Greetings SCC Family,
Here's a summary of the items discussed during the Members Meeting this Sunday as well as the results of the survey. Note that the survey results are posted in the "Files" tab (see below) in pdf form so you'll need Acrobat Reader to open them and they may not open on some devices.

Thank you to the almost thirty people (including family) that came to breakfast and the 20 that came out to the park for the meeting itself.

We started the meeting out with our Vice President Eli leading us in a moment of silence to acknowledge and remember of our military, first responders civilians killed on 9/11.

We stepped through the survey results and discussed the main items contained in them starting with an interest in possibly having regional chapters or regional representatives. The consensus was that having formal chapters wouldn't benefit the club and may encourage division. The result was an agreement that we should continue to encourage posting of "meet-ups" (e.g., "A few of us are heading out to the track. Who wants to come?") and local hang-outs by individual members and to continue to make the point clear that there are no boundaries on events, either in time or geography. If you have an event that you want to promote to the club broadly we ask that you contact Alexis to help get it on our calendar but that shouldn't been seen as a restriction on suggesting a local event that you're interest in to the club.

Comments were shared that the officers (and in particular I) need to be seen as more approachable. I asked for how we could encourage that and the feedback I got is that I in particular should make more of an effort to get out and meet each member, especially new members to make sure they feel welcome and are comfortable sharing ideas or concerns. Excellent point and I know that I can definitely do better in that regard and I'll definitely try to do so. If you do have anything that you'd like to share please do discuss it with whomever of the leadership (me, Eli, Alexis, Greg, Rose or Israel) or any of the long-term members (e.g., Jim "Diceman" Deiss, Phil Bowdoin, Danny, etc.) that you're comfortable with approaching. We need your input!

There is an interest in working with local Dodge dealerships to set up events and a couple of members volunteered to help set up some events (sorry we didn't get the names).

We discussed at length the subject of being a member of multiple car clubs (including other local Challenger clubs such as Challengers Unlimited) and the consensus was that this is fine: other club's members are welcome to be members of our club (following our normal prospecting period and dues payment policies) and vice versa. If there is potential for or is actual conflict generated we would need to address it as it comes up of course but broadly speaking we don't want our members to feel that there are implied restrictions on who they can spend time with.

There was discussion on changing our chosen charity due to a lack of interest by Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund in either acknowledging our contributions or really interacting with us at all sadly. I'll post a separate item on this suggestion after this one so we can discuss it as a separate item. There is another charity that we are considering and I'll post information on them once we get a chance to talk with them in more detail. We'll be open to suggestions here and will vote for the final choice.

There is interest in setting up an SCC-hosted fundraiser. Efrain agreed to lead this effort supported by a number of other members who agreed to help. These events take a great deal of effort to organize so please offer to help if you're interested in doing so. Rosie is organizing a holiday party/fundraiser as well and I'm sure she'd value your support on that effort as well.

The SoCal Challengers (SCC) name is in the process of being trademarked and the SCC brand images are going to be copyrighted. This effort should be complete in the next few weeks or so. This effort was undertaken to protect the club in a case where some malicious party attempts to use our name for some negative purpose (such as the blogger we had issues with 8 months ago). To be absolutely clear, this is an effort to protect the club from harm and not an attempt to keep individual members from showing SCC love by generating their own images for their personal use such as stickers for their cars or hats. We only ask that you don't use our images or name for anything commercial (obviously because that would hurt our fundraising efforts), political, negative, etc. If you're considering developing something please discuss it with an officer so we can ensure that the right image is used if required and that it conforms with our club standards (see above and the Membership Agreement policies) but showing SCC love is always encouraged :-)

The process for prospecting new members was discussed and the current policy will remain in place. Some history behind why the changes were made was presented and discussed and there was a consensus that the current policy should remain in place (i.e., 4 events and a vote by the officers).

There was a comment that for those members who get email notifications when there is a post to the club page that they are getting overwhelmed by the number of emails, especially those related to posts of a more personal nature than strictly club business. We discussed why that could be in terms of content of discussion in the forum and how Facebook is set up. It seemed that the right solution was to encourage those members who are set up this way to modify their Facebook settings to remove the email forwarding setting if they feel that this is an issue. If you'd like to do this, please contact Alexis and she can help you get those changes made. In regards to the content of discussion on our page, there was agreement that no policy should be set other than those already in place to restrict any specific type of post.

If I've missed anything or if you have any questions or comments please let us know and have a great rest of your week!

Doug Bennett
President