The BCMC is run by volunteers. No volunteers = no club.    It's that simple.

I encourage every member of the club who's been out on trips before to organize a trip themselves. Don't be fooled by myths on why you can't do it...

- You don't need to lead a challenging trip... Do an indoor climbing gym trip, a snowshoe or ski trip up Diamond Head or Hollyburn, hike up the BCMC trail (or part ways up if there's too much snow) or the Baden Powell. Go somewhere you've been before and that you like -- you'll be surprised at how many other members may be interested in joining you!

- You don't need to be fast. There are many members who enjoy going at a relaxed pace

- It doesn't need to be an overwhelming experience... limit it to a few participants (3, 4, 5, whatever is comfortable).

- Most importantly you don't need to wait until later... do your bit to help the club by listing a trip now even if the trip is several weeks or even months later

Let me know if you need some help and I'll help you get started.

Cheers and see you out there!!!

Hey Francis, 

my name is Carson. I joined the club at the end of last summer. I've enjoyed the club for its ski/ snowshoe trips and its courses (OAR course) and look forward to go on more hikes and rock climbing and mountaineering course trips in the summer. I am 23 yrs old and enjoy the people in the club and leading trips is something that much interests me as a way to get involved and to help the club in the place where I feel it needs the most help because there are many trips but always full, that makes me think that people want to go on trips but they're not enough organizers and people are afraid to organize trips. I am one of these people that are unsure about organizing trips.

I think I would benefit from a basic layout of what the club expects of organizers before they organize their first trips?

As a way to get young members (the future) involved in the club something I think would be popular would be day courses that talk about how to lead trips and possibly incentives to people that are considering organizing trips. E.g. After organizing a small number of trips like 3, members will receive a gift card or something, then maybe another reward after the tenth organized trip. 

Thank you Francis!

-Carson

Hi Carson,

that's really good feedback. I agree that it's quite clear that the club needs more trip organizers and for organizers to post more trips in a year so that we have more trips on the schedule available to all members. Trips are filling-up too quickly.

The executive team has been discussing how to address this issue and here are a few things that we're working on:

1. make it easier for members to become trip organizers: members who want to organize trips should be able to do so without bureaucratic rules in the way. 

2. provide incentives for members to organize trips. We are creating a Pro-Deal group open to frequent trip organizers. We already have Helly Hansen, Gold Star, and Promotiv that agreed to offer a Pro-Deal to our most active trip organizers. We will send out details soon as we're still finishing putting this together right now. We're also discussing incentives paid for by the club, which could include subsidized courses and gift cards.

3. encourage members to lead easy trips -- those are very popular and don't require any expertise.

You're now the 3rd person to mention the idea of having some sort of leadership program for how to organize and run trips. I like this and we'll have to see whether we can pull this together as it would require volunteers to put together a course and teach it. That would be something quite new for the club as I'm not aware of this having been done in the past (at least not the past 20 years or so).

I'll try to spend a bit more time on this over the weekend and post more, especially on what we expect of a trip organizer.

Cheers

Anyone else interested in sharing their views? Anyone wanting to help with this?

Hey Francis,

thank you so much for the reply. It's great to know the executives are actually noticing this wanting to fix it. I appreciate the long reply.

In my opinion, I think the leadership program is actually a great idea, in order for it be effective it should only be led by someone with good leadership skills and should be for only people that haven't organized or maybe organized a couple trips. 

As for the incentives for the frequent trip organizers, I think this is good but the club is volunteer operated and if these types of people are only organizing trips for big incentives some of them maybe should't be organizing trips, we should only organize trips because we want to promote others to enjoy the outdoors. This is why I think the most focus should be put on new members and new trip organizers because they're the ones that are really interested in benefiting the community and the club, and yes I think a clearly laid out step-by-step plan on the website on how to become and what is expected of trip organizers with some small-medium incentives would be useful in encouraging new comers to overcome the initial intimidation and confusion on organizing trips. And if focus is put on new members the first trips to be organized would be easy trips which would take care of your 3rd point.

Thanks again Francis!