Before the COVID pandemic, we did a lot of work with volunteers to develop our new Volunteering Strategy, but it is yet to be completed. As we near the end of this difficult year, the role you play to support people affected by MS may never have been more important.

This session will focus on three important topics – our new membership offer, the reopening of face-to-face group services, and the staff restructure.

If you would like to hear more about any of these areas, or have any questions, please sign up here and join in the discussions. When you register, you will be able to ask questions in advance on these topics, and you will receive the Zoom information for joining the session.

If you process data as part of your volunteer role, and/or have access to personal data via the Portal, you will have completed our online data protection training course.

To fulfil our legal obligations (under GDPR) and ensure we continue to respect each individual’s right to privacy, we will be asking you to complete a refresher course early next year. In the coming weeks, we will be working with a number of volunteers to ensure that this updated eLearning focuses on what’s important for you to know for your role.

In our last email, we told you about the trial we are doing with a small number of our groups to test the new paperwork and procedures needed to restart face-to-face activities in a ‘COVID-secure’ way.

Since then, the law about meeting in groups of no more than six (with variations in each of the nations) has been introduced. This change will certainly make restarting things more challenging, but we will be studying the detail of the new guidance carefully. In the meantime, we will continue with the trial wherever possible.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, our Annual Lecture (Scanning the horizon: How advances in MRI are transforming MS research) can no longer take place at its usual venue - the Royal College of Physicians in London. We are therefore delighted to bring it to you online instead.

Professor Olga Ciccarelli, NIHR Research Professor of Neurology at UCL, will focus on how improvements in MRI technology could speed up clinical trials of potential treatments, and how cutting-edge artificial intelligence methods could more accurately detect how the brain is responding to therapies.

In the latest edition of MS Matters, we started communicating with our supporters about the changes we’re making to our membership approach. This is so we can reach many more people affected by MS, as well as enable everyone to get the information they want and need from us in a way that works for them.

We currently have a membership of about 30,000, but we estimate that MS in the UK affects more than a million people when you take account of the 130,000 people who have the condition and all their friends and family.

Last month, we told you that our Health & Safety Team were studying governmental guidance to see what our groups would need to do if they wanted to resume face-to-face activities.

This work is now complete, and we have created guidance documents for groups to use in order to restart certain low-risk activities in managed venues, and ‘COVID-secure’ SLAs to enable exercise classes. The appropriate new document(s) will need to be completed and approved for each activity before a group can restart it, and new processes will have to be put in place.

We started this year with an ambitious new strategy driving towards a vision of a future where nobody has to worry about their MS getting worse. To support this, we developed our three goals and some supporting focus areas. These set out how we propose to transform and adapt so we can achieve even more for people living with MS. One of these areas is ‘forging creative strategic partnerships’.

We’ve all been through some difficult situations this year, including the last couple of months for the MS Society, going through consultation around phase one of our planned people changes.

Following the outcome of this consultation, there have been a few enquiries coming through from volunteers. There are two main points of focus, which are the additional Regional/Community Development Officers (RDO/CDOs) and the individual grants programme.

We know this is a worrying time for the MS Community, our volunteers and our staff. The coronavirus crisis has had a huge impact on our organisation and, like so many other charities, we’ve been hit hard financially. We expect significant income loss this year and next.

We’ve been consulting with staff and volunteers on some urgent changes we need to make to our organisation. This will mean people changes, including some redundancies, and stopping some of what we do.