One of the difficulties that many volunteer groups (and businesses, and organisations, and...) have is the following: once you are well established, and everybody is involved and engaged, things go swimmingly. But how do you get there? How do you get from just a handful of people trying to so stuff, to good, organised group?
One thing that seems to be really important is for the group, the community, the interested parties, to make sure that the organisation has a pulse: some reminder to everyone that it is time to be involved again: this could be a newsletter, it could be making sure that meetings happen regularly, it could be phone trees: there are lots of ways to make it happen.
This topic came up this afternoon at a meeting of the Parent/Teacher Organisation for the school: how do we make sure that the PTO has a pulse, to bring parents out, to get them involved and to keep them involved?
Do we really want meetings every month? Is that too many? I feel that it's perhaps more than we need in terms of what needs to be done in the meetings, but the "pulse" that they'd bring, especially if scheduled in a regular fashion (say, always the second Tuesday of the month, or whenever) would be worth the extra time.
Similarly, next weekend will be the fifth first-Saturday-of-the-month meeting of my origami group (we threw in an extra meeting on a non-first Saturday too, so it's the sixth meeting) and my first without the help of my co-founder, who has up and moved away for a new job.
Yours, keeping up the pulse,
N.
One thing that seems to be really important is for the group, the community, the interested parties, to make sure that the organisation has a pulse: some reminder to everyone that it is time to be involved again: this could be a newsletter, it could be making sure that meetings happen regularly, it could be phone trees: there are lots of ways to make it happen.
This topic came up this afternoon at a meeting of the Parent/Teacher Organisation for the school: how do we make sure that the PTO has a pulse, to bring parents out, to get them involved and to keep them involved?
Do we really want meetings every month? Is that too many? I feel that it's perhaps more than we need in terms of what needs to be done in the meetings, but the "pulse" that they'd bring, especially if scheduled in a regular fashion (say, always the second Tuesday of the month, or whenever) would be worth the extra time.
Similarly, next weekend will be the fifth first-Saturday-of-the-month meeting of my origami group (we threw in an extra meeting on a non-first Saturday too, so it's the sixth meeting) and my first without the help of my co-founder, who has up and moved away for a new job.
Yours, keeping up the pulse,
N.
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