Re: [AISdiscuss] Feb. PresMes

[ZEBRAIRIS1@aol.com]

Greetings one and all!

I've read through the President's message which should be quite effective in 
spreading alarm and chaos among us chickens.  I've also read the AIS comments 
flowing back and forth and frankly very little of what's been said is of any 
value in addressing either the short term problems of the AIS or the mid and 
long term survivability of the AIS.

No! the "sky isn't falling"!  No! this isn't an issue to address in a chaotic 
manner at Portland.  And NO this doesn't need to be an organizational 
destroying social game of who can I stab in the back while protecting my rice bowl 
and "keeping up appearances."  

Yes, the AIS needs a bottoms up review of all revenue sources, all 
expenditures and most of all our mission.  Let's face it folks the old AIS is dying a 
slow death trying to preserve "tradition."  All I've heard for the last year as 
a panacea for the AIS problems is "how do we get more members."  Well, its 
time to realize we aren't going to increase membership until the gardening 
pendulum swings back in our favor.  OUR responsibility as the AIS Board is to 
preserve the AIS until that time comes! 

I've never won a popularity contest and it is too late to start working on it 
now. Regardless, the President and Mr. Pries need to have their concerns 
taken seriously and some "fool" needs to offer an option on how to address these 
concerns.  The best way is to identify some of the problems.

Problem # 1, The leading problem within the AIS today is its Board of 
Directors because the majority of it has at least 'till now failed to accept their 
fiduciary responsibilities for the AIS.  Even within nonprofit organizations the 
voting Directors have fiduciary responsibilities for the financial soundness 
of the organization.  The AIS has a significant financial problem and every 
director needs only to look in a mirror to see the person responsible for 
correcting this problem.

Problem # 2, This is the oppressive resistance to change that paralyzes many 
long time members (and directors) and leads to overwhelming frustrations like 
those expressed in the President's message.  We must embrace the concept that 
change provides the opportunity to improve our services in a more cost 
efficient way without increasing our expenditures.

That's enough problems so how do we digest the various conflicting issues to 
produce a logical and coherent solution -- divide and concur!  As I mentioned 
before we need a bottoms up review of our mission, revenues, and expenditures. 
 Do we do this in an open meeting of the Board? Not unless our goal is to 
disillusion our remaining members and far too many of them will be in Portland.  
We first have to agree on the need to set up something like an ad hoc 
committee to lay out a sound mission based financial plan.  The Portland meeting could 
be used to throw out some ideas to see the response they get, but even in 
this we need to know ahead of time in what direction we want to channel the 
discussions.

A few ideas about a bottoms up review would be to identify the most costly 
services or products the AIS provides.  The two major ones jumping right out of 
our budget are liability insurance and the bulletin.  

First let's evaluate liability insurance.  While a lot of us are still hung 
up on the concept that this a benefit we are, and should, be providing for all 
AIS functions at all levels we continue to fret about its cost.  Let's look at 
it a bit differently by first recognizing that the liability product we 
provide is a low cost group policy that covers all affiliates, sections and 
individual AIS members engaged in an AIS sanctioned activity.  This is a major amount 
of financial security we provide for the whole AIS family and at an 
incredibly modest cost of $25,000.  The direct revenues collected to cover this cost 
should be proportional to the benefit provided.  First affiliates are primary 
users and they should be accessed a uniform fee to cover 50% of the cost. 
Another large user is the AIS convention and maybe we should earmark the proceeds 
from the silent auction to pay another 25% of the cost.  The last group of users 
is individual members and maybe the last 25% be allocated from membership 
dues.


Okay! Calm down!  The point of the above was only to show that in a bottoms 
up review we tie services to actual users and then proportionally "charge" them 
according to their usage.

I'll have to let the bulletin go for now because I'm too tired to continue.

Good Night to all!
Brad 

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