Extra fun ideas for senior member meetings?

[Spike]

^ Well I do offer a free round of drinks at the club after every meeting to those who desire.  My Senior Member numbers have increased and soon I will need to find another way to bribe them as it is becoming increasingly expensive on nights when they ALL show up. 

[NIN]

[snip]I watched a video about the Army Reserve that was produced around 1954.  It looked like Reservists used to meet on night each week at the unit.  Does anyone know if this was in fact the norm back then?  If so, I can guess that is where the weekly CAP meeting got its start, following military reserve setup.

Thats where the concept of a "4 hr UTA" came from, a unit did a "5 to 9" or "6 to 10" Unit Training Assembly 1x per week for "4 UTAs a month."   If you're in the ARNG or Reserves nowadays, your drill weekends are generally termed a "MUTA 4" ("Multiple Unit Training Assembly, Four") which is a throwback to the concept of combining four 4-hour UTAs into a weekend.

For those that meet monthly or bimonthly, how many hours do you meet for??

My former unit had a 2hr "senior staff" meeting once a month on a Monday which was for the seniors and the cadet squadron staff.   Several years back, after we started doing these meetings, one of my cadet commanders decided that since there were seniors in the armory to "supervise," that one Monday a month would make a great opportunity for his staff to get together and plan things, too.  So while the seniors were in the classroom, his cadet staff were in the mess hall dining room doing their stuff.

Each quarter, one of those senior meetings becomes the quarterly training meeting for the next quarter.  Seemed to work pretty well for us.

[Major Carrales]

No reason to have weekly meetings for seniors.  Go to twice a month.

There I disagree - that's a great way to lose or never have momentum.

I agree, if you have a situation where weekly meeting are warranted...going to every two weeks does nothing to help you.  For example, many CAP Officers only have CAP on their mind because of the meetings and call outs for missions.  Units that meet once a month, tend to wither and die.

Having said that...the true answers is that a unit meets as often as the situation prescribes.  Don't fall into "cookie cutter" policies for all units, such situations only offer a guide.

[NIN]

^ Well I do offer a free round of drinks at the club after every meeting to those who desire.  My Senior Member numbers have increased and soon I will need to find another way to bribe them as it is becoming increasingly expensive on nights when they ALL show up.

Back during my first go-around as commander of my last squadron, I had built one hell of a senior team up and we had a semi-unofficial official policy/motto of "the squadron that plays together, stays together." My deputy for seniors took on the role of "chief entertainment officer" and put together little "occasional senior-only" get-togethers at his house or elsewhere.  Couple times a month my officers and I would hit our squadron O-club (the local Legion hall) for a couple beers after the meeting.  2 of my officers were teetotalers and they came and had Cokes.  I had a rule that I always bought the first round, and that got expensive, but you know, I didn't care: we were a great team and if $20 in beers after CAP kept everybody running as a well-oiled machine, well, that was worth it.  And it was the Legion: they took good care of us, and drafts were like $2.. sweet!


EDIT: Oh yeah, and once a year we did a little dinner cruise thing with our spouses as a way to tell our wives/significant others "thank you for putting up with us and all this silly CAP stuff.."  It started with about 10 of us and our wives, and last time we went it was about 40 folks....

[RiverAux]

No reason to have weekly meetings for seniors.  Go to twice a month.

There I disagree - that's a great way to lose or never have momentum.

Oh, that must be why the squadron was only the second largest with the most active senior program in the Wing.  Guess we weren't doing it right....

[Eclipse]

No reason to have weekly meetings for seniors.  Go to twice a month.

There I disagree - that's a great way to lose or never have momentum.

Oh, that must be why the squadron was only the second largest with the most active senior program in the Wing.  Guess we weren't doing it right....

Size is irrelevant -  the largest unit in my wing is ~30% empty shirts, and the second largest is 000, also the "most active senior program" also says nothing because perhaps the rest of the "senior programs" were poor.

Just because one or a few hyper-motivated units can be successful without the normal level of meeting structure doesn't mean its a
good idea.  Those situations are "lightning in a bottle" - awesome, enjoy them, but realize that they a generally personality-based and a few key members dropping out or a couple of meeting or facility challenges and the whole thing dissolves in 6 months because there is no baseline structure to fall back on.

I could very easily assemble a unit made up of all the pilots in a large urban area, give them a couple planes, never meet or ask them to do anything but fly, and then call them the most active squadron in the wing.  CAP units are supposed to be more than that.

[RiverAux]

Fine, I guess the entire Wing sucks then and that I just can't believe my own experience.  By the way, size means a LOT.  If you've got a great program its going to grow.  Weak programs shrink.  You're not going to find very many large senior programs that are a waste of their members' time. 

The point is that you can have a good program no matter what your meeting schedule is. 

[Eclipse]

^ Are you looking just to argue - I never said either of those things.

Of course you can have a good program with any number of variables, that doesn't mean that examples which are exceptions should be considered the baseline, any more than the baseline should be so rigid as to not allow for exceptions.

[Ned]

^ Are you looking just to argue?

Bob,

You did see who you were responding to, right? 

One doesn't become the most prolific poster here without "looking to argue" for argument's sake.

Really.

[SarDragon]

These two guys are a rolling micturition competition. 

[Eclipse]

These two guys are a rolling micturition competition. 

Heh - had to look that up...

[RogueLeader]

Does anyone know how the Iowa Wing monthly "drill" idea turned out?  Did it help or hurt?

As far as I know, it fell apart after the last WG/CC situation that caused the state funding was pulled. 

As far as I can tell, it didn't do either to regular meeting attendance, at least in my unit IA-043.  It was the only opportunity to get "approved" ES training.  The only big benefit that I got out of it was some of the networking.  The issue was that it was 4 hr drive to Des Moines from Dubuque.

[RiverAux]

^ Are you looking just to argue?

Bob,

You did see who you were responding to, right? 

One doesn't become the most prolific poster here without "looking to argue" for argument's sake.

Cite please!    

[RogueLeader]

^ http://captalk.net/index.php?action=profile;u=593

[Eclipse]

^ Are you looking just to argue?

Bob,

You did see who you were responding to, right? 

One doesn't become the most prolific poster here without "looking to argue" for argument's sake.

Cite please!    

NICE!