Summary of Chair Liz Ryan's report to the agm May 2004

The year was overshadowed by the death of Stuart Golland, many of our members were close friends of his and he will be deeply missed by all of us.

More positive things occurred too. Our programme of monthly meetings has continued with guest speakers including: Mark Hollander on applying for Arts Council funding; Jonathan Hall on overcoming writer's block; Vanessa Rosenthal on writing drama for radio; Wils Wilson on creating site specific theatre; Duska Radosavljevic on the role of the Dramaturg.

Last summer we hosted a talk by Caroline Raphael (Commissioning Editor for BBC Radio 4). Gary Brown chaired this event and a follow-up report by Joyce Weaver is on the website. Caroline Small led "Very Rough Magic” - a workshop which challenged participants to write a play in 2 hours. We also contributed a whole day of script-in-hand performances of new work for the WYP/Northern Exposure Festival in June 2003. These included a performed reading of Asylum, a "chain play" written by ten YP members and co-ordinated by Alan Mc Donald.

In February 2004 we joined forces with Jonathan Byrne and other actors from the Leeds Equity group to mount a showcase of work developed during workshops in autumn 2003. Our thanks go to the actors who gave their time and enthusiasm, and to the YP members who led the initial workshops.

Most recently three members have benefited from a small-scale script development project in partnership with Damien Cruden at York Theatre Royal. We're grateful to Helen Brandom for co-ordinating the script selection process and to the volunteer team of script readers.

Melanie Harris of BBC writersroom and Project Manager for Northern Exposure, was the speaker at our April meeting and that month also saw the start of new series of workshops with the title "Take A Risk", led by Gary Brown, Alan McDonald and Ray Brown.

Financial resources have been our biggest headache this year however membership has continued to grow. ACE Yorkshire (through drama officer Mark Hollander) found a small pot of emergency funding to support two issues of Newscript and further issues were supported by generous donations from YP members. Just before Easter we heard that our application to ACE Yorkshire for organisational development funding had been successful and we contracted arts marketing consultant Lisa Baxter to guide us through our "re-branding and marketing” project over the next twelve months. We now have enough money to pay for the production of Newscript and we are out of the woods financially for the coming year. By next year we hope to be even more financially secure with a lot more new members.