Agewell Sandwell Annual General Meeting

May 16th 2007 was a very important day in the life of Agewell. It was at the Annual General Meeting that Agewell Sandwell was formed from the six towns of Sandwell.
It was the culmination of much hard work by Agewell members and staff but we now have a new structure in place. This heralds an exciting new phase in Agewell’s history and development.

The forums in each of the 6 towns have had the opportunity to elect up to 10 members to the new central Agewell Sandwell, replacing the Agewell Lay Group.

Agewell Sandwell will continue to carry out the functions of its predecessor the Lay Group including choosing the representatives to borough wide groups, such as transport, housing and health.

However, as Agewell Sandwell is now strengthened by new members, it will ensure that Agewell is in contact with even more local older people throughout the whole Borough.

Agewell Sandwell will have a more strategic approach and elected forum members from each town will be responsible for bringing concerns, issues and opportunities from their local forums to the central group for discussion and action. They will also be responsible for feeding back information to their forums.

The AGM, followed by lunch, was held at the National Metal Forming Centre. The meeting was open to all forum members.

The Chair of Agewell John Allen MBE, opened the meeting and welcomed everyone and expressed his pleasure that there were so many new faces there.
He gave his Chairman’s report which was illustrated by photographs of the year’s events.

He particularly paid tribute to Harold Short who sadly passed away in December. Harold was a founder member of Agewell and a former Chair. He was active in many community activities and it is good to know that Sandwell Council are honouring him with a bench to be sited outside of the Council Offices.

The Elections followed and all the nominations to Agewell Sandwell from the forums were unanimously endorsed. Agewell Sandwell will have 44 members this year. No town forum had needed to carry out a ballot

The election of Chair and Vice Chair followed with John Allen MBE being re-elected as Chair and Edna Barker and Ralph Perkins being re-elected as Vice Chairs. Pauline Everitt the manager of Agewell gave an overview of the work programmes for Agewell and members of staff gave presentations on their specific areas of work.

This gave new members a chance to learn about the different work strands of Agewell including Mid Life Planning and Active Sandwell.

Geraldine Child, one of the Community Development workers highlighted a number of new opportunities for Agewell Sandwell members to be involved with. This was followed by members from the forums giving short presentations on what has been happening in their town.

It was really encouraging to see the growth of the forums especially in parts of the Borough like Rowley Regis and Tipton where Agewell has been under represented in the past.

It is apparent that across all the towns that they have the same issues in common especially transport and anti–social behaviour.

Some of these issues will inform the agenda for Agewell Sandwell for the coming year.

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