EC Meeting Papers July 2018

GENERAL FEDERATION OF TRADE UNIONS EDUCATIONAL TRUST

REPORT OF THE TRUSTEES FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2017

Arts and Cultural Work. We were pleased also to be able to support the production of a play about an early leading woman trade unionist who was on the GFTU Executive, Mary Quaile and to support the work to preserve archives of the North West Women’s Union. Our normal funding of a biennial study visit by the Executive Committee of the GFTU did not take place in quite the same way in 2016 due to funding and time pressures on the committee. However, we were able to fund a visit by younger EC members to Greece. We have also been able to support two educational exchanges to the GFTU by ESNA the Latin American trade union education and research organisation. Work with the Vietnamese 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. 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. The Trust supported a special event to explore ways of using arts and culture to support union organising, campaigning and education work. This was generally considered a very worthwhile and unique day. Around 65 attended including all arts related affiliates. Performances and discussions were excellent. It provided a great building block for the Liberating Arts Festival November 3,4,5 2017 and took us a long way forward in terms of considering how arts and cultural workers can assist the union work of organising, education and campaigning. The Trust was also able to support the performance of a new play about Mary Quaile by a new young theatre group in Nottingham, Bread and Roses. Following these events a small group organising the Liberating Arts Festival has met to plan things and apply for grants. This group includes Townsend Productions, Exeter and York Universities, Reel News, Chris Jury, Jan Woolf, Banner Theatre and others. Leeds Beckett. This meeting was at the most senior level with Vice Chancellor and Deans and Heads of Department and discussed a whole range of ways in which the University could support our education work. Further meetings will be held. A Memorandum of Understanding has been agreed. The university will deliver our new course for trade union educators in 2017. Newman University. The University will deliver our new course for trade union educators at Level 6. Mike Seal from Newman is putting a great deal of work into our editing our book on trade union education and made presentations at the summit and union building conference. Ruskin College. Positive discussions are under way about closer working. The Secretary remains a member of the Executive Board of Ruskin. The Secretary was an invited speaker at the special Ruskin Day on the future of Working Class Education Somerville College Oxford. Dr Alice Porcheska who is a distinguished internationally renowned historian and archivist, wrote the first history of the GFTU. She is now Principal of Somerville College Oxford.. She is keen to share some of her unpublished work on the GFTU’s history with our new Ph D student and to work closely with us again. Dr Procheska has also arranged to host a meeting of education officers at Somerville college to discuss access to the university for trade unionists. It is not every day that you get an Oxford College inviting trade union education officers in for discussions! Northern College. Our five day courses at Northern were very successful. The Trust has been able to promote Northern College and Ruskin College at the TUC and in its new education brochure. Partnerships. There has been positive support for our work from a growing number of Universities.

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