Board meeting Aug19
Board meeting Aug19
2 Sep
CFNZ

CFNZ Board Update – August 2019

2 September 2019

CFNZ Board member Warwick Murray provides an update on the latest Board meeting.

So, what did your Board get up to at its latest meeting held on 31 August?

For me, the most exciting thing was welcoming to the Board our new Independent Director, Rachel Harris, and our new Board Intern, Jaggar Bootten. In looking for an Independent Director, we were wanting some more diversity of thinking around our board table. We’ve certainly got this with Rachel who comes to us from Christchurch with a background in accounting and law and a wealth of experience in the not-for-profit (NFP) sector, in governance and in business.

We have also invited Jaggar to join us as a non-voting intern where, as a young medical student with a passion for the NFP sector, he will get lots of useful governance experience, but will also bring a much-needed young person’s perspective to the board table.

The Board also considered a paper from Jane Drumm, Board Chairperson, which set out a proposed programme of work for the Board for the next twelve months. It reflects some of the challenges facing us as an organisation like ensuring we have a sustainable financial base on which to plan, but it also reflects some of the great opportunities we have to better meet the needs of our CF community – things like ensuring we have equity across the CF community, that our branches are set up and supported well and the support we provide to people with CF and their families best meets their needs.

We approved an agenda for the up-coming Chairperson’s Conference and annual general meeting, which is crucial for ensuring we get the most out of working with our Branch Chairs while we have them captured for the two days. Our branches are a vitally important face for CFNZ out on the ground and these two days provide us with a very useful means of ‘downloading’ their ideas and thinking. Of course, they will also be charged with electing a new Board at the AGM!

We got a great report from our Chief Executive and the Marketing and Fundraising team on the recent CF Awareness Week campaign. While the campaign delivered some good returns by way of donations, perhaps, more importantly, it gave CF a profile in the media and elsewhere that we’ve not seen for some time, if ever. This is important for fundraising but also crucial for gaining political support for better care for those with CF and better access to new drugs.

With this in mind, the Board urges you all to sign Eddie Porter’s petition to get Kalydeco publicly funded and the petition of Malcolm Mulholland for Patient Voice Aotearoa to reform PHARMAC and to double the PHARMAC budget.

Finally, the Board also approved the CFNZ national operating budget for the current 2019/2020 financial year which supports our annual plan. We were very pleased with the range of things we could afford to fund this year and we are excited about what we will be able to achieve with this, but we are acutely conscious that we can only spend what we earn and to earn, we are heavily dependent on our volunteer community out there on the ground who are prepared to put in the fundraising effort. So a big thank you to all those who did their bit during the recent CF Awareness Week.

Warwick Murray
Board member