While planning our trip to Salem, I knew I wanted to attend this years leadership summit. This is an annual gathering of MOA chartered club leaders and key volunteers, is open to anyone who wants to attend that is a member of a chartered club. It is held on site of the national rally on Wednesday. They provide food and beverages and it lasts about 8 hours with breaks and lunch.
This years summit started with the subject of women in our clubs. The main question being “Does your club encourage and environment to encourage women to join the club”. It is my observation that as a club we have some very amazing women and that we seem to be attracting more women and couples. A large majority of our officers are women and have some very active women who volunteer to help at events.
After some group discussion on this we moved on to Safety. We had a nice presentation by the Oregon State motorcycle safety director. He talked about the importance of continuing education, a club culture of safety and the clubs responsibility to promote safety and safe riding. We discussed the safety classes available from the MOA and the smart trainer computer that simulates different riding situations and rates your responses. I believe we will be getting the the smart trainer in November to use.
The last section before lunch was about volunteer burnout and how to avoid it. We talked about how other clubs get more volunteers. Also about automating some of the club functions such as recurring payments and charter renewals. One of the ideas that I really liked and have been trying to get implemented was a general membership summit meeting during the winter. We would ask members to help us plan events for the coming year, to bring ideas for rides, events, and meetings. I believe we could get some great ideas from such a meeting.
After lunch we had a presentation from the new MOA president, A longer group discussion about the previous topics and finally an hour with some of the board members from the MOA. There was also a door prize raffle.
So my questions to you as members are these,
Do you feel that we as a club are welcoming to women, and all new members?
DO you have any suggestions that would improve the club procedures on this subject? What could we do to help retain members and encourage attendance to meetings and participation of events?
Would you attend safety training, group classes or advanced rider classes?
Would you attend and participate in a meeting to discuss the club, events and meetings? Would you be more likely to attend if the club provided food?
Email me at Waypastdawn@yahoo.com to respond to these questions or any other comments you may have.