[cbale2000]

This topic is something team 703 has been dealing with for a few years now, but our problems are a bit different from most of the others I'm seeing posted here...

Our team has maintained its core leadership and a good working relationship with our school, but over the past few years we've slowly been loosing support mentors and experienced students, shifting more responsibilities to the few mentors and students that are left to the point that many are on the verge of burn-out (myself included). This year it's gotten the point where we have had serious discussions about what to do going forward; whether we should fold the team or if there are things we can do to avoid it.

Our situation is somewhat unique as our team is not based out of a traditional high school, but instead a part-time technical high school for 11th and 12th grade students to attend half day. As a result, we recruit students to the team from a variety of schools in the area (including 9th and 10th graders), but we have no native student population to recruit from and very little school loyalty to work with. The problem has been made even worse by the expansion of new FIRST teams in our areas, as many of the surrounding schools we used to pull students from now have their own teams.

On the mentor side of things, we benefited for many years from the help of mentors from our sole financial sponsor. Over the past few years, however, we've seen many of these mentors leave the program and we have not been able to fill their roles. I personally suspect this is due to a lack of interaction with our sponsor over the years. Essentially they had always just given us whatever financial support we needed so we never really looked for any additional sponsorship or did very much to maintain our relationship with our existing sponsor (and consequently, we have no one on the team with any experience in soliciting sponsors). This year we found out that our sponsor will be cutting our budget in half in 2017 due to them starting to fund additional teams in our area. The classic case of getting burned because we put "all of our eggs in one basket".


So essentially, if our team folds, it will be because of some combination of three things: lack of students, lack of support mentors, and/or lack of money.