This group was founded in 2006. We deliberately keep the group to a smallish number of members at around 150 -160, which allows us to provide space for all members at our core meeting. We pride ourselves on being a very welcoming and friendly group to new members helping them get the best from their membership.
It is the members that make any u3a group and I think it is a testament to our membership that we still have founding members in the group. We have thriving special interest activity groups, a wonderful programme of trips, and monthly core meetings attended by over 80 each month. New members often say at our New Member's meeting how friendly they have found the group to be.
Richard Saunders, Chair.
Our monthly core meetings are held in the Solihull Methodist Church on the 3rd Friday in the month at 10.00am. They take the form of a talk for about 1 hour followed by a break for coffee/tea biscuits and socialising. We then gather again for any notices about activity groups and events coming up and any group notices from the committee. The meeting usually finishes around 12 midday. We have a very wide variety of speakers for these meetings. Some of the recent topics have been:
Songs of the Sea - stories and songs we could sing along to
Life, Lovers and Death of Elizabeth I - given by an excellently dressed Elizabeth
The Nurse who changed Guinea Bissau - an amazing woman and we all found out where Guinae Bissau is.
Real Life Murder Trial - after considering all the evidence we delivered a not guilty verdict.
Our April core meeting is our AGM looking back on all we have achieved over the year and our December core meeting is always our Christmas Lunch usually held at one of our local hotels.
We are very lucky with the venue of our core meeting. The Church provides comfortable seating with excellent audio – visual facilities for our talks. It is located very close to the centre of Solihull and next to the railway station so it is well connected for public transport as well as having a large car park.
Activity Groups
While our core meetings give a wonderful chance for many members to meet up, it is through the activity groups that people get to know each other and enjoy learning about new topics and/or topics they may already know. We have numerous activity groups at present ranging from “Art and Culture” to Walking; Science to Creative Writing. A full list and details of each group can be found by clicking here or the Groups link at the top of the page. Each group is run by a co-ordinator and most meet monthly in a member’s home which does mean that numbers in the group can be limited.
A number of the groups are open to the whole membership, such as Interesting Places, Faith Visits, Coffee Club and the Sunday Lunch Club.
We are always happy to support members who would like to start a new activity group or a topic not already included, in fact our Indoor Bowling Group was just formed this year and a Board Games one is evolving.
Day Trips and Holidays
We run an extensive programme of day trips and holidays spread throughout the year. The holidays are usually run with other organisations but are open to all our members. In our last membership year we went on 9 trips and 1 holiday. Here are just a few examples:
Manchester Ship Canal
Isle of Wight
Ashwood Nurseries
The Police Museum
Speke Hall and The Gormley Statues
Birmingham Gun-Barrel Proof House
