The Carmarthenshire Meadows Group has a subscription of £10 per year.  We ask members to pay a subscription so that we can maintain the CMG website (which costs £66 per annum), provide insurance to cover the group for sites visits and indoor meetings (£84 pa) and the “Membermojo” membership system (£40 pa, increasing to £75 if the membership is 100 or more). The membership system enormously simplifies the administration of the group and maintains a secure database of members and also of their land (should they choose to enter that information).  

Until the start of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, we also paid for the hire of village halls around the county to hold indoor meetings every spring and autumn (the cost of hall hire varies). We also offer to pay the speakers’ expenses, especially if they need to travel a long way to deliver their talk.  CMG members may attend indoor meetings for free and non-members pay £3 for entry.  We had to cancel all outdoor events and indoor meetings starting with the one arranged for March 21^st 2020 and as we didn’t (and don’t) need to pay for hall hire for the foreseeable future we gave the members one year’s membership for free.

CMG is run by a “steering group” of seven unpaid volunteers, but since we can’t currently meet up to discuss and plan the running of the group, we now have a Zoom contract. This is used for our steering group meetings as well as for delivering talks for CMG members on a wide range of conservation and wildlife interests, which we’ve been doing every month since October last year.  The Zoom contract costs £144 annually, which is about the same as we were spending on hall hire for the big indoor meetings.  The autumn/winter talks have been recorded, and they become available for anyone to watch on our YouTube channel whether they’ve paid a subscription or not:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1szE6Y3JQMP-6ukQejGdVQ

We also use the subscription income to pay for occasional printing costs and we are planning to produce information sheets on meadow and grassland management particularly relevant to conditions in Carmarthenshire.

All these activities are funded by the subscriptions paid by our members, of which there are currently about 70.  The website, as of today has 186 followers, so it’s apparent that many of the people who have subscribed to follow the website aren’t members of the group.  So, if you’re not a member, but you find the website interesting or useful, please consider helping us to continue providing these services by joining the meadows group.  You can find out how to join by visiting this page on the website:

https://carmarthenshiremeadows.com/cmg-membership/

Thanks for reading.

Rachel