The June 2019 issue of RadCom, the Radio Society of Great Britain’s equivalent to QST, contains the article, Building a strong local club structure, by Richard Thomas, G4JJP. In the article, G4JJP proposes changes to the way we organize amateur radio clubs.
Citing the dwindling membership of most local clubs, one of the proposals he makes is that instead of many small clubs, he proposes that we form more regional associations and that this regional association would exist primarily online, except for perhaps a club station. Organizing in this way would reduce the overhead costs of running a traditional club.
I would say that in addition to forming regional associations, we need to make them more like real nonprofit organizations, and that includes paid staff. There’s only so much that you can do with volunteers. And, running a club like this is going to be even more work than running a smaller club. It’s already difficult to find folks to be be club officers for small clubs. I don’t think that there will be that many people who are willing and able to run one of these regional associations solely on a volunteer basis.
Once set up, these regional nonprofit corporations will have to provide services that people can’t get online. For example, access to a club station and a lab with equipment, such as a spectrum analyzer and a 3D printer, might just be something that you can get people to pay for. Other services might include regularly-scheduled license classes as well as classes on a variety of other topics, such as software-defined radio, digital modes, DMR, and operating techniques.
I like this idea, but to make it work, the national amateur radio associations—the RSGB and the ARRL—are going to have to step up and work with local groups to affect these changes. For the most part, the clubs just don’t have the resources to pull this off. I’m not really sure the ARRL does, either, but as G4JJP points out, “We need to change. Before we die.”
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