On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 05:16:59PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> My opinion is that the effort put in by members
> outweighs the benefit.
Heh. I'm wondering if you're just trying to stimulate discussion with
this line of advice. :-)
Your club has had an opportunity to be refreshed by young blood; It
sounds like you might have resisted it at every turn, and ended up
with a confrontational relationship between the cadets and your own
club culture or individuals in your own membership.
So it's not surprising that you're not retaining any of them in your
own ranks. They probably think you're a mob of stodgy authoritarian
old farts, and they'll either piss off altogether (never to return to
gliding) or they'll find a club that treats them as peers. Step number
one for building any kind of successful relationship with teenagers is
that you're doomed to fail if you look down at them (which is
basically how you've described your reaction to their wild, uninhibited
entheusiasm flaying around your club).
I've been saying for years: If a club identifies a target audience
and then fails to attract members from that group, it isn't the
groups' problem, it's the club's. If you haven't retained cadets,
*your club* needs to look at what it did wrong. That might mean that
*your club* will need to change, possibly in ways which make it
unattractive to its more conservative membership. If that happens
then so be it: It's better to lose a couple of 70 year old OFITTH's
to pick up a dozen entheusiastic cadets than it is to keep the
oldies happy, not change anything, and continue the movement's current
decline.
We can't blame changes in society for our decline, and look overseas
for solutions. We need to blame ourselves for not changing with society,
and look inwards at our own catchment communities for the solution.
- mark
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I tried an internal modem, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
but it hurt when I walked. Mark Newton
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