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Hot Topics

Articles of Association

Events & Competitions Committee Restructuring

Membership and Levy Schemes Review

Whole Sport Plan (2013-2017)

Whole Sport Plan (2009-2013)

British Orienteering Federation: Articles of Association

 Events & Competitions Committee Restructuring

At the December Board meeting the appointment process and appointments panel was ratified and a Director was identified to sit on the appointment panel.

NOTE that the process is now underway and the appointment of the first 4 members is on-going.

The members of the committee will be appointed along the lines specified within the British Orienteering ‘Recruitment & Selection Policy’.

The appointments are taking place in two stages:

1. The 4 association representatives are currently being appointed. Associations have been asked to nominate as many members as they think are appropriate for positions on the committee. A brief CV and table outlining the skills, understanding and experiences of each nominee have been required.
   Why would associations nominate more than one person? The process of appointing people is first taking a sweep through the nominations and the 4 committee members are being appointed that best meet the criteria with a maximum of one person from any association.
2. The remaining 2 appointed members of the committee will come from all other nominations from members, clubs, associations, committees, staff, etc. This means that in the final instance there may be more than one member from some associations.

The appointment panel consists of:

The Chair of the Events & Competitions Committee – Mike Forrest

The Chair of an Association – Ernie Williams, EMOA has been asked and has accepted

A Director of British Orienteering – Scott Collier

The Events Manager

The appointment process for the initial 4 members of the committee, the association representatives, is now on-going and nominations for the next stage of appointments are being sought from any member, club, association, committee, staff. Those nominations from associations that are not appointed in the first round of appointments will automatically be moved forward for consideration in the second stage appointments.

Committee Structure - Amended timetable

The timetable for the implementation of the review of the Committee Structure was agreed. 

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Membership & Levy Schemes Review 

Background

The activities of British Orienteering are currently funded from a variety of sources, public and private. Income from UK Sport, Sport England and Sport NI represents about 72% of the annual income and may be used only for the purposes for which grants have been offered. Income from membership subscriptions, levies and major events represents about 17% of the total and may be used for any purpose in accordance with the members’ wishes.

The current membership structure is perceived as cumbersome, expensive to maintain and, arguably, not sufficiently attractive to potential new members. The levy system is well tried, but currently more than 50% of participant runs are at events which do not contribute to the costs of orienteering through the payment of a levy of any sort. The Board therefore wishes to embark on a consultation process to review the membership and levy structures in tandem, to determine whether these structures are the most suitable for meeting likely future demands. 

Consultation

The supporting paper below forms the basis of a consultation to individual members, participants, clubs, associations and committees. The consultation process, at this stage, has several clear strands: individual members and participants; committees; clubs and associations. 

Clubs and Associations have been asked to discuss the supporting paper focusing on the questions specified below and to brief their representatives attending the Association and Club Conference (15^th October) on these views. 

Feedback will also be sought from individual members and participants and committees on the review.

The consultation process will have 3 clear strands:

It is anticipated that the range of views will be wide and that most will be strongly held. The Board will try to find a balanced consensus and will put forward more than one proposal to the 2012 AGM if there is strong support for appreciably different solutions. 

Discussion questions: 

1. Do you agree with the basic principles outlined in this paper for governing the membership and levy structures?

2. Do you agree with the assumptions outlined in this paper for governing the membership and levy structures?

3. Do we have the right balance between income generated by members and income generated by participants?

4. Do you agree with the current ratio of income generated by membership compared to income generated by levy? What do you feel is the ideal ratio? 

Membership and Levy Structures – A Consultation Paper

Mike Hamilton, Chief Executive 

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Whole Sport Plan (2013-2017)

Firstly, can we thank again the 54 clubs that provided significant input into the development of the Whole Sport Plan 2009/13. It was thanks to their input that we were able to feel confident that the plan did meet the needs of our clubs and members.

The Board is now working to develop the Whole Sport Plan 2013/17 and sees this work as of critical importance to the on-going development of the sport in the UK.

The initial consultation with members has taken place (via an online survey) and seems to support the continued use of our vision ‘more people, more places, more podiums’. The consultation does raise a significant number of issues for discussion and we would like to hear the views of members, clubs and associations on these issues. It is worth noting a few points prior to the discussion however:

From the themes identified in the Whole Sport Plan (WSP) online survey, we have developed a number of discussion questions to be considered by individuals, clubs and associations alike. We have asked that these questions be considered and discussed within clubs and associations, and views fed into the Association and Club conference (15^thOctober 2011) by delegates attending.

We also welcome feedback from individuals on the discussion questions.

The discussion questions, themes identified from the WSP 13-17 online survey and the raw data have been compiled and can be found in the document WSP 2013-2017 consultation papers.

We welcome feedback from all interested parties.  Please feedback, using the discussion questions as a basis, to the following email address feedback@britishorienteering.org.uk.

Look forward to hearing your input on the issues.

Mike Hamilton, Chief Executive

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Whole Sport Plan (2009-2013)

A great deal of information regarding the Whole Sport Plan (WSP) has already been provided to members via Focus magazine in a summarised and hopefully, readable form – almost every publication for the last 2 years has contained an update on progress!

Previous editions of Focus magazine can be downloaded from the members only section which you can access by logging in to the British Orienteering website.  If you have forgotten you username/password please email the National Office.

