25th March 2013
At the start of the year, I had envisaged that we would park the perennial charity status question for the PS@30 year. However, at the first committee meeting, it became clear that there was a will to push this forward. I asked Sue and Adam about this again outside the meeting, as the onus of work would largely fall on the Secretary, Treasurer and Chair posts, and it needed all of us to give time and energy in order for it to have any chance of success. We did most of our planning in an Indian restaurant near Lamb’s Conduit Street and divided up the tasks. Sue redrafted the constitution, Adam looked into all of the financial implications and I dealt with trusteeship and the kinds of questions that choir members were likely to ask.
The choir adopted the new constitution at a General Meeting (GM), and then we submitted our application. A list of 10 complicated questions came back to us. At this point about a decade before, our forerunners had given up. But we persevered, finding evidence to back up our claim to musical quality (thank you Murray), charitable purpose, etc., held another GM to pass an extra clause in our constitution and were duly awarded charity status on 25th March. This is likely to be the thing which will have the longest legacy for the choir from the year, though it was paradoxically the thing which took the fewest people to achieve.
Timeline datestamp: 25 March 2013