Report: Branch Committee

Annual Report 2020

Events over the past year have affected us all in many different and unexpected
ways. None of us knew at the last AGM that another general election was imminent
when we took up our positions! And, like communities across the world, we’ve
been struggling to navigate our way through the health and economic crises
caused by COVID-19. The committee has nevertheless worked hard over the past
year running campaigns, holding events and training sessions and continuing to
work constructively with our councillors, MSPs and the national party. We would
like to extend our thanks to everyone who has been involved with the branch over
the past year, particularly during such difficult times.

Branch events, meetings and trainings

We’ve run a range of branch events and meetings over the course of the last 14
months. We have sought to improve the accessibility of these events by
introducing welcome teams to help people feel comfortable and supported when
joining us at events, and by introducing a budget set aside for accessibility.
We also increased our fundraising activity at events, introducing raffle
collections to fundraise for room hire costs and support the branch. From March
- at the outset of the COVID pandemic - we successfully shifted to hosting our
events exclusively online. We will continue hosting events this way for the
foreseeable future.

Events have included:

Our AGM was postponed from June to September due to COVID.

Elections

Importantly throughout the year there has been focus on the 2021 Scottish
Parliament election and 2022 Edinburgh City Council election. Despite this, we
have still been kept busy facing a snap Westminster Election and several by-
elections too:

Westminster General Election - December 2019

Work on the snap-election began as early as October, selecting candidates to
stand in all constituencies covered by the Edinburgh branch. The branch agreed
with the proposal to stand in all Edinburgh constituencies and Livingston, in
addition to the Falkirk branch leading in the Falkirk East and Linlithgow
constituency.

It was recognised that the campaign was not going to elect our first Scottish
Green MP, however the main campaign aim was successfully focussed on engaging
members across our target wards for future elections whilst fundraising all our
election costs (c.£11,000).

We were delighted to return the highest Green vote share in Scotland with Claire
Miller in Edinburgh East and to have offered all voters across Edinburgh the
opportunity to vote Green. Full results from the election are below:

Thank you to everyone involved in the campaign.

Holyrood Election - May 2021

The planning for the Holyrood campaign started in summer 2019 with a lessons
learned meeting looking back at the 2016 election. This was followed by
organising a hustings and the selection of Lothian regional list candidates,
announced at the October 2019 conference in Inverness. The list is topped by
Alison Johnstone, Andy Wightman and Lorna Slater. A full list of our candidates
can be found here.

The Lothian Regional Campaign Board has met monthly since January 2020, with
discussions covering key topics including finance, fundraising and interface
with the national campaign. The campaign launch took place online on 12th
September 2020 with input from Alison, Andy and Lorna, as well as other
speakers.

Council Election - May 2020

Early planning to recruit council candidates began in November 2019 with a “So
you want to be a councillor?” event. The candidate selection process for
Edinburgh is ongoing, with the second phase due due to commence imminently. The
West Lothian candidate selection for the 2022 election is planned to begin in
late Autumn 2020.

By-elections

Preparations are underway for the Craigentinny & Duddingston council by-election
on 12th November 2020, with Ben Parker selected as our candidate following an
online hustings. The branch is also looking to support a candidate in the
Livingston South by-election scheduled for 5th November 2020.

Membership, local groups and representative groups

Membership

Our membership figures as of September 2020 are: Edinburgh 1,434 and West
Lothian 98.

Over the course of the last year we saw an encouraging growth in the branch
membership. Between July 2019 and June 2020 it had risen from 1,445 to 1,566 in
Edinburgh and 96 to 104 in West Lothian. However, there has been a marked
reduction in recent months. This could be explained by ongoing issues relating
to the move of the party database from Civi to Forest It is also possible that
the pandemic and resultant economic difficulties have led some people to cancel
their memberships.

We are aware that many local teams are also struggling to track membership
levels and details and we are working with the national party to help put this
right. A number of members are also not currently receiving our emails due to
the party database inadvertently opting them out from bulk emails. The national
party is aware of this problem and currently working on a fix.

The membership working group developed a strategic plan in February 2020 with a
number of priorities for facilitating engagement with the branch membership and
attracting new members. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced some of these ideas to
be delayed, but the working group has made significant progress on drafting
welcome letters for new members in consultation with local teams. These are
nearly ready to be rolled out, ideally sent at the first instance by local teams
in wards where this is possible.

We have not been receiving membership capitations for the past couple of years
while the national party sorts out a new workable and sustainable system. The
new system should begin and capitations should restart following elections in
May 2021.

Local teams and sub-branches

Our local teams and sub-branches are active, hosting regular meetings and
events. Most have managed to move activities online following COVID-19.

Late last year, we delivered a “Green Party into action!” training day to
support local teams better engage with their membership. As part of the
Westminster election campaign, we were pleased to see local teams put this
training into action, with activists out in wards right across the city,
including in West Lothian too. Though COVID has restricted the ability of our
teams to get out door-knocking, we will be able to resume Green News deliveries
from October, and local teams have been making plans for this.

We have also worked with local teams to support them to manage their membership.
We have produced “Welcome” letters for local teams to share with new members,
and supported teams to conduct phone rounds too. Most recently this has been
with the Craigentinny and Duddingston local team and West Lothian sub-branch, in
advance of their respective by-elections in November.

Representative groups

The national party’s Women’s Network relaunched in late 2019 and a
representative from the group has sat on the Edinburgh branch committee since
then. We have also worked with other rep groups including Rainbow Greens and
Disabled Greens to ensure the committee has a positive dialogue with those
groups. We hope to support the party in establishing a Greens of Colour rep
group in the coming months.

The committee worked particularly closely with the Women’s Network to support
women and non-binary nominees for Holyrood 2021, and with the Rainbow Greens to
help ensure our gender balancing mechanisms are inclusive of non-binary
candidates.

The city-wide Edinburgh Young Greens group relaunched in February and the group
are making plans with the Edinburgh University Young Greens to support the
election campaigns in 2021 and 2022. Representatives from the Edinburgh Young
Greens have been particularly active in helping organise, run and host a number
of branch events over the course of the year.

Other

Cllr Derek Howie has joined the party having resigned from the SNP. He will sit
as an independent in the council but work constructively with the Green Cllr
group.

Communications

Our communications team have kept up their great work this year. We have
established a slick process for producing video content to share online -
including recording branch events to share with members who are unable to attend
in person.

The branch website is being redeveloped with a fresh look and improved
functionality, and is set to be launched in tandem with the Craigentinny-
Duddingston by-election.

While we did not print a Spring 2020 issue of Green News because of Coronavirus,
Autumn 2020 issues for our ward areas are currently in draft, and will be out to
local teams in early October. We have an excellent and comprehensive set of
party guidelines on what it means to do leafleting during the pandemic.

The talents of photographers, website designers, editors, graphic and video
makers have been much appreciated throughout the year.

Other committee business

We have established new ways of working on the branch committee this year. We
expanded and consolidated a working group structure to encourage more people to
get involved with the branch. Our working groups are:

As part of the committee elections this year, we revised the role descriptions
and introduced a process for gender balancing the committee. We have also
introduced a new AGM website to make the process for electing a new committee
and running the AGM easier.

We have also done lots of working tidying up the internal filing systems to make
sure that no important documents are lost between committees, and introduced new
tools and programmes to help record meeting minutes and actions.