I have noticed a ' drift ' on this thread , lets get back to the O/P , so will you all be happy having Leigh Centurions owned/run by a Supporters Trust ? , which as I pointed out , would almost certainly remove any chance of ever getting into SL

If people want to discuss the Community Trust , start up your own thread

I don't get it.



And you didn't answer my questions.

You posted ST , when you meant CT

As for what they have done , do you want me to get overall numbers of kids worked with ?, programmes delivered ?, players employed ? , awards recieved ?

Dont forget , what the apprentices will be doing is fairly similar to what the Community Dept/Trust has done for years , so unless the club changes what it has/hasn't done afterwards , then the results wont improve

Unfortunatley there is no way of actually counting how many new supporters have been brought to the club as a result of community work , unless of course you start of with the ' Census ' of the club I first suggested to the BOD several years ago , and to the PSG last november

Only by first doing that can you get a true indication of any initiatives success or failure

By this you mean what exactly?

Ticket offers, generally converting people into Leythers? How would you personally persuade people to support? (This is not a dig btw, maybe its something we can discuss with the club at the next meeting/fans forum)

Ah so I did.



Sorry to keep going on about this but one of the things I don't understand it you say you thought of building a database with DOB etc years ago, but why, as a director of the Community Trust, (something which you say is your passion), didn't you or one of the professional people involved in it, ever implement it through the CT?

Surely that should have been one of the first things they should have done?

Instead, it's has been left to a bunch of 'amateurs' to build the database up from scratch, something which they've done very well in the last couple of months I might add.

Just for the record, I'm not involved in it.

Too much to go into right now , I'v work to do , but we all agree Friday night was fantastic , that was due to 3 things

1 the visit of a world class team

2 a large number of away fans

3 a large number of home fans

Well we cant do anything about the world class opposition , but the other two things can be achieved with a little foresight and some hard work

Confucious he says , use net to catch fish , better than a hook and line

It is the clubs job to know its customers , not the community depts/trusts

Personally I think we must keep the super league dream alive.

Friday night showed us how good this could be we cannot abandon the holy grail and I'm afraid thats what super- league is.
Who knows about future sugar daddies don't think we can rule out anything at this stage.

If I felt we ever reached the point where it was a ST or fold then I would support it.

I think starbugs views are tainted by his personal disappointments with the current regime

Lets get back on track, there is a thread about Community Trust, although community ownership is what a Supporters Trust should be all about - we have tremendous passion, we need to unite it and engage it behind a common goal with a clear statement of intent.

Many hands make large revenue streams.

On a related point, are LISA now a shareholder?

Just a small point for the record , on Friday , who was it that helped out the club by running the face painting and helped with the 20 odd mascots we had on the pitch pre match , all unpaid for of course and for an organisation that made them redundant 8 months ago ? , in fact they had a couple of the apprentices assisting them as well

I suppose none of the ' proffessional ' volunteers would have wanted to upset their pre match routines to do that , now would they ?

Confucius actually wrote - "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime."

Taking this to its core meaning, if we can bring up kids with an inbuilt passion for Leigh RL we will have them for life (like me and Maurice watching with our free tickets from XII Apostles when we were 9).

How we do this is moot......

It seems to me there are too many short term issues to fix before we start thinking about who owns/ how the club is structured etc etc. We are still in survival mode unfortunatley.

We can have a CT, ST or whatever, but if it means arguing over who owns Jimmy Ledgard's beer mat, then its pretty pointless.

Short term got fixed months ago , survival depends on how you plan the future , no ' plan ' , no future

Yes it was mentioned in the meeting, and a very good job she did as well (though I'm not sure which of the 7 men in the PSG you'd expect to do the face painting).





Unless you mean me, then unfortunately for one I can't face paint and for two, my pre match routine is setting up the radio.

Why , is face painting considered womens only work mish ?

Maybe you are nearer the crux of the matter than you think

We dont need a ' think tank ' that comes up with idea's for others to do , we need ' dooer's ' who are willing to get their hands dirty and ' do '

I asked this question as since it was all resolved at our last LISA meeting we have not yet been asked to any board meeting , however there is being a code of conduct being written for all directors to adhere to including LISA so once in place we will be taking up the shareloding and the board representation.

And you've hit the nail on the head there Steve.



Think tanks are OK in their place but we need people who will actually take their time to do things (Let's just forget about you saying you came up with the idea of getting a database together then expecting others to go out and do it shall we?).

I can't speak for other groups but at the Tues morn PSG, we have Alan who does the programmes/communication, John who does the Junior Centurions, Eric and Mike who take care of the accounts, myself and Pete who do the radio/communication and Richie and Trevor (god knows what they do).



Then there's the NSFG who are all doing a fantastic job in organising things for match day.

So who is this 'think tank' you refer to?

Just for the record, the PSG doesn't sit around dreaming up wild ideas for the club.

This might have been the case in the early pre-season meetings, when ideas were thrown around but it's certainly not the case now. Each member merely briefs the others on what happened during the previous week, for instance Alan will talk about programme sales, any problems he had with articles, advertising etc and each member gets their turn to talk about their area of interest.

It's more like a de-brief, where the different sections all come together to report on their progress. We do not make decisions about anything regarding the club.

How we do this is moot......'"

Right, despite Michelle's valiant defence of 'professional' volunteers from the PSG 'Think Tank' , I'll come clean and admit I wouldn't want to upset my pre-match routine. Having spent up to 30 hours of the week trying to put a programme together, (and have you noticed how many home games we are getting? Just look at June for instance!) I feel that I do want to sit back and enjoy the build up to the game. I don't feel in the least bit guilty about that, as I feel I've done my bit. Mind you, I can think of one or two faces I would just love to 'paint'!

Steve, if you were at the last Forum, and listened to the Finances presentation, I would suggest that the 'short-term' has not yet been fixed at all, and isn't likely to be until the end of the year.

I suppose it depends on your definition of 'short-term', but the problems we were facing then haven't exactly gone away, and are still being addressed.

Sure, we must look to the future, but we daren't take our eyes off the immediate future.

Alan, I took Steve's post to mean we sorted the Tax bills with the RFL money, took running/playing cost out and improved our retained revenue with LSV co. Which meant with projected income we would be at x come year/season end.
We have overdraft facilities at the bank guaranteed by certain Shareholders, and that AT paid up his overdraft guarantee. We don't know if the business plan means taking away the overdraft guarantees in place or if these will be treated as Director loans and never be expected back.
The immediate future is almost set. We know our fixtures, we excluded the CC run, NRC finals and play offs from our revenue forecasts so must achieve projected income and keep the cost controls in place.
It will be unlikely that we can maintain our playing cost base next year, imo, and hence we need to be preparing strategies now.
As I have said for many years a ST structured to our needs is the way forward, again imho, because we should budget for a shortfall and have that shortfall covered if/when its needed. I believe our costs will go up £150-200k next year, £90k from RFL means we need to create £60-110k from shareholders/stakeholders/Directors.

we also get 3 extra home games next year

'"