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jducoeurAs always, I'm a ways behind, so I don't know how much the news has gotten around -- probably quite a bit, but just in case:
The Society's President sent out an email yesterday, announcing (not really a big surprise) that the SCA has a budget problem. It's not really a single thing, more a confluence of many, but the result is a disconcerting $181k shortfall for this year, and a non-trivial $27k for next year even with some optimistic assumptions.
To their credit, they're not panicking this time around: they're asking for opinions on a basket of options, most of which I find completely uncontroversial. They did, of course, slip pay-to-play into that list, albeit disguised as
The problem, of course, is that none of the listed options are going to help nearly enough -- they'll raise a few thousand here and there, but they're not going to plug a tens-of-thousands hole. (And I'm pretty sure that pay-to-play is long-term suicide for the club as we know it.) So I expect the old arguments to revive.
Which does lead me to wonder: can I coherently make the argument that the only way to fix the Society's budget issues is to decentralize, in less than ten eye-glazingly dense pages? I do think it's the case -- IMO, much of our budget problem, like many of our problems, comes from the SCA's excessive degree of centralization. But it's not a simple argument to make persuasively. Time to start doing some outlining...
The Society's President sent out an email yesterday, announcing (not really a big surprise) that the SCA has a budget problem. It's not really a single thing, more a confluence of many, but the result is a disconcerting $181k shortfall for this year, and a non-trivial $27k for next year even with some optimistic assumptions.
To their credit, they're not panicking this time around: they're asking for opinions on a basket of options, most of which I find completely uncontroversial. They did, of course, slip pay-to-play into that list, albeit disguised as
Examining the different membership participation options, with a short term "event pass" for new participants.But at least this time they're not trying to ram that down everyone's throats as The Only Way.
The problem, of course, is that none of the listed options are going to help nearly enough -- they'll raise a few thousand here and there, but they're not going to plug a tens-of-thousands hole. (And I'm pretty sure that pay-to-play is long-term suicide for the club as we know it.) So I expect the old arguments to revive.
Which does lead me to wonder: can I coherently make the argument that the only way to fix the Society's budget issues is to decentralize, in less than ten eye-glazingly dense pages? I do think it's the case -- IMO, much of our budget problem, like many of our problems, comes from the SCA's excessive degree of centralization. But it's not a simple argument to make persuasively. Time to start doing some outlining...