Time to reflect

From this session, I took three actions back to the Kent Local Section. The first was to review our activities, in particular what to keep, what to do more of, and what to bring to an end. I also wanted to discuss how to get more people involved in our activities, and not necessarily as committee members. Finally I wanted to investigate whether we could organise a ‘Chemistry Community Day’ at the University of Greenwich.

Following our review, we have agreed to keep some of our most popular fun social events, such as our local brewery visits and our support for schools outreach. We also agreed to set aside a bursary to help local schools fund travel to museums and are looking to increase the number of applications we receive for our small grants more generally. While we don’t currently have the resource to hold a community day, this is something where we would be happy to contribute to as part of a larger event organised by others.

One area we thought we could improve was in enabling chemists from different disciplines, companies and career stages to get together. We have held networking meetings in some years but have now made a firm commitment to ensure that these are annual events.

We also recognised the need to connect more with local members of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Early Career Network (ECN). Our committee member Charlotte Carr is also on the ECN committee, so we are now looking to build more links with the ECN through her. Charlotte is leading a small sub-group from the committee in setting up an ECN careers and networking meeting, to be held in Canterbury in October, coinciding with the Royal Society of Chemistry careers consultations in the area.

We’ve found that the will to help is often there but it is about communicating need and opportunity – a call for volunteers led to us co-opting someone onto our committee who has an interest in strengthening our support for primary schools, which had been one of the key actions from our strategy meeting.

From the 2016 General Assembly we’ve learnt that reviewing what you do on regular basis re-energises the committee and provides more focus on things that matter to our members.