Articles about the WSP have appeared in Autumn 2007 (p26/27), Winter 2007 (p4), Spring 2008 (p20/21), Summer 2008 (p6/7), Autumn 2008 (p24), Winter 2008 (p24/25), Spring 2009 (p3). Mike Hamilton has also provided updates in his Chief Executive report.

Additionally the detailed papers have been provided to some committees and those Associations that have requested copies.

The Board has discussed the WSP and Sport England submission at Board meetings since the inauguration of the Board and there has been considerable discussion regarding how the WSP could be communicated to members in a style and structure that would encourage it to be read. Obviously we would like to encourage members to understand it and do their part in helping to implement it.

Board members have recognised that the Sport England submission, and to a lesser extent the WSP, are written in a language, style and structure that is required when communicating with funding partners and being large, is unlikely to be read by many members. The submission and associated documents do not use especially ‘orienteering friendly’ language and consequently the concepts and underpinning principles have been communicated to members through Focus rather than by publishing the original documents.

The Board advocate transparency and therefore have previously made the documents available when requested.  In addition, some time ago the Board asked staff to develop an ‘orienteering friendly’ version of the WSP that will be suitable for clubs and members to use. A project to provide such an interpretation of the WSP that will be easily usable by clubs and members is currently under development and will be piloted with some clubs and their members with a view to publishing it by early 2010.

British Orienteering has recently been informed by one of our funding partners, Sport England, that a request has been made to them under the Freedom of Information Act regarding the Orienteering WSP. To assist Sport England in responding to the request more easily, the majority of the significant information regarding the WSP is now being published on the British Orienteering website. Consequently articles have been added to the Major Topics page that provides the background and links to the relevant documents.

The background to the development of the WSP and the Sport England funding submission is:

The submission for funding from Sport England was made in October 2008 and an agreement in principle reached in January 2009. Funding commenced in June 2009 although there remain several documents outstanding that will be completed shortly.

The last two documents cannot be released without authorisation from Sport England which has been sought.

In reality the above list of documents is only a small percentage of the total documents; there were many meetings and email discussions between members, staff, Board members, and Sport England staff about the above. The list does however provide an insight into the work that has been done in delivering both a reasonable draft of a Whole Sport Plan for Orienteering and the Sport England Funding Submission.

Similar work, based on the Orienteering WSP and national needs has already taken place in Northern Ireland and is commencing in Wales. Additionally Scotland has a yearly process to gain funding.

Mike Hamilton, Chief Executive

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• Association and Club conference notice
  • Association and Club conference - expenses
    • Association and Club Conference discussion items and supporting papers
    • Articles of Association - Introduction and Overview
    • Articles of Association - Draft markup
    • Articles of Association - Draft final
    • Articles of Association - Cross reference
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    •   
    1. Individual members and participants are asked to feedback their individual views, using the discussion questions below to structure responses, at any time to the following email address feedback@britishorienteering.org.uk.
       • Interested individual members and participants are asked to express their interest in being involved in a further consultation process by registering their name and email address with the National Office at info@britishorienteering.org.uk.  This should be done by the end of August 2011.
       • Depending on the level of interest in this further consultation process, it is likely this will take the form of a number of groups looking into particular issues.  These will be conducted electronically.
       • Communication will be via email within each group. Groups will be balanced as far as possible to reflect age, gender and geographic distribution.
       • These electronic discussion groups will consider the consultation paper and discuss several key issues; Agree principles, strategic aims and assumptions; Consider a number of illustrative levy and subscription models to arrive at best contenders; Consider draft proposals ahead of Board formal adoption and presentation to AGM 
    2. As well as individual feedback, we will circulate the paper to British Orienteering committees and ask for comment using the discussion questions below to structure responses.
    3. As well as the individual and committee feedback, we have asked that the paper and the discussion questions are discussed at club and association level, with a view to club delegates feeding back responses to the Association and Club conference on 15^thOctober.
    • The Whole Sport Plan is for orienteering and not the sports councils or other funding agencies. Once we are clear what we wish for the sport we will tailor various funding submissions from the Whole Sport Plan.
    • The Whole Sport Plan is for orienteering in the UK including all home nations.  We look forward to working with the home nations to include their input and feedback.
    • The process of developing the Whole Sport Plan requires considerable input from members, clubs and associations. Your views are the basis for the plan and this is a genuine consultation – nothing is settled and it will be shaped by you.
    • The timeline for the development of the Whole Sport Plan 2013/17 is to have the plan in final draft form by March 2012. This will enable our significant funding submissions to sports councils to be made based on the plan.
    • A needs analysis exercise was completed in Summer/Autumn 2007 which produced a significant amount of data and was the basis for the WSP
      - Intro to WSP 09-13 (Sept 07)
      - WSP Club Returns (Jan 08)
      - Club Projects & Barriers (Jan 08)
      - WSP Needs Analysis v2 (May 08)
    • This formed the basis for the drafting of the Orienteering Whole Sport Plan which was discussed and progressed to version 4 but not finalised due to the work on the Sport England Funding Submission commencing
      - WSP v4 Draft (May 08)
      - WSP Discussion Presentation (Jun 08)
    • Sport England worked with national governing bodies of sport on the ”09-13 Assessing the Needs” submissions for governing body funding.
      - Orienteering 09-13 Assessing the Needs Submission (Oct 08)
      - Financial Summary (final version Feb 09)
      - Schedule of Outcomes (latest version Jun 09)
      - Offer letter (publication not authorised)
      - Award Letter with Standard Terms and Conditions (publication not authorised)