Dear Councillors, Dear EEMS members
The EXCOM would like to thank you for providing feedback on the proposal for the new EEMS constitution. As you know, our current state as “Friendly Society” proved to be untenable under the changed legal requirements which is why the EXCOM has proposed to dissolve the current Friendly Society and reconstitute EEMS as Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (SCIO), a new legal form for registered Scottish charities. This motion was agreed at the EEMS AGM in Warsaw, Sept 2012 and a proposed new constitution was shared with you through the national councillors for commenting in January 2013.
We have received quite a number of comments from different national groups and have carefully considered them at our recent EXCOM meeting last Monday. In this discussion we have realized two things. For one, we believe that we could have done a better job in explaining you all why we urgently need a new constitution and secondly, we should have provided you more background information why we have selected the model that we have proposed to you for commenting. In other words, we should have explained you in more detail other potential models and why we have rejected these. Anthony and David are currently working hard on putting this information together and we anticipate that we will be able to share this with you in a few weeks’ time.
What we however have also realized is that several of you have raised a common concern which is a perceived misbalance in decision making (voting) between Corporate Members and Individual Members under the new constitution. We believe that there a number of advantages that come along this model and we will make sure to share these with you together with potential disadvantages as indicated in your comments. In addition, we will share with you a second, alternative model for the new constitution and also describe its advantages and disadvantages.
In our EXCOM meeting on Monday we have agreed to provide the above mentioned additional information as well as detailed discussion of what we consider to be the two most viable alternative constitutional models to the EEMS community (via councilors and EEMS website) by end of March/early April. You will then have 1 month time to send back any comments or preferences. Based on your feedback, we will then select the most favoured model and organize for an online voting on this new constitution which will likely occur through May. With this we hopefully have a clear decision from you as EEMS members on the preferred future format of our Society.
We will stay in close communication with you through your national councilors during the next months to come and would like to thank you in advance for taking time to help improving our Society.
Kind regards,
Andreas (on behalf of the EXCOM)
ACTUALIZACIÓN (09/04/13)
As promised, we are providing you with additional information regarding the new EEMS constitution. In the attached document which was compiled by Anthony Lynch and David Kirkland, you will find a detailed outline of 4 alternative scenarios, each with potential advantages and disadvantages.
You will now have 1 month time to review this information and to provide your comments and preferences. Please send any feedback to your national councilor by May 3, 2013. They will then forward the compiled feedback to me.
As outlined in our previous message below, based on your feedback the EXCOM will then select the most favored model and organize for an online voting in May 2013.
The EXCOM is looking very much forward for your active participation in this process and would like to encourage all of you to provide comments and preferences.
