On Sunday 10 October 2021, Border Terrier Welfare held our AGM in a virtual setting for the second year running. As circumstances remain challenging, a virtual meeting was felt the safest option, however it does allow for people all over the UK to attend who wouldn't otherwise be able to attend an in person meeting. We had a good turn out for our meeting and after the formal business of the AGM was completed, the meeting was opened up and we had fun with a presentation & discussion on Training your Dragon (more on that later!) and a couple of live draws too. We appreciate the virtual format doesn't suit everyone, so In order to make it as accessible as possible, we are sharing the AGM reports along with AGM Raffle news and more, for anyone who wasn't able to attend to enjoy.
AGM Report 2021
Attendees of the meeting were presented with minutes of our 2020 AGM, financial statements and Reports from our Treasurer & Chairman which can be downloaded below if you would like to read more.
Committee re-elected
The Committee, along with the Officers, were re-elected at the AGM as follows:
Chairman & Rep - Tony Wrenn
Secretary - Melanie Robson
Acting Treasurer - Melanie Robson
Records Trustee & Rep - Mark Harvey
BTW Co-ordinator Trustee - Roger Newson
Digital Trustee - Paula Byers
Trustee & Rep - Jenny Oakshott
Trustee & Rep - Joyce Rhodes
Trustee & Fostering - John Jessop
Trustee & Fostering - Vanessa Jessop
Their contact details can be found in our BTW Committee section of our About BTW page.
A Presidential handover
Under any other business, we also announced the sad news that Diana O'Grady was stepping down as President of Border Terrier Welfare. We are sad to see her go and cannot express our gratitude enough for her support and enthusiasm for BTW for over 40 years, as she has been involved since formation as a Charity in 1981.
We were however, delighted to be able to announce that Bob Bolton agreed to undertake the role as the new President for Border Terrier Welfare and give him a warm welcome back. Bob has also been involved and supported BTW for many years, most latterly as longstanding Treasurer stepping down in 2019. It is great to have him involved once more.
We'll be following up these announcements in later blogs, so keep an eye out for them to read more on both Diana & Bob.
BTW AGM Raffle draw
After the formal part of the meeting closed, we were then able to have some fun, with our live draws, presentation and chat.
As you know (and if you don't where have you been?! 🤣), in the run up to our AGM we ran our fundraising Raffle! So many of you answered the call and purchased tickets in your hundreds . . literally. We sold over 1560 tickets in total, so a huge thank you to all those who bought them, wether it was 1 ticket, 5, 10 or 50 - it all helped to raise funds of over £1,560 which will go directly to helping Border Terriers in need.
We also need to say another big thank you to those who donated prizes as we had over 40 prizes to give away, including our top prize of the Nikki's Nestie medium dog bed. You can check out all the prizes in our Raffle launch blog here.
As we were fortunate to have so many prizes, we did the draw in advance, with Trustees John & Vanessa pulling the tickets with their adorable BTs, Edith & Leo assisting and we played a sped up version of the draw in the meeting, before drawing the final ticket live.
If you would like to watch the draw, you can see it in real time on our YouTube here (and while you're there click subscribe to be notified of new videos we post there!).
So, once we had all our winning tickets, they were entered into a digital wheel of names to then randomly generate our overall winning ticket for the Nikki's Nestie top prize. We all held our collective breath while the tech did it's thing and selected our winner . . .
So huge congratulation to Jane W of Hampshire! We have been in touch with Jane & will put her in touch with Nikki so that she can choose her bespoke Nikki's Nestie medium dog bed. We'd like to say a great big thank you to Nikki too for donating this bed worth at least £100 - a generous offer to help our fundraising Raffle along.
Below are the list of prizes with their winners, which we will be sending out in the next week or so, bear with us while we pack them all up - we're working as fast as we can to get them all out to you!
How to train your Dragon
After the excitement of the draw, we then moved onto our main presentation, 'How to Train your Dragon'.
Wait . . . what?! No sorry, that's How to Train your Dragon . . . errr Border Terrier! 🤣. Here's Vanessa to show you how it's done.
With Vanessa breaking down how to teach a complicated trick into simple moves, ably assisted by Leo (or should that be the other way round?). It generated a good debate around training as we had some great questions from the audience, along with lovely compliments for Leo & Vanessa. Whilst some Border Terriers are harder to train than others, it was a good discussion and shows that with time and patience, teaching tricks can be a good way of breaking up the monotony of the basics of Sit, Stay and Recall, as well as helping to keep busy active BT brains out of trouble!
BTW AGM Attendee live draw
After the presentation & Q&A, we moved on to our live draw for the attendees of the meeting for the felted storage basket in BTW colours (along with confirming they didn't have to own a dog called Toby to win!). Again, we held our collective breath while the wheel of names spun to reveal our winner . . .
So congratulations to Melanie L from Essex who we checked was still at the meeting (she was), so we're now in the process of arranging personalisation of the felted basket with her.
Note: Committee member names were removed from the attendee list prior to the felted basket draw to ensure it was won by one of our supporters.
A big thank you from BTW
We drew the meeting to a close with an open discussion and updates from some on the call who showed off their adopted Borders. We also introduced our newest BTW Rep for Scotland, Louise Nowell, so that we could put a face to the name (and put her on the spot rather as it was a spur of the moment - sorry Louise!).
We all agreed it was a lovely way to spend an hour generally sharing the Border love, with the opportunity for people to join from much further afield than an in-person meeting. Chairman Tony Wrenn thanked everyone for joining us and for the ongoing support.
If you missed it, hopefully you've been tempted by this catch up and we'll see you at the next online or in-person meeting.
