New Year – New Beginnings

Happy New Year
I just wanted to take this opportunity to wish all our members, partners, funders, stakeholders and clients a very happy New Year.
I am sure that 2017 will bring many opportunities and challenges for us all. We will enjoy the opportunities, and we will embrace the challenges and work to turn them to our advantage!
Here at Cumbria CVS, we are looking forward to a number of new opportunities in 2017.

New CEO
Well, this may be the last Ebulletin article that I write as Chief Officer of Cumbria CVS, as my successor has been appointed and will start on 1 February 2017. After a comprehensive and dare I say, enjoyable recruitment process, our trustees appointed Laura Cadman as the new Chief Executive Officer of Cumbria CVS. I will remain in post until 31 March so there will be plenty of time for a smooth transition.
I am sure you will join me in welcoming Laura to Cumbria CVS – and that you will all play your part in helping her settle into her new role. I will let Laura tell you more about herself in the next edition – so please watch this space!

New Opportunities 
I am sure that many of you will have heard that Cumbria CVS will be moving our main office from Gillan Way, Penrith to Shaddongate in Carlisle. This move will help us to realise closer joint working between our CVS teams; provide us with an excellent location to support our service delivery and enable us sub-let office and meeting spaces to other local voluntary organisations as part of a community hub.
We are very excited at the prospect of this move and look forward to keeping you up-to-date with developments.

Please remember to take advantage of the Resilience workshops that are taking place over the next few weeks, and which have been designed to help organisations think about how they can be better prepared for an emergency (and how they can help their users be better prepared too). For further details see the Training section of this bulletin or on our website.

So welcome to 2017. I hope it is a year of exciting opportunities for us all.

Karen Bowen
Chief Officer
Cumbria CVS