What I am doing - my resolve:

All of the history, (the arbitrary requirements for "membership", the Non-Member Surcharge, the differential pricing at the door, etc.) acts against the idea that we are all working together to build the shared reality that many call "the Dream." If a person has contributed enough to deserve and Award of Arms, then they have contributed to the SCA, probably far beyond any monetary contribution they might have made to the SCA, Inc. Whether they are a "member" of a 21st C. corporation becomes, at that point, irrelevant.

[[The volunteer labor which is given to the SCA could possibly be valued in dollars, but if it were we could not afford the SCA. (Try to calculate the number of volunteer hours donated in your Kingdom alone - don't forget to include the dance teachers and the herald's research meetings and the hours that the Exchequer donates to balance the Kingdom accounts. Don't forget the hours spent at the local level by the Marshall, the Seneschal, the Herald, the Exchequer, etc., for each branch. Multiply these by the minimum wage of $5.75 (grossly under-valued). Now multiply this by 17, allowing for the different sizes of Kingdoms. It's a lot of money -- millions of dollars.)]]

Since A.S. IV, I have been speaking out against the twin thrusts of increasing arbitrary "membership" requirements and the idea that somehow "non-members" were not contributing to the SCA. The divisiveness that such statements engender is foreign to my idea of the cooperative nature of the SCA as it actually operates. The news of the actions of the Board at the June, 2001 meeting caused me such personal pain that I wrote a song about the matter. It may be accessed here. The song addresses other concerns about how the SCA is evolving, but its primary cause was the new NMS. That was not enough for me, however. I had to think of a way to remove the causes of the problems. The proposal I put forth is my effort in that direction.

(Onward to What the Proposal is intended to do.)

(Back to the Table of Contents.)

(updated 2 December, 2002)