GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

activities. The information does go out. Do not make it just part of your bundle

that you kind of scan read. Urge your members to engage with all the

activities, the educational programme, which is really progressive, really

exciting, both for members and for staff within the unions. The cultural

activities, the historical activities, you will see there is a full programme there -

the Kurdish Festival, which I would urge everybody to try to either attend or

send a representation to.

I have not got a Shakespeare quote really, I have got a line. It is all out there

for you. Make sure you take that out to your members. So, in the words of

Antony and Cleopatra, “Dispatch!” (Laughter and applause) .

BRO IAN LAWRENCE (NAPO): Chair, conference, good morning. I hope you all

had a good night’s sleep. I note for some of you that did go to the theatre that

included the three hours’ duration of the play, but for those of us that really got

into it, it was quite an experience. Thank you for organising that.

Oshor has given a great exposé of why it is important for unions to become

more engaged with our activities programme and he has given a

comprehensive account of the sorts of things that were covered at the summit

and the subsequent union building events, so I do not need to rehearse what

he said. I just want to spend a couple of minutes talking about how the GFTU

has helped NAPO to re-energise ourselves in many respects and also to

enthuse our staff to think differently about their place in the organisation. I was

told that when we sold the building quite recently to move out that the plan to

move out of Chivalry Road had been on the books for about 40 years. A

retired member, a lovely gentleman, wrote to me saying, “We were planning

this 40 years ago and you guys have done it”. We would not have done it, I

think, were it not for the summit conference we had where we talked about

shared services, thinking differently and future challenges and that allowed

myself and the officers to go back and engage with the staff through our

training and development programme to say, “Look, we have got to do

something here about our premises situation”. Nobody had wanted to pick this

up and run with it, but from the contacts we made, from the sort of thinking that

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