The Dons Trust board held its monthly meeting at our home in Plough Lane on Wednesday 8 March. We agreed for this year to hold some meetings online and some face-to-face, and so far we’ve done our monthly meetings on a rotation basis, plus an extra awayday meeting at the stadium. The face-to-face meetings have been well attended.
March’s meeting had all members attending apart from Matt Lowndes who had let the board know long in advance that he would not be available on this date. Secretary Martin Newton was also there.
Here’s a quick round-up of some things we discussed and agreed:
- We will be holding a joint boards’ (DTb and PLCb) strategy day as soon we can find a date in everyone’s diaries. We are inviting Craig Cope and Danny Macklin to join us.
- The DT will be sponsoring refreshments for matchday volunteers
- Board members have been attending the FSA training sessions and reporting that it has been really helpful so far.
- As part of their rolling programme of support to all trusts, we have invited the FSA to conduct a light-touch review of DT governance.
- A nominations’ committee has been set up, to pursue the selection and appointment of non-executive directors to the PLC board.
- The board is still working on a paper outlining the issues on further equity sales (taking us below the 75%+1 threshold) for members to consider and discuss. Further discussion will be held before a paper is shared with members.
- Papers for the members’ meeting on 30 April will be going out shortly.
Other issues raised:
- Richard brought up board performance measures and will be doing some more work on how we review ourselves and how we review the effectiveness of the PLC board.
- We had another discussion about minutes, as part of which we agreed to try to re-instate the short meeting summaries that were previously shared with members in advance of minutes’ being agreed.
- The board discussed issues for the DTb’s representatives to take into the AFCW PLC meeting due the following week
- A skills audit template would be circulated to help identify gaps and areas for board training
- All members were asked to check in on DT ProBoards from time to time to take part in any relevant discussions
The next DT board meeting will be on Wednesday 12 April. It has not yet been agreed if that will be online or in person.