Two CFU directors will be going to the Supporters Direct (SD) AGM this evening.

Neil Bellis and Mike Day will be representing the club at the event in Manchester where they will have the chance to network in the afternoon with other fan owned clubs, discuss challenges which face fan ownership and, hopefully, come back with ideas of how to further improve the club.

In the evening CFU will be putting forward an amendment to the SD rules on audits at the AGM. Currently to be a SD affiliate a yearly audit is required if your turnover is over £100,000. The board of directors feel this is unnecessary and are asking the members of SD to change the rule so audits are not required until a club reaches a turnover of £5.6million – to match the current statutory requirement for independent providence societies.

The directors will report back to the members at the next CFU members meeting.

On Wednesday evening CFU held a volunteers meeting at the Lookers Vauxhall Stadium.

At the meeting club chairman, Grenville Millington, outlined his DNA of the club in its essence as ‘the club first, others second and yourself third’ and had a dialogue with volunteers about what it means to be a fan and volunteer at the club. Grenville will now take the feedback and ideas from that evening, and a consultation of key people at the club over the past few months, and come up with a concise statement of what the club is about called ‘The Chester Way’. He hopes to have this in place before the start of the season.

Communications director Neil Bellis updated the volunteers on plans to improve the CFU website and increase the coverage of volunteers and volunteering opportunities at the club. Neil has been working closely with fellow director Mike Day on updating the CFU website so all the working groups (eg. fundraising, stadium maintenance) at the club and the affiliated groups (eg. senior blues, inclusive blues) can have their own page in the future. Neil and Mike are hopeful this can be done in the near future but unfortunately it is difficult to put an exact date on the completion of the work at the moment.

After this there was a general question and answer section with the volunteers where a number of good ideas were put forward.