Lutterworth YFC Chair Charlie Skinner has been involved in the club for 10 years and is now enjoying being at the helm leading its 70 members.
I always wanted to be a Chair and I guess it was just good timing that someone decided to put my name forward, and even better that it was seconded.
My main responsibility is standing at the front on a Tuesday night and putting everything together. We have such a brilliant team that do all the background work and I really just help orchestrate it in the meetings.
Working on my family farm means sometimes I find it hard to leave the jobs to go to meetings. Luckily my father is very pro me being a Chair. Even if he doesn’t always show it, he understands that I may have to leave the drilling for another day to go bowling or leave him halfway through feeding calves to go walk around the local hunt. He was Chair of his Young Farmers’ Club many years ago so it’s my turn to follow in his footsteps.
My top skill I hope I’ve mastered is keeping everyone busy! Sometimes if you don’t keep members occupied, they can soon drown the room with natter! It isn’t bad as I understand sometimes in your day it’s the only time you get to talk farming. But if we have a guest speaker, they deserve our attention.
Our club mainly has all member meetings as we’re lacking in over 18s (but not depressing) and our junior count is through the roof! In the future we do plan to do over 18 pub socials just to give us a break and we also plan on revisiting our local vineyard which will be for over 18s as well.
We advertise through Facebook mainly. I think that’s the thing to do at the moment. But I believe that anything in farming is word of mouth and if we do a good job, people will talk. We can see members swapping to our club or new members arriving because of that as well.
We start our year with a new members’ meeting and this year we went for a pizza party. This involved lots of ice breaker games, as it’s different. Most clubs near us were doing BBQs, which may be better, but we like to be different.
We did learn though that pizza makes people thirsty, which meant handing out lots of glasses of water so maybe the BBQ would have been better!
We sat down at the start of the year with all of our officers and spitballed ideas for the year and then our excellent programme team makes it work. I truly would be lost without them.
Our best meeting idea is yet to come so I don’t want to drop any spoilers!
Sometimes it’s hard to manage behaviour – especially with junior members, as you don’t want to come across as the bad guy. The way we dealt with this is a ‘moo off’ – it’s a little bit silly but it works. Basically two people moo at each other until one laughs. When threatened with a ‘moo off’ they usually simmer down.
Just enjoy it! At the end of the day, we choose to be there. Sometimes you have bad nights, sometimes you have good nights – everything can be fixed with your team over a drink after a meeting.
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