Motion #25

Conferences Committee

Conferences Committee is not a political committee like most others within the Party – our role is much more of a practical one: planning and running all aspects of our events alongside local volunteers and our hard-working and dedicated national staff. This report covers the work undertaken by the committee since the previous AGM which (for the first time separated from the conference itself) took place on Saturday 9 September 2023.

Autumn conference 2024 will be covered in the report to the 2025 AGM.

At the Autumn 2023 conference, the following members were elected to the committee:

● TJ Milburn, Rachel Collinson, Cade Hatton, Ruby Tucker

At the first meeting of the committee after conference, TJ Milburn was elected as convenor. Rachel Collinson resigned from the committee in January 2024.

During 2024, Mags Lewis was our “GPRC friend”.

Autumn conference 2023 took place at the Brighton Centre, from Friday 6 to Sunday 8 October. The conferences team were hit hard by the terrible news of the sudden, unexpected death of our dear friend and colleague, Cameron Bairstow, on 14 September, less than three weeks before the start of conference. Cameron, from Scarborough, had joined the team as a local party volunteer when conference took place at Scarborough in June 2019, and was elected onto the committee at Autumn 2019 and re-elected each year since then.

As well as considerable involvement with their local party, in April 2022 Cameron was appointed as the interim secretary to GPEx, which became a permanent position in February 2023 as the Party’s Governance officer. During 2023, Cameron was also employed as conference assistant, supporting Louisa Greenbaum (our conference manager). The fact that they were so involved in the Party made their sudden death so much more of a loss to us all. For me personally, we had become very close friends and would not only spend long days (and late nights) with each other physically at conferences, but also many, many hours and late-night chats throughout the rest of the year, talking about politics (obviously) but also nerding out over data, systems and processes, discussing anything and everything. It may have been less than 5 years, but it felt like a lifetime of deep and sincere friendship.

Cameron’s death so soon before the Autumn conference in 2023 was such a significant loss to us all - not only personally, but also in terms of the work involved in organising and running the conference itself. Autumn conference 2023 was hard work, and it was also intensely emotional for the conference team.

At conference in Brighton, on the Saturday, there was an “in memoriam” for Cameron just before the afternoon plenary session. Cameron’s mother and sister were there to hear just how much Cam meant to all of us, and how much we would miss them.

The workshops for Autumn 2023 took place online as has become customary during the week leading up to the conference itself. Once again we used the CrowdComms platform.

The Green Coordinate website continues to be an essential tool for us, hosting the conference agenda and all the motion text - huge thanks to Ash Routh for all the hard work that goes into that.

https://www.greencoordinate.co.uk/archive/autumn2023/

894 people registered for Autumn conference 2023 - 127 of those were online participants. Around half of all participants were first-timers. This was our largest conference since before the pandemic.

Autumn conference 2023 made the decision (motion D18) to “indefinitely suspend Spring conference until the Party’s finances have improved” so there was no conference held in the Spring of 2024.

The committee meets online, and during 2024 we met almost every week.

As ever, I would like to extend my thanks to our conference manager, Louisa Greenbaum, and all the other Party staff and volunteers who support us throughout the year and in-person at the venue during conference itself, as well as the other members of the committee.

Cameron was a wonderful person to work with, and also a very important and special friend. I’m still struggling to comprehend a world without them in it.