California District Proposal

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by jpetito

In SoCal, the big elephant in here with is is the Volunteer issue. The higher up you go on the event food chain (as far as skill and experience is concerned) the more you see the same faces repeatedly. Judges, Refs, Volunteer Coordinators, FTC's, the like. And these faces are doing ten other things: FLL, VEX, FTC, Academic Decathlon, etc., and some holding down a real job in public education, which has become a seventy hour-a-week thing.

This is at least a three headed issue in most areas, but it can be easy to cut off these two (and they won't grow back, I promise)

Shifting from WTRS to FSS events frees up more people to volunteer. A lot of people who love FIRST but need to work to live or be able to "afford volunteering" can't when they need to take 2-2.5 days off of work.

Shift small jobs to teams and get people to train up where there is interest. I know some positions can seem perpetually understaffed. In some regions, you lose the potential for repeat volunteers when the volunteers themselves are not properly engaged or subjected to volunteer cliques where a potential future KV may be shunned from learning from or training for their role. "But it doesn't happen to me!" It's happened to me and other people I know. It's anecdotal. I'd love to have data on it, but I know it has happened more than once, which is too much for something that is preventable.

Originally Posted by jpetito

Money: Just today our kids and team 294 brought this year's machines to a North/Grumm gig for show and tell, and to thank them for funding us. The bigger geopolitical picture in SoCal shows the firms most in need of the product we produce (technically educated kids), are repeatedly hit up for money by a hundred outstretched hands. Squeezing out more in this environment is becoming harder-- established teams with good organizations will always do well; those reinventing the wheel every year have no history to build on, no institutional memory of how to get funded, and struggle, and become the drop-out percentages. This could be an argument for Going District, but maybe not.

What's your point here? A team's individual ability to raise money does not really directly affected by the regional model or district model. I would say that through smaller events and the ability for iterations, the district model can directly lead to more quantifiable success for teams than the regional model and then indirectly can lead to a better buy in of team cultural and a development of an institutional memory.