*Note: Darryl Horsman is the USCA representative for the Western region, which includes the PNWCA, MOPAC and Alaska regions. We’ll be posting his updates here for the members of our region*
Good morning everyone – I hope this email finds you well! I wanted to share with you a couple of updates from the last Board meeting we had on 6/14/23.
First off – the USCA at this fiscal year end is in a positive cash flow situation with just over $250k in the accounts. The 2023-2024 Budget was proposed for the upcoming year and was approved by the Board. Key take-aways is that Dean and the USCA team will continue to drive down expenses and as a group we are bullish on income – but remain conservative. The 2024 budget shows a net increase of about $150k over this year. The Board is working with Dean and his team to create some KRA’s (key result areas) or what some of you might know as Flash numbers so that we can share and monitor the progress month to month, year over year. Along these same lines – we will be working on some stretch goals as simply “doing better” isn’t really a target! Happy to report that Columbia is continuing their support of curling and Toyota has come back. The plan is to get more sponsors moving forward of course.
Second, and maybe more importantly; after a couple nights of good discussion – Terri Gleason from Wisconsin making the motion, and Colin Hufman from Washington seconding the motion – the Board unanimously approved that Dean and his team adopt many of the recommendations provided by the Governance 4.0 committee and can move forward with introducing a new membership model and possibly some incentives for clubs. As an aside – there have been a number of ad hoc committees made up of various Board members (myself included) over the past couple of months that have put forth some membership models and club incentive ideas to support a few ideas Dean has constructed. I expect there will be a lot of excitement, anxiety, questions, and suspicion surrounding this news but I want to reassure everyone that the Board was extra sensitive to small membership/arena clubs and was vigilant in making sure the big membership/dedicated clubs didn’t get more breaks than they should due to their size. We don’t want to create a “rich gets richer” atmosphere anywhere in USCA curling. I think the conversation among the Board and Dean was really productive, inclusive, well thought out, and really took the recommendations and thoughts sent forth by the 4.0 Governance Committee to heart. At this time there is no direction to change the way the regions are set up as that wasn’t a large concern that the 4.0 committee pointed out. With that said, at some point this might be looked at but the hope is that the new membership model relieves much of the stress they were feeling over the last few years.
The next part of this plan is to host another Town Hall in early July once Dean and his team have had a chance to really hone the new membership model that will affect clubs and curlers. At this time the Town Hall will be your chance to provide feedback and ask questions so that Dean and his team can rework anything that the members don’t like – with the thoughts of having something that the majority, if not all all, of the USCA members will want to support and approve at the next Members Assembly.
It is not lost on anyone at the USCA or who is on the Board that the work that is currently being done is sensitive and important to the future of curling in the USA. We again would like to thank all of those who were on the Governance 4.0 committee and for the great work they did getting us to this point.
Thank you and Good Curling!
Darryl
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