Well, it’s been a while since anything has been posted to this blog, but that’s about to change. You see, at our meeting on the 7th of October, we decided to disband as an organisation with a formal membership structure. But that does not mean the end of Wessex Society by any means. The Wessex Chronicle will now turn from a hugely expensive print magazine with a tiny circulation to…well, this blog. Contact us if you have an idea for an article or interview that you would like to see published. Our quarterly meetings in Salisbury will change from business meetings, with agendas and minutes, to purely social gatherings. And instead of membership fees, we now have a Patreon page, where people can donate online. The average monthly donation for Patreon pages is $4.44 (£3.34). At the time of writing this, the Society has 244 likes on Facebook. If each of those people donated the average amount, we could have an annual income of nearly £10,000. With that sort of money, we could achieve all sorts of projects that we had to shelve for lack of funds, such as:
- Paying for contributions to the Chronicle, attracting a higher quality of contributor.
- Sending out Wessex flags to private businesses, and to district and parish/town councils, as well as county councils and unitary authorities, for them to fly on St Ealdhelm’s Day.
- Publishing our Essential Wessex series of books on Wessex history and landmarks.
- Publishing our long-gestating Wessex Dialect Dictionary.
- Sponsoring prizes in the arts for works exhibiting regional distinctiveness.
All these are previously-mooted ideas, thought there may be others we haven’t thought of. If you think of anything else, please speak up. But above all, donate! The more we can collect in donations, the bigger we can go. So, it’s over to you, lovely people.