Before Christmas the York Supplies Community Buyout group sought to recruit an initial membership for a York Supplies Action Group (YSAG), together with nominations for people to form a YSAG steering committee.
The YSAG’s purpose is to complete the paperwork, applications and money-raising necessary to create a consumer co-op that will buy and run York Supplies. Once the co-op is established, that will become the governing entity for the shop and its activities. At that point the YSAG’s work will be complete and it will be dissolved.
Following the request for members and nominations, 56 people signed up to be YSAG founding members and 10 people offered their skills for a steering committee.
Since the constitution specifies 9 committee members and 10 had volunteered, it seemed that an election would simply deny YSAG some skills that would in fact be useful to the committee. Accordingly, the nominees held a meeting on 29 January to determine how to ensure the committee had an odd number of voting members while still using all the skills offered, and to fill the 5 officer positions.
As a result, we would like to present the following steering committee:
We hope that members will be happy that all skills are being used in line with the constitution. The steering committee will now pursue a grant application for free professional support to produce a business plan and the other documentation involved in setting up a co-op, so that we can move on to most important part of the buyout, which is raising the money!