From my research, it looks like the vast majority of teams are from a school, but I’m curious just how many.
School Based
Community Based
Other
0voters
For instance, Alberta has 17 teams, but only around 4 are community, with two being working together out of a collective space. (Us and 5015). I’m curious how this ratio extends abroad.
I know CD isn’t the most apt at repping the entire community, and this method is flawed because it doesn’t account for multiple students of the same team, but it does give a relative idea.
One thing that I’d note from my time on 299 (also a community team) regarding such teams is that small or poorly organized community teams are much more likely to dissolve than school teams in the same situation; school teams, by and large, tend to have a basic level of support (funds, meeting space, supervision, legal coverage, etc.) that allows them to operate with even a ‘skeleton crew’ of students, if they want to, whereas community teams generally require a much larger investment of time and energy just to stay afloat. While I don’t have the numbers on hand, preliminary analysis showed a similar pattern; community teams tended to either thrive, shut down within a few years, or both – even successful teams can only do so much if they lose their space or legal backing.
I’d be interested in learning more about what your situation looks like up in Alberta; having that high of a community/school team ratio, and that much cooperation between them at that, is quite impressive!
So I’m on one of those teams, 4334, and as stated we share a space with 5015.
The main four teams that I know of that are community is us and SWAT Bots, Intimitrons - 4604, and Phat Cache - 7799.
The reason why we became a community team was simply that one of the founding members switched schools and wanted to continue, and the school allowed us to run more independently, until 2018 where we almost fully separated, and from there accepted a lot more students from across Calgary, with now only about 20% of our team being from the original school.
SWAT Bots joined us in 2019 since their head mentor was very close contacts with our head mentor. They were working out of a basement for years, and when their members started to dwindle they ended up talking to our head mentor and they decided to partner up. It’s worked out great for both teams, them making it all the way to Newton Finals last year.
I can’t say much about how the other community teams work in Alberta, however we do have fair amount of contact between them, with 4604 assisting 7799 their first year according to my knowledge.
Similar scenario for my team, we have a parent school that helps find us grants, but we get about 5 students from that school, and the other 3/4 come either from another school, or are home-schooled. We build out of a church (we are a non-religious group, they just provide us space) about 5 miles from the parent school, and all our insurance comes from 4H.
We started as a school team, with a teacher as mentor; that team invited students from any other schools to join… then over the years we formed a nonprofit, the teachers from that school retired, we stopped working at the school (though we may again the future) - now we meet at a donated space in our local mall; and we have students from 4 schools and none from the original school. Also no mentors from that school at present.
I think we’re now a community team (though we still list the schools that our students attend, in our team info).