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I spoke last month to you about the importance of preparing for the future security of our Clubhouse.
It has been wonderful to hear back from you, and that you are overwhelmingly in support of this strategic direction. Thank you to all of you who took the time and interest to communicate your support, questions and suggestions for future savings.
The decision to no longer issue winner’s tickets is one part of a broader review of the club’s finances, to ensure that we continue to add to our surplus.
Our bridge education has been and is a critical activity for our club, essential for the ongoing renewal of our club, and for maintaining our vibrant member body and promoting our game. It has been instrumental in our change from a club with declining membership more than five years ago to one that now has stable, stronger membership trends.
Some members have raised the question of how our bridge education activities are managed and accounted for.
The direction, scope and course fees of our bridge education program are agreed between the Committee and the Bridge Education Sub-Committee every six months. This year for example we reduced the number of beginners classes in favour of more courses focused on our improver players. This shift probably contributed to our club membership falling slightly this year in contrast to growth in recent years.
The club runs on the contributions of a large number of members. As we have been reviewing our expenses and the way we manage our activities, I am impressed at how much different people do to help our club be as good as it is. We don't yet have a full list of the different contributors and their contributions, but I am convinced that the size of some of these contributions are largely unknown to our overall membership. For some of the roles, possibly only the persons who have held the role previously can comprehend the amount of time, effort and responsibility involved.
Take for example the House Manager role, currently filled by Bill Fitzsimons. In recent months a sample of things I am aware that Bill has been involved in, completely on a voluntary basis, include:
Club members will have heard of the grant money we received as part of the federal Stronger Communities Program. We received $7,500 plus GST to be used to fund 50% of $15,000 in eligible spending on bridge equipment to improve the club. We are pleased to note (as we are required to do) that “This project received grant funding from the Australian Government.”
We would also like to note the huge voluntary time commitments that planning and implementing these purchases involved from the Committee and others, and particularly from Bill Fitzsimons, Ken Watson and David Farmer.
We have used this grant money as follows:
Recent changes have triggered some discussion among members at the club, including on the need for us to have registered for GST.
To help this discussion be more informed we have attached two papers that the ABF commissioned when GST was introduced and later when the GST thresholds were revised.
The club continues to support visitors and other players who find themselves unexpectedly without a partner at a number of its sessions: Monday afternoons (Green section only), Wednesday afternoons, Wednesday evenings, Friday afternoons and Friday evenings. We also welcome unpartnered players at all of our supervised sessions.
We have started keeping records of the unpartnered players at these sessions and there are many. While we encourage these players to proactively arrange for their own partners, we are glad when we can help those who unexpectedly find themselves partnerless.
We have received 203 responses to our member survey at the time of writing this article, an impressive 33% response rate from our 608 members. It is not too late. If you have not completed the survey or wish to update your response click on http://bit.ly/PBCSurvey2018. We want to gather as many of our members' views as possible to give us a good foundation for making decisions on your behalf.
A few of our members did not want to include their year of birth and remarkably were born in 2018. That is of course their choice but for some purposes these responses will need to be excluded. For instance it may not be possible to use their survey responses as demographic evidence to demonstrate to Council and other similar bodies our provision of strong community value to senior citizens, and could diminish our claim to stronger community support.
The survey will close at noon on Saturday 30 June. Printed responses will be entered online. The responses will then be augmented by postcode and other relevant membership data held and the results summarized and anonymized in a form useful to the committee and for inclusion into a club demographic and transport needs profile - and interesting summary results published on the website.
Some of the changes at the club have inspired discussions among members about the club's membership situation.
To help these discussions be well-informed and constructive, members may be interested in some recent membership trends, looking at both the joining dates of our current members and the number of lapsed and resigned members.
The joining dates of our current 607 members are as follows:
