New strategy launched at Merton CIL AGM
Merton CIL would like to thank all our members and supporters who came to our AGM on 30th October 2017. A total of 60 people came along to show their support. You can find out all about how we did in 2016-17 in our annual review, here - http://www.mertoncil.org.uk/assets/documents/annual-review-2016-17
Looking ahead, we were really proud to launch our new strategy for 2018-23 which has been co-produced with our members and supporters over the past year.
There are 3 areas of focus to our strategy. The first area is Support with Money. This includes our Advice & Advocacy Service, especially around benefits, grants, budgeting, and we want to increase staffing here by 50%. It also includes policy work around some of these issues, like looking at financial exclusion, or challenging assessment centres which aren’t accessible. It also includes an ambition to provide debt advice from 2019.
The second area is about independent living. This is about Advice and Advocacy support around Community Care, and Housing. We also want to increase staffing levels in those areas, and support them with dedicated policy work. This area also includes working with young disabled people, which members told us was really important, and we’re hoping to do that from 2019, after we’ve spoken to young people to find out what they want. Also in this area we’re looking at creating an independent living tool kit, building on some of the independent living work we did this summer.
The third area is about living safe and well and includes advocacy and policy work around access to healthcare, and around preventing hate crime. It also includes some work around celebrating disabled people and celebrating our achievements as an organisation – Merton CIL is 10 next year!
We would really welcome your views on the strategy, so please can you answer these 5 short questions for us? https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/GZLWBLX
We also have an internal area to our strategy which is about being an accountable and sustainable organisation and working in line with our values. As part of that we said hello and welcome to our new trustees, who were voted in by members: Amanda Edwards, Estifanos Habtesellasie, Sally Yarwood - we are really looking forward to working with them.
Finally, we said goodbye and thank you for all your hard work to the following trustees standing down this year: Charles Barraball, Anita Jones, Carole Mathurin, Nick Pizey, Fiona Ringwood. We wish them all the best!