Friends and a Half
Last night, my local Friends of NRA Committee event came off at one of the best banquet houses in the Capital District: we had a good time, and some folks walked offf with some TERRIFIC great buys at low dollars: e.g., one young woman from the Hudson Valley walked off with a photo-safari to Republic of South Africa for a meagre, get this, $1,050. (Oh, yeah, she'll have to pay somewhere in the realm of $1200 round trip airfare. BUT that buy was for a safari for TWO!) Challenge: Go online, search, try to find anything like that for under $5,000 per person! You will not.
Anyhow, we did pretty well, even though, had this dinner banquet & auctions occurred in almost any other region of the country we would have given away three times the stuff we did (which was a lot -- a city lot!) and have taken in at least three times the bucks we did for the Foundation.
What does the NRA Foundation do with those dollars: 1) underwrite projects like youth programs in the shooting programs around the country, including Eddie Eagle; 2) so doing the FNRA saves NRA millions of dollars that had been traditiojnally spent to train those youth and police and just plain folks; and 3) puts half the money back into the local area for a local, homegrown committee to review a variety of grant applications made by local clubs and to fund those clubs proportionally with the dollars earned from banquets in that locale.
From my point of view, all that is good --- and is the only reason I agreed to be the 2006 Chrmn.
What did I learn over the term this thing unfolded? Well, first of all, you have to understand that I've been doing this since about 1986-90 -- whenever one year after the FNRA was founded came around. There has been an ongoing "street battle" with the young man who went to work during those early months of the effort, who is only doing his job as he is told to do it (he has zero options), but who might carry a different attitude toward our local committee to his work.
This year he called and asked me to show up to the first meeting, largely as institutional memory. I went. It became soon apparent that another committee from another area would be in the saddle, even though an adequate group of folks had been recruited from the local region. When it came time to pick a local chairman I suggested first one, who declined, then another person: they are good folks and could have walked away with it. I left Chairman, much, much to my displeasure, and only because I had been told it would be for two months only, after which someone else would step up and carry it -- a significant matter to me, for I have been swamped during recent months. Never happened despite my ongoing objections.
The man from another committee -- a really able and energetic person -- told me he had me covered anytime I could not pitch in. True. And that is what I learned: no one knows our local area the way the members of OUR committee know it, but they were shortly shoved into such a narrow functionality that it was that man and his deeply experienced, wholly committed, sealous committee who were in charge. True also that they know almost nothing current and truly deep of our area in the ordinary or demographic/psychological sense.
It became a kind of struggle the main battle of which will occur hereafter: with the local committee. Our committee begins all over again come July 5. They have to take the reins and hold onto them: it will not do to allow others to impose themselves and grouse about the performance of our folks as if they were without either resources of their own, imaginations, or energies. They used them all this year, and used them well -- and they never lost their composure under considerable pressure that would have broken other less self-disciplined persons.
Just a word to the wise: when working in community projects, do it yourself -- with local help if possible -- and not by allowing distant persons who think they know better than you how to do it (this could turn into a polemical diatribe re modern partisan differences and taxes!). It is enough to allow impressment as if from above...once. After that, let'em go home and tend to their local flower gardens. And you tend to yours with no less focus.
Anyhow, we did pretty well, even though, had this dinner banquet & auctions occurred in almost any other region of the country we would have given away three times the stuff we did (which was a lot -- a city lot!) and have taken in at least three times the bucks we did for the Foundation.
What does the NRA Foundation do with those dollars: 1) underwrite projects like youth programs in the shooting programs around the country, including Eddie Eagle; 2) so doing the FNRA saves NRA millions of dollars that had been traditiojnally spent to train those youth and police and just plain folks; and 3) puts half the money back into the local area for a local, homegrown committee to review a variety of grant applications made by local clubs and to fund those clubs proportionally with the dollars earned from banquets in that locale.
From my point of view, all that is good --- and is the only reason I agreed to be the 2006 Chrmn.
What did I learn over the term this thing unfolded? Well, first of all, you have to understand that I've been doing this since about 1986-90 -- whenever one year after the FNRA was founded came around. There has been an ongoing "street battle" with the young man who went to work during those early months of the effort, who is only doing his job as he is told to do it (he has zero options), but who might carry a different attitude toward our local committee to his work.
This year he called and asked me to show up to the first meeting, largely as institutional memory. I went. It became soon apparent that another committee from another area would be in the saddle, even though an adequate group of folks had been recruited from the local region. When it came time to pick a local chairman I suggested first one, who declined, then another person: they are good folks and could have walked away with it. I left Chairman, much, much to my displeasure, and only because I had been told it would be for two months only, after which someone else would step up and carry it -- a significant matter to me, for I have been swamped during recent months. Never happened despite my ongoing objections.
The man from another committee -- a really able and energetic person -- told me he had me covered anytime I could not pitch in. True. And that is what I learned: no one knows our local area the way the members of OUR committee know it, but they were shortly shoved into such a narrow functionality that it was that man and his deeply experienced, wholly committed, sealous committee who were in charge. True also that they know almost nothing current and truly deep of our area in the ordinary or demographic/psychological sense.
It became a kind of struggle the main battle of which will occur hereafter: with the local committee. Our committee begins all over again come July 5. They have to take the reins and hold onto them: it will not do to allow others to impose themselves and grouse about the performance of our folks as if they were without either resources of their own, imaginations, or energies. They used them all this year, and used them well -- and they never lost their composure under considerable pressure that would have broken other less self-disciplined persons.
Just a word to the wise: when working in community projects, do it yourself -- with local help if possible -- and not by allowing distant persons who think they know better than you how to do it (this could turn into a polemical diatribe re modern partisan differences and taxes!). It is enough to allow impressment as if from above...once. After that, let'em go home and tend to their local flower gardens. And you tend to yours with no less focus.
posted by Duct Tape at 5:33 PM
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