BMS “in the box” for Tesco Bags of Help

Update – Banchory Men’s Shed entry into the Bags of Help scheme has now ended (30th June 2018)

The Banchory Men’s Shed are currently enjoying “pole position” (that is, the box nearest the door) for the current round of the Tesco Bags of Help scheme.

From their web site:

“Bags of Help is Tesco’s exciting local community grant scheme where the money raised by the sale of carrier bags is being used to fund thousands of local projects in communities right across the UK.”

When you check out at Tesco don’t forget to see if you qualify for carrier bag tokens and if you want to support the Banchory Men’s Shed’s fundraising drive, please drop them in our compartment of the transparent boxes to the right of the out door.

Lynn from Tesco drops in at Tuesday’s BMS social to meet some of the Banchory Shedders

Our participation as a nominated Charity for this round of Bags of Help runs from 1st May to 30th June and we would love it if you would drop your blue tokens in our box.  Depending on the level of support we should receive between £1000 and £4000 to put towards our fund raising efforts – we are intending to allocate these funds to Phase 2 of the premises.

Thanks, and keep those tokens coming !

Chairman’s Message – and Premises Model

Further to yesterday’s updates, firstly a message from our new Chairman, Paul Evans:

“I should like to thank our retiring Chairman Alan Pumfrey and secretary Jack Ward for their hard work and determination that has brought us to where we are now, poised to go ahead with conversion of the Legion Scotland undercroft to be our own Men’s Shed.  We aim to have Phase 1 (the garage bay conversion) operational by this autumn, and Phase 2 (the undercroft open area) by Spring 2019.  I know that the Shed will grow to be a valued and popular feature of Banchory.  I look forward to our Shed becoming the Go-To place for good causes needing skilled practical support from men enjoying working ‘shoulder to shoulder’.”

Alan P, our old Chairman, has also recently built a useful and informative model of the planned Shed premises which is much easier to understand than complex drawings.

(The photo can be seen at full size by clicking it)

You can see the Social area to the left (Phase 2 as mentioned by Paul above), and the workshop (Phase 1) to the right, being the two rooms with the paper labels internally.  The corridor behind and to the left is the fire escape from the Legion stairs and the unlabelled space to the right holds the existing Legion garages.  For cost-saving reasons, there is initially no door directly between the Social Area and the Workshop, and initially the window between them (which must be fire-safe) may also be deferred.  However, access between the two halves is possible on the flat (for accessibility) via the external doors, and also internally by doors out-and-back-in at the rear.

This is a fantastic model from Alan and really helps to crystallise what the Banchory Shed will look like.

We’ll post soon some information on where things have got to quote and funding-wise

The End of the Beginning…

….But definitely not the beginning of the end!

Firstly, apologies for the lack of “Normal Service” hereabouts. We have not updated our web site for the last 5 months due to our Webmeister becoming seriously ill … in New Zealand … and hence being unable to travel back until recently.  Hopefully normal service is now resumed, so keep your eyes open here.

New Board Members

The Banchory Men’s Shed has been in existence now for 3 years, albeit without our own premises as yet.  Much water has passed under the bridge and we have learned a lot about getting a Shed off the ground.

As becomes necessary, the BMS Trustees/Board have to put themselves up for re-election every 3 years and this happened at the May AGM. Our outgoing board members Alan Pumfrey, Chairman, Peter Ash, Vice Chairman and Jack Ward, Secretary all decided not to seek re-election and the BMS conveys our thanks to these gentlemen for their excellent service in getting the BMS off the ground in the first place, continuing to support us through some difficult moments and to a point where the light at the end of the tunnel has indeed become visible.  Alan, Peter and Jack are all remaining as BMS members; Alan and Jack are remaining as Trustees.

Jack trying to keep up with the discussion!

We have two new key Board members. Paul Evans has taken on the post of Chairman (as well as continuing with his superb fund-raising work) and Lionel Davis as Secretary.  We welcome Paul and Lionel to the BMS board and look forward to working with them as we go forward into the rest of 2018 and further.

The other Trustees were re-elected and are continuing their roles as per our Contacts page.

In other news…

New Website

As you may have noticed, we have now lost the banchorymensshed.wordpress.com site, which was free but included advertising (sorry!), and had limited flexibility, so here we are now at banchorymensshed.org.  This has been made possible through our new hoster providing a free (!) hosting package for registered charities, so many thanks and a “big up” are due to TSOhost.  The old site will remain in place for a little while just to provide redirection but will eventually be taken down.

This new website has been updated with a new BMS Who’s Who, an update to the timeline (Milestones), a new Membership Application Form to meet GDPR (the height of excitement!) and an updated list of Funding & Sponsors.

For those of you who signed up on the previous Blog page to “Follow this Blog by e-mail” we have deleted all your e-mail addresses and have to reconsider whether we re-start this facility in the light of GDPR.

Please also keep an eye on our Facebook page for regular updates, and on this web site for the bigger picture.

Yet more…

Once we get a moment we will also add a blog post updating where we are with our Premises, Lease, Fund-Raising etc.  Don’t forget to come along on a Tuesday morning, bring a friend, and let everyone know about Men’s Sheds and the Banchory Shed.  Thanks

And finally … GDPR …

Not again! You will have been inundated with messages from anyone and everyone you have ever given your details to and you will be unsurprised to know that we have to join in with this game, even though small charities were exempted from data registration requirements before.

We are still in the throes of finalising our formal Privacy Policy and will be contacting members shortly to confirm their consent.  Our final Privacy Policy will be posted on our Documents page.

Thanks for reading and please await our further updates