RVC-6 Report – Ralph Rudolph Dated August 11, 08
I’m pleased to announce that Rhonda McLean of Central Oklahoma has volunteered to be our Regional Scholarship Coordinator, so Region 6 will be taking part in our scholarship programs. It’s a bit sad that not all groups are participating in this program as it helps some aspiring folks and makes for a good PR opportunity to get your group’s name in the newspapers. In my group, we treat the scholarship winners to dinner and do press releases on this.
Again in my own group, I’ve taken over as testing coordinator and am boosting our own testing to about every other month with more test locations as we have built up a backlog of about 50 prospective members. We are boosting our number of proctors to six to be able to do this. I merely did a search (through the National Office) of members with degrees in psychology as they can easily become proctors (with a bit of sweet talk). I’m pleased to see that other groups are also giving an increased emphasis on testing.
Some groups are doing interesting things. For instances, TJ Lundeen of Central Oklahoma is trying to put together a weekend near Ft. Smith (on the Oklahoma side), inviting members from Arkansas, Eastern Oklahoma and East Texas. It will be a low-key weekend with camping, cabins and RV sites, making it very affordable, most probably over the Halloween weekend. A Mensa test session may also be held, with testees invited to a pot-luck dinner. Way to go! And it will be kids friendly.
Within Louisiana, with the agreement of both LocSecs, certain zip codes of Baton Rouge Mensa are being transferred to New Orleans Mensa. Several members of the zip codes have already preferenced into New Orleans.
By now, I hope all of you have contacted your lapsed members and asked them to consider re-upping. From my own personal experience, such contact causes quite a few to renew. It’s also a good opportunity to send them a survey. NOTE: Today, I just got a notice from the National Office. In Region 6 only 5 local groups contacted lapsed members. Eleven groups did not! What part of “serving your local group” don’t you understand???? What does it take to write a nice letter and slap labels on them?
On the AMC level, we have a closed forum called AMC-lists where we discuss items of interest (?) before proposing them for the agenda at our meetings. This saves meeting time as items with little support don’t have to be argued in person and poorly worded items can be edited. Given that we are having a November planning meeting to develop action plans for our future (strategic vision) you’d think that we’d be discussing this a lot.
Not so. Administrivia rules.
The November AMC meeting is some time away. But boy am I busy writing agenda items about things that disturb me. There’s a lot, lately.