Shared Interest Society Limited Annual General Meeting Friday 16th March 2012 The meeting was held at Oxford Town Hall St Aldate’s, Oxford, OX1 1BX at 11:30am on 16th March 2012. Kate Priestley, Chair of the Board, welcomed 187 members plus their guests and other staff (who are not members of the Society) to the meeting and went on to introduce the opening speaker. Ian Barney, Managing Director of TWIN, gave the introductory address which included input from Willington Wamayeye , General Manager of the Gumutindo cooperative in Uganda. Patricia Alexander, Managing Director, presented a report on the Society’s activities during 2010/11. Tim Morgan, Finance Director, gave a presentation on the financial results for the year and then, along with members of the Society’s Management Team and Non-Executive Directors, responded to questions from members. Question: What are the sorts of problems that have caused bad debts and can you elaborate on the Producer Committees? Answer – Tim Morgan There is no obvious pattern of bad debts. Numerically more come from producer customers but higher value of bad debts come from buyer customers. The nature of the bad debts shows no long term trends but we would deal with these if we could see any pattern. Answer – Patricia Alexander On Producer Committees the overseas teams met with five or six producers in their regions. Terms of Reference for the committees were drawn up and one physical meeting has been held. There are questions from these meetings which Shared Interest needs to look at and address. The plan going forward will be to have one virtual and one physical meeting per year and rotate the producers involved every two to three years. These are early days for the committees and we’ll see how they go and learn from this. Question: How are we developing our contacts with church bodies? I never fail to be surprised by the lack of knowledge of Shared Interest from these groups. Answer – Patricia Alexander This is a focus of the Supporter Relations Team. We do have some members who are church groups and we are working to penetrate this movement. Question: A Dutch social lender was mentioned earlier. Does Shared Interest cooperate with other similar organisations in the field? Answer – Patricia Alexander 1