Board of Directors/Level of Participation

From PCSAR

Revision as of 22:58, 2 May 2017

Goal

In February 2017, the Board set a goal for strategic planning: "to develop a plan to address the level of participation, number of members, and rejuvination of the organization".

Description of the Problem

We've addressed the problems of compliance with provincial requirements by splitting off the Community Response Group. However since 2014 our core group has greatly been reduced in part by the difficulty of reconciling ourselves to the need to change our organization and in part because of the provincial requirements on our members.

We're seeing attendance numbers of 4-10 vs previously 15-20. How can we move forward with these number? Workload has now been downloaded to this small group. Burn out for this group is becoming very real.

Strengths

• we develop inherently interesting skills that are attractive to many potential members
• we have exciting responses
• we have lots of good equipment
• we have solid financial support
• our community thinks highly of our activities and offers strong moral support
• our community has a high percentage of outdoor people that we can recruit from
• we have easy access to great wilderness for training

Barriers

Barriers we are currently facing include:

• amount of work
• burn out
• mindset
• life has changed for long-time volunteers
• the disparity between paid and volunteer responders on the same incident
• volunteers are demotivated when they train but don't get used

Potential Strategies

brainstorming some solutions:

• Look at a paid model
  • merge with CNP Fire to get paid model
• lots of community members with Basic SAR training like the first aid model
• bring in fresh blood
• we should target 18 to 40 year olds for members
• we should use social media to reach our target audience
  • get control of and post to PCSAR's Facebook page
• invite general public to our events, exercises and training
  • risk: over engagement; mitigate: limit vacancies
  • post on Echo's community events
• promote & advertise our group

Tactics

• 2017-04-21 Volunteer Appreciation
• 2017-04-25 ICS Workshop
• Recruit from other outdoor groups
  • identify potential groups
  • groups such as
    • Quad squad
    • CNP snowmobile users
    • Volunteer Ski Patrolers
  • develop generic letter - Susanna and Rose
  • consider meeting with groups

Status of this Document

This is an unofficial summary of board discussions.

Log

• 2017-02-07 Board strategic planning
• 2017-03-07 Board strategic planning
• 2017-04-04 Board strategic planning