In another thread, a poster asked the question: "what's wrong with making people follow the rules?" It was a fair question and a good one on top of it. The problem always comes in the form of context and content. Stay with me here and you will see why and what i mean. So we are really clear, i negotiated and wrote contract language as part of my previous work life. Over the course of that 25 plus years, i dealt with more than my share of attorneys who loved writing ambiguous language where there were multiple interpretations. Call it wiggle room if you need, i called it crap. I wrote language the members i represented could understand. I wrote it simple and vanilla plain. It's like i write here, much like when i speak at a mic. I never want to leave with people saying; what did he say; what did he write? I was taught early on in my work career, good communication comes from those writing or speaking. The task is on the creator, not the receiver. When we bought in Sun City in 1999 and moved here in 2003, i was stunned at how unique and how different the community was from everywhere else we had lived. No city government was the biggest change. Beyond that, all of the individual organizations dotting the landscape, each filling their own need and niche was simply amazing to watch. The closer i looked, the more i loved the concept. I immediately got involved in the community's self-governance. I had acquired some skills running a non-profit organization and i volunteered at a lot of different organizations. One of the things i often tried to help with was communication and marketing. What we often found was there was a vacuum of information provided. Sun City was in a transitional stage; where boomers were replacing the greatest generation of home buyers. Joining organizations wasn't anything like those buying here from 1960-2000. Not worse, not better, just different. Literally every organization asked the same question (and they still do), how do we reach members? How do we reach potential users of our services? There's not a one word answer, but the most effective way we found in Sun City was through word of mouth. Positive remarks were golden; negative ones were a death knell. The other problem we stumbled across that was closely linked to marketing and communication was how little those buying in Sun City knew or understood. Averaging 2000 home sales per year magnified the problems and as those buying here got so little in the way of information, the void grew to a chasm. But wait, it gets worse. By 2009, the RCSC board under the advice of legal counsel and the GM decided our community documents were too member friendly. For the past 40 years they had served us well, but clearly there were those in the community that wanted to destroy us all (so we were told). Odd, we are still hearing that today. Those same documents were written and rewritten to the point they were virtually unreadable. Hell, boards couldn't figure out what they said, they still can't. In conjunction with that, we pushed new home buyers away and told them, move here and just have fun. It's how we got to where we are. I know, i have drifted, but without the context of the importance of rules and more importantly those who are living with and under them, what is the true value of them? Put it in this context: If you are blowing along a freeway, speed limit set at 65, and suddenly a cop pulls you over and tells you the speed limit is now 40, you're first question will be "where was that posted?" If the answer was, it wasn't, you should just know it; you might be inclined to contest the ticket. Rules are important and have their place, they keep us all between the lines. They give us direction and help us understand how to act and behave. What they should never be used as is a gotcha moment. The place where it becomes a game and you become a shill or a rube who gets stuck paying simply because they can and they want the money. Stay tuned as we will return and explore more deeply Sun City organizations and how they function. And more importantly...how they can get better.
Over the years, i have written 5 magazines on Sun City; 2 for SCHOA and 3 for the RCSC. In every one i have tried to summarize how Sun City works. At best, they barely scratched the surface on the unique features that makes Sun City different from all the other age restricted communities out there. We were/are built around a handful of tenets, values if you will. From our earliest moments, members took both responsibility and accountability as part of their ownership obligation. From that they forged a sense of community that lives on today (in spite of the recent best efforts to kill it). It should come as no surprise those same values were found in the dozens of organizations that shaped Sun City. Up and down the lengthy list of service groups, community organizations, churches and clubs, those joining worked their butts off to keep them afloat. It kept them busy, gave purpose to their lives and often was an inexpensive value added commodity within the community. Put another way, it kept Sun City affordable. Watching it being dismantled and labeled the "Fun City" was depressing and disturbing. Worse yet, the RCSC sets the tone for almost every other organization in the community. There's a couple that have stood alone and grown rather than shrinking, but that's really been a function of their boards and how well they pushed rather than settling back into a comfortable place non-profit organizations tend to go to. I can't tell you how many times i have written this, suffice to say, a lot. "The best thing about Sun City is it's a community driven by volunteers. The worst thing about Sun City is it's a community driven by volunteers." We've all heard the adage; you get what you pay for. The net result is at times we do really well, at other times we struggle. There's no value in throwing stones at anyone and my advice has always been the same: If you don't like what an organization or club is doing, put your hand up and fix it." Been there, done that, more times than i care to admit. Some efforts have been wildly successful, some have been abysmal failures. It's the nature of the beast, but more importantly, why it is so important to "grow the circle." It's a term we were taught back in my leadership days where i came to understand any one person who thinks they are the answer, the solution are doomed to failure. Sadly, too many groups think internally rather than externally. They tend to bring back the same board member, year after year. It's way easier than recruiting and training new board members. It's also why they all too often tend to stagnate. Then there's the other problem, non-profits tend to pay well below the market value for the employees they do hire. It's again the nature of the beast. All of which feeds into the discussion regarding rules. In a community like ours, with no city governance, those rules are critical to how the community is run. We've seen in another thread how former board members are touting the importance of following the rules. I would argue and have in fact argued just this: It's even more important that members both know and understand those rules before the RCSC uses them as club to beat members to death with them. The evolution of the RCSC from a member-directed organization to a leadership-driven one was intentional. I understand why it happened, i didn't agree with it. It was one of my worst failures as a board member, our differences in direction were miles apart. The GM was driving the bus and i refused to get on it. There were two of us who were outspoken and out voted. It's how boards work and we accepted the results. Now we are all living with them. The good news is, the past two RCSC elections were wildly successful. There's been a paradigm shift in thinking and members are being asked and invited to participate. They are looking at the rules and measuring them to be more engaging for the membership. That's a really good thing and even better is their capacity to be more open, more blunt and far more transparent. Hopefully that will transition across other Sun City organizations.
