Ten years ago, I developed a leadership seminar for amateur radio club officers. We held a couple of session here in Michigan, which the participants found to be useful, and I suggested to the ARRL that they offer this—or something similar—to club leaders across the country. In typical ARRL fashion back then, I never heard back from them.
Well, in yesterday’s ARRL Club News (October 18, 2022), I found the following item:
Call for Instructors
ARRL is embarking on a journey of training for club officers and members. The new club development webinar series will include live Q&A, and the live sessions will be available to everyone. The webinars will be recorded and available to ARRL members through the ARRL Learning Center. We’re looking for ARRL members to help us produce, create, and deliver the webinars.
The purpose of this program is to offer a series of short webinars that offer training for the skills needed to build and run a successful club. Topics will include leadership, activities, finance, and recruiting. Envisioned is a series of 10 or more webinars, all lasting from 20 to 30 minutes.
The hope is that club officers and members will view the series as an opportunity to learn from others that have been able to put those skills to use. To do this, we need the help of membership. We’re looking for instructors to help with building the training. We’re also looking for members that can present in a standard format and have the skills necessary to do the training. If this sounds like something that you are interested in, please contact Mike Walters, W8ZY, at [email protected] for further details. We hope to start this series in late January 2023.
It’s great that the ARRL is starting to work on this, but even better is that they’re asking for volunteers to help. I’ve always said that there is a wealth of talent and experience among the ARRL membership, but that most of the staff members were inflicted with not-invented-here syndrome. That is to say that the prevailing opinion always seemed to be that if an idea or program did not originate in Newington, it wasn’t worth much. Soliciting volunteers like this is not something that the ARRL would have done 10 years ago.
It’s been very satisfying to see the ARRL come around on things that I proposed years ago. Next on my list that I’d like to see the ARRL tackle: setting a membership goal of at least 25% of U.S. licensed radio amateurs.
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