Support for Secretaries

If you are the Secretary for your group, the Resource Centre can help you to understand your role and to develop skills and techniques to support your group effectively.

We can offer this support to volunteer-run groups based in Brighton & Hove which are:

  • Tenants’ or Residents’ Associations for Brighton & Hove City Council tenants and leaseholders, and/or
  • Groups run by and for people living in an area of social housing, and/or
  • Groups run by and for black and minority ethnic people, and/or
  • Groups run by and for disabled people.

If you think you may be eligible, contact us to find out whether we can help.

First steps – beginning to take minutes

Minutes are simply a record of decisions made in a meeting. They are useful because they help to summarise discussions and keep track of decisions that have been made. They should be agreed by the group at the next meeting, so that everyone has a chance to say if they think the decisions have been noted correctly.

We can meet with you one-to-one to go through some simple techniques to help you take good minutes for your group. We will talk about what the purpose of having minutes is, and what makes minutes useful for other group members.

We can provide you with a template to use when taking minutes, to help you identify what you need to write down and what you don’t.

Organising, typing and printing your minutes

Once you have taken notes in a meeting, you can come back to us and we can help you to organise them in a way which will be easy to understand for other people, and useful to refer to in future.

We can talk through what happened in the meeting, and give you tips about how to present the minutes.

We can teach you computer skills so that you can type the minutes up, or we can also do the typing for you if needed. We can also print copies in our print room.

Help with making an Agenda

An agenda is a plan of what you will discuss in your meeting.

Having an Agenda for a meeting is important for helping it to run smoothly and ensure that the important things get discussed. The Secretary and Chair often work together to produce the agenda. We can meet with you together or separately to give you tips about planning meetings and making good Agendas.

Publicity and communication

We can:

  • design and print fliers and posters to advertise meetings
  • teach you skills in designing your own publicity if you would like to do this yourself
  • help you plan and produce a newsletter if your group wants to share news with the wider community
  • teach you how to use email and social media to communicate with your members.

Published October 2016

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All Resource Centre information is available for free because we know small community groups have small budgets. However, we are a small charity, so if you are in a position to make a donation, it will help us to keep running this service into the future.

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