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active role in the Club.
One area of work was a close look at our health and safety procedures brought on by
the need to revisit our insurance policy which covers our members and committee if there were an accident on one of our events. We do not need to change anything except provide better documentation of our procedures. Nevertheless, we need to make sure our members are safe as we all go about our business and Andy was grateful to Richard, who volunteered to look at what we needed to do to tighten our procedures and monitor this in the future.
Our programme of events is again a full one with interesting, established, favourites and some new activities planned. During the year, we were able to lift restrictions on events following the Covid pandemic. These included longer events which are usually a cost-efficient way to have a holiday, important for many members. A special thanks to Eva March and Sue Crane who have the difficult job of ensuring there are no clash- es between events, and the organisers who do a magnificent job of laying on these birding trips.
No Grand Get Together (GGT) was planned to take place during this reporting period, but our next follows shortly over the long weekend of 6 – 8 October at Skegness. Apart from being the largest gathering of LGBT+ birders in the world, it is great fun and gives a chance to meet with friends, old and new, at some great nature reserves: in this case, Gibraltar Point and RSPB Frampton Marsh. Pat, Adrian Thomas and Liz have done most of the preparatory work for this extravaganza and the success of the event owes a great deal to their diligent and careful work. Unusually, we have begun planning for a GGT to celebrate our 30th anniversary in 2025. This is because we are looking to stretch beyond our usual ‘territory’ to a Scottish venue. This is not without risks, so to protect the Club’s interests, we are polling our members to minimise this risk before making such a commitment and will report back to members, probably before the end of the year.
Andy noted that the Club communicates with members using a number of channels. The most important of these is Out Birding (OB), our quarterly magazine which has been edited by Pat for a number of years and is unfailingly punctual. It is provided in electronic format, or optionally as a printed edition. Prospective members find us using our website gbc-online.org.uk.: this was designed and is maintained by Julia Hopper and contains information about the Club, including updates on events. We also have a private email notification method which can be broadcast to all members or just to individual regional groups. We also use social media channels, the most important of these being our Facebook site, which is used by over 460 people; many are paid-up members of the Club, but we recognise that this site is important as a potential gateway to full Club membership, especially among younger and overseas LGBT+ birders. The Facebook site is monitored by three volunteers: Rik Morley, Kerry Sutton-Spence and Chris Whitby and they ensure that this is a safe site for everyone. There is a great deal more we could do to promote the Club, either through articles, more advertising or by increasing our coverage on other social media platforms such
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