CAEE Chair of Trustees Yvette sets out ambitious plans for 2024-25
With the persistently high cost-of-living, 2024-25 will be another important year for CAEE. Our Trustees have approved an ambitious business plan with new ideas for expanding the service, engaging the community and giving clients more access to good advice.
Yvette Ball is Chair of the Trustees Board at Citizens Advice Epsom & Ewell. (2 minutes)
We had a very full Board meeting in early March including approval for the new 2024-2025 Business Plan and budget plus the Leadership Self-Assessment (LSA) report. We are scheduled for a telephone meeting with national Citizens Advice later this month. The LSA is the next big thing, a little intimidating for me, being my first experience of this comprehensive review of nine leadership areas.
Development thinking
To inform the Strategy and Business Plan we invited James Wood, CEO at Doncaster CA, who spoke of how he had invested in and embedded his CA proactively in the community. He shared fascinating ideas of things we could develop, for example: community advice to groups of people; doing the majority of face-to-face interviews in outreach locations; garnering trustee support by engaging with local businesses for funding and volunteer recruitment and/or by giving presentations. This has inspired the Business Plan giving us lots to aspire to and achieve.
Partnerships
The pending move to new office premises on East Street, which is a tad off the beaten track for clients to drop in, presents a great opportunity for finding new outreach locations possibly through partnerships with other organisations. Partnership working is in itself a key driver in the coming year to enhance grant bids and optimise resources.
Money is tight, as ever, but our energetic CEO, staff, volunteers and trustees are on the case! They’re putting in bids and out there inspiring local companies to support us with grants, volunteers and mentoring.
We’re recruiting!
Lastly, acting on our recent Board review, I’m starting a recruitment campaign for trustees. If you have skills you’d like to offer in a range of areas, eg diversity, legal, health and mental health, housing, fundraising, safeguarding and IT amongst others, we’d be delighted to hear from you. If you would like to have a chat with me, you can express your interest online and we will get back to you by phone or email.”