[MR] NonMember Charges (fwd)

[David W. James]

On Tuesday, August 27, 2002, at 11:17 PM, Logan wrote:
> to think that i should feel good about paying money to the club i 
> belong to
> and getting no more than a newsletter that i look at online anyway so 
> that
> others can skirt that is silly.  what then is my memberships good 
> for?  i
> have posed this question before and, strangely, it has been ignored.  
> if we
> all stop paying our membership fees what will become of this club?  i 
> know
> it was a rhetorical question.

> I get my discounts at hotels because i pay my AAA membership dues, i get
> free towing as well

	The last time I looked AAA wasn't a charitable organization.  And I 
suspect that you pay your due to AAA specifically because of those 
discounts and the towing coverage, not because you believe in the 
mission of AAA.

	(Interestingly enough, you do realize that you (almost certainly) 
are not a member of AAA?  You are almost certainly a member of a club 
affiliated with them.  In Northern Atlantia that would be AAA 
Mid-Atlantic.  I'm a member of AAA Mid-Atlantic; they are a member of 
AAA.  Much the same as I am not a member of one of the Astronomical 
League; I'm a member of a local club that is a member of it.)

	If I understand  your first question, your 'membership' (a friend 
has pointed out that the this term is incorrect; you send a donation to 
the SCA, Inc., a charitable organization incorporated in California.  
Send their lowest standard donation and you get a card back saying that 
you did and noting that you have a waiver on file there.  Send enough 
and you get extras, like (until Jan. 1) a newsletter or two, a lot like 
when you send money to your local PBS station) is currently good for:

1) Receiving kingdom newsletter(s) (not all of which is available 
on-line...)
2) Receive TI (this year...)
3) Access to research and practice of others published in
     newsletters and pamphlets (TI, CA, Kingdom, and local)
4) Eligibility to hold office and fight in crown tourneys
5) Receive mildly preferential treatment in device submissions.
6) Warm fuzzy feelings of belonging to the SCA, Inc.
7) Small tax deduction for filing itemized US tax returns
8) Avoid occasional event premiums
9) Help Maintain group status (shire, barony, etc)
10) Ability to vote in local polls in some groups (where applicable)
11) Knowledge that you help financially maintain the corporation and its 
goals
12) The convienence of only having to sign the waiver once a year (or up 
to 3 years.)

(Most entries cribbed from a recent report to the Board.)

Let's see, as someone who didn't cut a check to the Corporation this 
year I get:

1) Warm fuzzy feelings of belonging to the Society (in areas where "The 
Society" is recognized as not the same as 'The SCA, Inc.')
2) To be allowed to donate my time to the corporation and people of the 
Society

Now, what was that question again?

As far as your second question, if everyone stopped donating to the 
Corporation it would either A) have to find another method of financing 
itself or B) go bankrupt.  In which case the groups currently playing 
the game would have to incorporate separately and work out some means of 
covering the services formerly provided by the current Corporation.  
This would be tramatic, it would almost certainly be messy and it would 
either work out better or worse for the folks actually playing the game 
depending largely on what they wanted in the first place.  I suspect 
most groups would, at least initially, procede to make the same mistakes 
that the corporation does now, but we can hope that things would get 
better.  At worst several competing versions of 'the new SCA' would 
compete for memberships all over our current territory, sowing discord 
and confusion and driving us all to Civil War re-enactment or back to SF 
Fandom whence we came.  At best the various groups across the US and the 
various national groups would separately incorporate and together form a 
federation of clubs that would be largely indistinquishable from the 
original (in terms of actual services supporting our weekend events) 
from the point of view of the folks actually playing the game.

I suspect that the short term result would be that event fees would go 
up enough to cover the lost insurance and whoever filed the 
incorporation papers for the  SCA Kingdom of Atlantia, Inc., a 501(c) 3 
corporation, would get a lot more junk mail.  I would hope that your 
Majesty's reign would complete with little disruption.

But then I'm an optimist at heart.

David/Kwellend-Njal