EC Meeting March 2017

33.35 Birmingham University

33.36 The General Secretary participated as a speaker in three different seminars at the University. One concerning an international study by Dr Andy Hodder on trade union strategies to engage young people, a second on the use of popular education in trade union education and the third on key issues in arguing for an alternative education strategy. 34 The Trust has support work to build cultural and educational links internationally with Latin America, China, Vietnam, Venezuela, Bolivia, and the Kurdish community in Britain, 35 The Trustees have reviewed the application and relevance of the Trust deed and made no amendments. Induction training has been given to new Trustees and consideration has been given to expanding the Trustees’ group and areas of expertise. 36 Developments in legislation and guidance from the Charity Commissioners have been considered. 37 The Trust gratefully received a donation from the Rowe Leventon Trust when it was wound up. It has agreed to allocate sums from this donation to the making of a film about the trade unionists who supported the Anti Apartheid struggle, to commission some new artwork from the Artists Union of England and the Scottish Artists Union for Quorn Grange Hotel and our general education programme. The Rowe Leventon Trust was named after two pioneering trade unionists from Manchester in the youth and community sector. Sandar Leventon who may well have been the first woman General Secretary when she was elected to that role in the Community and Youth Service Association. Stanley Rowe was a youth worker and pioneer of collective bargaining in the sector. Together with Sandra he brought the disparate professional associations and unions in youth work and community work together and led a 13 year struggle to establish collective bargaining in the sector, the JNC for youth and community workers. It was pleasing therefore that also in 2016 the GFTU could lend support to the unions’ successful struggle to break up this bargaining committee, one of the best in the public sector. ‘There is an urgent need for progressive artists to be involved in the Movement.’ This opening remark from GFTU’s general secretary Doug Nicholls at The of Trade Unions event in Bedford December 6 th 2016, was organised by the General Federation of Trade Unions and its open network of arts' union members Liberating Arts. An audience of trade union activists and officers, academics and artists watched performances and presentations that had one agenda; how cultural workers can better serve and celebrate, working class struggle. In short, change things. It is clear how this might have happened in the past. Novels like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, the work of Dickens and Jack London, helped change consciousness to pave the way for the welfare state, but are safely lodged in the past – and of course, we’ll never get back to those days. Won’t we? Ken Loach’s recent masterpiece I, Daniel Blake reveals the vicious effects of neo-liberalism on working class people. It’s how art works with and through us during this time of change for the working class today that is the challenge. Art and the Movement.

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