Where to start? Well probably best that I do so where Marjorie Bramhill left off at the end of her own piece in the July Newsline, in the drinks aisle of Southwell Co-op! I still suspect it was all a ruse, but Marjorie asked me if I could pick up a low-lying case of French beer for her and... err... whilst I was at it, would I consider taking over from her as the next Chair? I, of course, immediately said “no, definitely not”. Unfortunately, a second request followed shortly afterwards, and I made the fatal mistake of saying that I would think about it – and you can guess how that ended!
I was already on the Committee and, a little earlier, I’d overseen the organisation of the Christmas party at the end of 2020. This had to be held on Zoom because of the Covid restrictions at that time. We had planned a ‘Southwell u3a’s Got Talent’ show, with members performing a remarkable range of written and musical pieces from their own homes. What could possibly go wrong? Well, at least as far as our dress rehearsal was concerned, the answer was everything! “You’re on mute!” “There should be a video icon at the bottom of your screen – click on it!” were amongst the milder cries of exasperation. By some miracle though, and following the show-biz rule of “it’ll be alright on the night” (or morning in our case), we eventually “Zoomed” out to an audience of over 100 – most of whom surprisingly stayed to the end of the party.
When I became Chair the following August, I felt confident that we would soon be moving into the sunlit uplands of a post- Covid world and that we would quickly be able to rebuild our u3a numbers and activities. How wrong I was! Our resumption of live group and monthly meetings soon proved to be a false dawn. A surge in Covid cases put us all back onto Zoom - not much use if you were Country Dancing or the Badminton or Table Tennis groups. Quite a few groups did find ingenious ways of meeting on Zoom though, including my own Come Dine With Us, which indeed has continued to alternate live and Zoom meetings to the present day.
We did though manage to get back to some sort of new normality by the Spring of 2022. By then however, post-Covid membership numbers had fallen by about 10% and many members remained apprehensive about meeting with fellow members, whilst others had simply got out of the u3a habit. My priorities were therefore to fully resume group activities, recruit new members and to get back to balancing the accounts.
We became one of the so-called “Pathfinder” u3as in a national recruitment initiative, starting our own Recruitment and Retention group, shortly followed by a separate Publicity group. We held stalls and open days on the Market Square to showcase our activities, and we stood in the doorway of Southwell Co-op, bothering shoppers. By 2023, we reached the magic number of 800 members which we’d flirted with pre-Covid, but never quite achieved. Rosie Barnes of Upton was duly celebrated as our 800th member and I was invited to give an interview about the u3a on Radio Nottingham, on the back of an article of ours in the Newark Advertiser.
As you’ll no doubt know, our membership has continued to grow since that time and on our current trajectory we will soon be reaching 1000. We do sometimes wonder whether we can have too many members but, for the time being at least, the advantages of these higher numbers in supporting more interest groups, more social activities, achieving economies of scale and keeping subscription prices down still seem to outweigh any possible disadvantages. I am also very pleased that we have continued to run an annual programme of short courses and workshops over the past four years. On a visit to see our children in Australia, I visited Canberra u3a (4000 members, in a city just shy of 500,000 people!) and was intrigued to see that they didn’t have all that many regular interest groups but ran large numbers of short courses. We already ran some ad hoc workshops but combining such workshops with short courses on everything from smartphones to solar heating and plumbing to philosophy seems to have proved popular with members.
Like every other Chair, I must pay great tribute to the many Committee members, Group Leaders and other officeholders who supported me in my three years as Chair and continue to keep the u3a show on the road. It really is a case of “By the members, for the members”. I wouldn’t underestimate the time and effort that is sometimes needed but I personally got a lot in return from my time as Chair. My advice then to any of you who might be thinking about possibly becoming a Group Leader, joining the Committee or even becoming Chair is – just go for it!