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As chairman of Mansfield & Ashfield 2020, I am very excited and proud to announce our new board structure, writes Jane Box.

We have seen a lot of change since our inception more than 30 years ago.

With devolution around the corner, it is now more important than ever that we ensure our combined business voices are heard to attract the much-needed funding our area deserves.

The current board, our operations director and I have been working hard over the last 18 months to determine how we can better serve our members and our wider business community.

Mansfield & Ashfield 2020 board members, back Marc Johnson, Ian Jephson, Jeremy Hague, Jane Box, Stewart Rickersey and Louis Brown, and, front, Andy Abrahams, Hev Bingley, Emma McLaughlin, Louise Knott and Hayley Wood.

The first stage of this was to enable a broader cross section of businesses to be able to access our business meetings and networking events.

Traditionally, we have run one business breakfast meeting a month. While this is still our flagship meeting, it did preclude a lot of businesses who were unable to attend at that time of the day.

We have now introduced two additional monthly meetings; our women in business luncheon and pie-and-a-pint meeting after work, both of which are proving to be a great success.

Our last six months have focused on how our board is structured and the needs of our members and business community.

To understand this better, we surveyed our members, and this, combined with the outputs from our recent workshop on devolution, has determined our future direction and how our board needs to be structured.

Historically, the Mansfield & Ashfield 2020 Board has not been structured around specific responsibilities and we believe that by changing this we will be able to achieve far greater support for our members.

This new structure will also provide points of contact for our members to approach with their views, or business needs.

The areas of responsibility were decided upon based on our member feedback and are in line with the devolution areas and council place board themes for business.

If you have never attended one of our meetings, please do come along and see for yourself how your business can benefit.

Our last breakfast meeting was attended by more than 90 people and we heard from two excellent speakers: Hopkins solicitors on the merits of the Seven Dwarfs – very entertaining, you needed to be there – and Adam Hill, Mansfield Council’s new chief executive.

And if that wasn’t enough, your first meeting is free.

We would love to see you there and help us build an even stronger business community.

If you have any questions, please do get in touch with either myself, or Ella McManus, our director of operations – email [email protected]

Mansfield & Ashfield 2020 elects new board members with focus on the future