attend, to get further experience in this field.

There is a BHA Group Representatives Annual Meeting on 27th November, but this year it is being held in Birmingham. I attended the GRAM last year in London but will not be able to get to Birmingham. If any member (or two members) of our Hastings Group would like to attend please let me know and I will give you the necessary details. It runs from about 10 am to 4 pm. It would probably be best to travel the day before and stay overnight. We may be able to cover the cost of the rail fare (if booked in advance), but not the overnight accommodation. You might be able to fit in a visit to the CBSO at Symphony Hall, or other attractions.