Unfortunately, none of the team at Ringwood & Verwood Round Table were able to attend yesterday’s RTBI National Council Meeting, where one of the items on the agenda was our request to Re-Charter. Instead, we sent up a statement to explain a bit about our Table – Who we are, Where we’ve come from, What we’re doing, and most importantly why we want to be a Table again. We felt that it summed us up pretty well!
The current item on your agenda is whether or not to allow the Ringwood & District Round Table to recharter this evening. Please accept our apologies for not being able to send one of our team up in person to be with you today to talk you through why we would like to be a Table reborn, but a combination of heavily pregnant wives, businesses to run, children’s birthdays and something about a rugby match have meant that we must instead put our reasons in written form to present to you all.
To give you an introduction to our table, Ringwood & District Round Table 643 was founded originally back in 1959 by a group of local young men who wanted to put back into the community as opposed to keeping on taking. After 40 years of good deeds and founding and running fantastic local events such as the British Pedal Car Grand Prix, our table ceased to exist in 2006. As we fast forward to September 2019, a plan was hatched to see if Ringwood Round Table couldn’t be re-established. With the help of some of the Council members sitting with you today, along with Round Table veterans and a bit of goodwill, an initial meeting managed to attract eight interested young men to see what Round Table was about, and what it could do for them. Very quickly, it became apparent to us all that the question was not what Round Table could do for us, but what we could do for Round Table and with Round Table.
Seven months on from that meeting in the back room of the pub, we present ourselves to you as Ringwood & Verwood Round Table, a group of young men eager to re-establish our Table as a force for good in our local community – New Name, New Faces, same goals! The lack of being an official table hasn’t stopped us as yet, as we have already got ourselves back involved with the Pedal Car Grand Prix, Ringwood Carnival, our towns VE Day celebrations and tree planting in the local area. We may or may not have even got the 70 trees that we planted recently labelled on Google Maps as Round Table Woods. Round Table has already brought us together as a group of new found friends. Our members range from a publican to a butcher, a pilot to a surveyor. We are determined to make our Table a prime example of what Round Table can do in the modern era – Our shared goal is not to become yet another “Social Club”, but to put back into our community and to inspire others to do the same.
As such, Ringwood & Verwood Round Table, a table which some at Marchesi House rated as the least likely in the country to be re-formed, ask for your consent to come back from the brink and “Do More” again.
Yours in Table,
Ringwood & Verwood Round Table
