THE
CHAIRMAN’S CHUNK... The toughest part of writing the Chairman’s Chunk for the Open House Magazine is normally, ‘Where do I start?’. In normal circumstances there is so much to cover that I am spoilt for choice but, as we all know all too well, the past two years have been far from ‘normal circumstances’. With this in mind I thought it worth dedicating the majority of this Chairman’s Chunk to an update on how the NABD has weathered the Covid-19 pandemic so far. NABD – The State of Play: As far back as April 2020, following the cancellation of the scheduled 29th You’ve Been Nabbed Rally and the onset of the very first Covid-19 lockdown, the NABD committee could see that the pandemic was going to have ever-increasing negative effects on our ability to provide services-as-usual as well as fundraising activities and donations coming in. In June 2020 we made the difficult but necessary decision to suspend the NABD Adaptation Grants system and the Learner/Loaner Scheme to protect the NABD from the very foreseeable consequences of the Coronavirus pandemic. However, it was also agreed that, when/if possible, outstanding grant applications could be processed where this would not pose undue risk to the overall welfare of the Association. Sadly, and with great regret, as the government furlough scheme came to a close in the Autumn of 2020, we had no choice but to offer redundancy to its paid Administrative Assistant, Jane Singleton (one of only two paid NABD employees). Jane accepted the redundancy package offered and the redundancy came into effect on 30th October 2020.
6 Open House Issue 99
As expected, donations to the NABD took a nose-dive as ever-increasing numbers of events were cancelled due to Coronavirus restrictions. As we were not willing to simply accept this situation passively, we organised a number of ‘Virtual’ online events, partly in a bid to raise funds but also partly to keep-up moral and reassure members and supporters that the NABD was still actively engaging where it could. These Virtual Events, hosted via Facebook, relied very heavily on a range of musicians and comedians donating their time and talent ‘free-of-charge’ and we are indebted to each and every one of them for doing so. The first event, The Virtual You’ve Been Nabbed Rally in May 2020, was an unsurprisingly chaotic event with a number of ‘technical problems’ due to our general inexperience of online events, but it raised a fairly respectable £2,519.66 over the weekend. Since then, we have organised three more virtual
