Page 388 - She's One Crazy Lady!

Marilyn, Linda and I chose to have our salaries reduced for the
duration.
• There were no face-to-face meetings.
• We could only plan ahead on paper.
• All planned events had to be cancelled.
• New landlords would be taking over.
• The tenancy of office was to be shortened.
• Life ‘after’ Covid would, inevitably, be very different
• Day by day, week by week, month by month – we were still getting
older!
Above all, and a far, more important implication – Marilyn was ill. Her cancer had sadly returned.
I want to share with you what this entailed and did, at one point, go off at a tangent here and wrote pages about her illness but... I’m going to continue with the story about how we closed the charity and will return to Marilyn later as her ‘journey’ warrants its own space.
Many, many conversations took place with Trustees about how we should proceed to wind down and close Crazy Hats and we sought legal advice as to what the protocol was. Naturally, once the news went public people were extremely surprised and saddened.
With the devastating news about Marilyn there were never any doubts about this being the wrong decision and I felt we approached things in a very calm and calculated way. First of all we listed all the assets and thought of ways how such assets could be sold off.
Linda began the process by organising online auctions whereby, through Facebook, members could place bids to ‘win’ certain items. This system was a great success and soon, as restrictions lifted, we organised ‘sales days’ downstairs in our workshop where members could come along to peruse what we had to sell and make donations
– which were always generous. In actual fact, it was good fun and so lovely to meet up with Committee Members in the flesh and see people we had not seen in such a long time. We chose not to open to the public as this could have been too complicated and we still had to observe Covid regulations – by having sales downstairs, we could open the doors and regulate who, and how many came in. We sold many of the bigger items of furniture through Ebay and through members buying them. We also gave a lot of our ‘unbranded’ merchandise and
“Above all, and a far, more important implication – Marilyn was ill. Her cancer had sadly returned.
”
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