[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
For money, all of it goes back to the members for picnics, prizes/raffles,
donations for charities, and club supplies like first aid kits, chainsaw, etc...
[/ QUOTE ]
I like a little more control over my $$
if you want to give to charity you do not need a club to do it.
if you need a first aid kit you do not need a club to get one.
I have always wanted to form a 'shop club'.
dues would go towards big ticket machinery that is hard to justify for a single person.
more like buying shares then a club deal.
make initiation the donation of a big ticket item that the shop needs.
pooling resources could be the path to some serious toy building.
after a while you should have the big ticket basics covered and start getting into stuff like IronWorkers and sheet metal shears/brakes.
eventually it could grow to having paid staff to manufacture saleable goods if the club wants to go that route
[/ QUOTE ]
One of the guys in the club I ride w/ when I have time is doing something like this. It is planned to be separate from the the club its self, though. The club has too many people who don't do their own work and don't want to, so it would be pointless for them to pay in. Others work for 4x4 shops and still others have more equiptment than some fabshops I've seen. If he had started planning it another time I would have jumped on it, but the way things are now I only have time to wheel maybe 3 time a year and no time for major mods.
This brings me to my other point, no club can MAKE anyone attend anything. We have a scheduled meeting and a scheduled trail ride every month. In the summer there are more "wildcat" trips that normally are made up of mostly club members and few who are not. The only people who would be excluded from the GBR are thoses w/ unsafe trucks. Personally I don't want to ride w/ someone like that anyway so worries for me. I guess offically I am not currently a "member in good standing" because I've only been on one club trail ride and to two meetings this year. However, because we are based on friendship, not rules, when I ran into some club members at a swap meet last w/e things were the same as they always were.
Honestly, if I didn't believe in what the GBR, Southern
www.sfwda.org , and United
www.ufwda.org do w/ the money I give them there would have been no point in paying my dues this year or next. But I do think they are good stewards of my donations, and they do work to keep the trails we have open, so they get my money. Look, neither political party is really looking out for the OHV community. One wants to totally shut us down and the other is more intrested in timber and grazing rights, and those intrests happen to dovetail with ours. If you are totally against joining something (I know some people have no desire to belong to things like this) consider a donation to the Blue Ribbon Colition
www.sharetrails.org The sad fact is, weather you are in the USA or Canada or anywhere else, money is what makes politicians notice. Thats my $.02
