Statement for December 2009

By Jim Blaine, wd4jzo

Hello from your Emergency Coordinator. I thought it might be appropriate to tell you a little about my own Ham radio History. I received my Technician License in August 1966, and upgraded to General in May 2001. I was inactive from 1977 to 2002. My primary concerns are: 1) Recruiting new members; 2) Training; and 3) Retention of our membership. Allow me to briefly address each of those points.

  1. Recruitment. This is our lifeblood as a volunteer organization in the community. Folks have to be aware that we exist, what is our purpose, and how they can participate. Do you know a Ham that is not a member of ARES? If so, invite them to join us on one of our nets, or to attend a meeting for folks outside of the ham radio community, ARES holds licensing classes. Last year, the ARES license classes produced over 60 new Hams. Did you know that only a couple of those new Hams joined ARES? Most of those students expressed the desire to be involved with emergency radio. We are hoping to add another 8 to 10 members from those classes. When you see a new face at our activities, shake their hand and make them feel welcomed ... because they are!!
  2. Training It never stops does it? With four (4) opportunities to participate in nets each month, the monthly meetings, and other special events, ARES needs a Training Committee to provide educational opportunities to fit almost any schedule. Our training is important to our served agencies and helps us to be better emergency radio operators.
  3. Retention Keeping all of our members interested and active is important. How can we make a great organization even better? What keeps you coming back? What keeps you away? Does something really "bug" you? We need to know. To me, our meetings are key to member retention. We need to know what type of things you would like us to do in our meetings. Would you like to have guest speakers from other emergency volunteer groups (CAP, MARS, DART, ARC, MRC etc) to hear about who they are what they are doing? Are you interested in presentations from the Health Department, Police, EOC, FEMA, DOT, etc? Please let me know. With sufficient lead time, we can make the arrangements.

Some of you have taken the ARES mission to heart while others have quietly disappeared or have never appeared in the first place. What to do? The easy answer is to drop those that have never attended meetings or checked in to the net. I'll have to discuss that with the SM. That would cut our numbers drastically but would also give us a small group that actually participates, maybe not 100% but none of us can be expected to be there every waking moment, although some do expect that of me. There are those that have taken the time to let me know that they have other obligations either on Net night or meeting night and believe me, I appreciate that. At least I know they care enough to stay in touch. There are of course those who when asked to respond to an email, just can't be bothered. Is five minutes too much to ask?

There will be a change in how we operate our weekly net. NCS operators and staff will be notified by email. We may make some field trips next year for our monthly meetings as well as getting guest speakers from served agencies and others. We will make an effort to do this.

The web site will be kept up to date and a helper will be assigned to assist Fletch to accomplish this as soon as we find that willing person who knows HTML. We will have a separate Training page added to the site as well and articles will be archived. You may submit photos taken at PSEs and during severe weather etc. to our photo page. Please use small jpegs. 300dpi is good.

Obviously we can't put up all photos at once but we might be able to make a clickable gallery of thumbnails. Make sure that you title the photo or add a small description (e.g date, location, event).

That's it for me this month (hopefully) and now I have to go and prepare for the next one. Have a great Holiday season. I'll see you next year.

-73 -
Jim, WD4JZO

updated Dec 4,2009