Growing pains

Our little club is getting bigger, and starting to get some momentum.  We love this, but it does mean some changes.  Over the past couple days, the founders and core members of the club have been discussing what direction we want to go in and how we want to cope with these changes.  The result is the new FAQ here in the Club Information sub forum.  If you read the old one, you'll notice some changes. 

Until now, the process for actually joining the club has been fairly informal, and we've felt to need to make joining more of a "thing".  Not a big thing, but we mostly wanted to make our expectations for prospective members a little more explicit.  So besides joining us at a club activity or three and getting to know everybody, we're asking prospective members to ask one of the core members for sponsorship into the club (as of this post, the core members are myself, Tyson/THardy, Brady/Dutchman, Andrew/clfrncwby, and Brad/OffroadMedic), and to participate in a fourwheeling-related service project.  This could be a trail cleanup, or a rehab, or something bigger.  It's up to you.

We've also made explicit some expectations for club members - the big one is ongoing membership in a land use organization.  I'm going to stick my U4WDA member number in my signature block, I hope the rest of you will join me in that.  It doesn't have to be U4WDA, there's lots of other organizations like Blue Ribbon Coalition and USA-ALL and Tread Lightly out there.  Pick one and do your part - it's quite literally the least you can do .

For a long time we made decisions in a fairly ad hoc way, because it was just the few of us and we could do that.  Now that we're getting bigger, we felt it somewhat important to formalize our decision making process and make clear who is calling the shots, so we've done that too. 

It may have seemed for a bit to some of you that just joining the forum was equal to joining the club, but no - we want a little bit more out of you than that .  That's not to say you have to do anything - if you're most comfortable just hanging out on the forum and getting out on the occasional club trip, that's absolutely fine with us and you're more than welcome to do exactly that.  We hope that everybody reading this will be as excited as we are at the new shape of the DesertRunners T4R club and want to take this next step with us.

So if you haven't been out on the trails with us yet, come get your truck dirty.  If you've been able to join us on a couple runs and we've somehow managed to fool you into thinking we're cool, hit up one of the core members for a sponsorship.  Once we get a couple prospective members in the pipe, we'll start looking for a service project to finalize your requirements and we'll see just how big this club can get!

Nicely put!

I want to encourage EVERYONE to read or reread the FAQ that Kevin linked. If you have any questions feel free to ask.