EC Meeting March 2017

embassy should enable us to support a health and safety exchange with Vietnamese trade unionists this year. A Kurdish arts and culture festival is also planned at Quorn on July 30th. 17 The Trust has supported two new initiatives. Quarterly meeting opportunities under the banner of Continuous Professional Development for various specialist trade union officers namely, education officers, HR managers, Health and Safety Officers, Finance and Admin Officers. We also support two meetings a year of General Secretaries. To extend and deepen the debates on education and union development matters the Trust supported a GFTU Summit in 2015 and a Union Development Conference in 2016. 18 In actively seeking to diversity our funding a number of external grant applications have been made and a number of bids supported. The most successful bid has been with Wolverhampton University and £670,000 has been secured for the university to do a study of the history of the North Wales coalfields with two new post-doctoral students, this will release some capacity for closer partnership working with the university. We were unsuccessful in our bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund for a project over three years to engage young people in studying the history of young people’s engagement in the trade union and community movements. However, the Heritage Lottery Fund have requested a meeting about the relevance of other funding streams to our work. 19 In order to begin to professionalise and regularise our external fund raising interviews with fundraising companies have been held and an initial contract to make some applications has been agreed. 20 In addition, we met with two representatives of FORMAC to consider joint funding on a number of related projects. FORMAC is a trade union related fund raising company established by the Polish Union OPZZ. It has a successful track record in obtaining significant funding for partnership projects throughout Europe and indeed the GFTU has been party to several of these over the years. Two potential partnership bids are being considered at the moment one to support our work on health and safety with the Vietnamese General Confederation of Labour and one to support work on youth engagement in unions. 21 In 2015 significant expenditure was made on a new integrated computer system to replace outdated hardware throughout. This was struck by a near fatal computer virus that seriously damaged all GFTU related organisations. As an illustration all of the Trusts Education Programmes were destroyed I would estimate the cost of this alone as £130,000. The system was then struck by some other spam attacks and has remained unstable since. A comprehensive independent review of our situation and future requirements is underway and an interim report has been received. Tenders for a new maintainer will be circulated and a new six month post of ICT Officer will be created. 22 The Trust has also begun to support new initiatives in using the arts and culture in education and these are reported on more fully below. 23 We have established a good new platform and now is the time to consolidate it and market our new initiatives more fully. 24 The Trust is offering its biggest and most comprehensive education programme in 2017/2018. This seeks to expand the subjects delivered, improve the way they are taught, generate business for the hotel through new public events and operate more flexibly.

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The Trust has been three full time staff down for the year.

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