The Story So Far

After a sluggish beginning, 2009 has given us many reasons to be positive about in the Midlands. The Regional Youth Committee has now really taken off and we have a hard-core of 5-6 regular attendees at our meetings now, something we struggled with before. Regular attendees equals more involvement, equals more experience which equals a fully functional self-sufficient youth committee!

In February we held our elections for the officers' positions on the youth committee. Mark Prew of the Birmingham & District Amal Branch is our newly elected Chair, Sammi Craig from Midland No7 Branch is Assistant Secretary and Gareth Eales, Northamptonshire Amal will continue as Secretary, for the time being.

Midlands RYC @ Youth Conference

The Midlands had a very successful Youth Conference this year. We took a good delegation from the youth committee and there was also 3 newly elected Youth Officers from within the region in attendance, who will get involved with the MRYC in the future. Of all the motions on the Youth Conference agenda pad, 25% were from the Midlands - which is a pleasing statistic and demonstrates how far we have come.

The Midlands RYC's 3 key priorities for 2009 are:

To join the fight against the BNP: The MRYC felt that opposing the BNP was a very important campaign that we must participate in. With that in mind the MRYC put on a stall at the Love Music Hate Racism carnival in Stoke on the 30th May, with the assistance of the Youth Advisory Committee and the Regional Secretary. There was a combined delegation of approximately 25 lay CWU members in attendance at the event. The stall was resounding success and we raised the profile of the CWU through the various freebies & handouts we had to give out. In addition to this event at our MRYC meeting on the 1^st May in Derby, committee gave a donation of £1500 on behalf of the Midlands to Love Music Hate Racism.

Introduce a SMS txt message service: In-line with Northamptonshire Amal's motion to this year's Youth Conference, the MRYC wish to fully embrace this policy and look to swiftly introduce a text messaging service to communicate with our young members. As this motion was from the Midlands the youth committee are eager to press ahead with this initiative. We are now going through the necessary processes within the region to seek authorisation for this facility to be implemented.