The Lifetime Membership Dues Amendment Contradiction

Sometimes I feel like I might be getting too cutesy with the titles of my blog posts, so I decided to stick with something that’s more to the point.  But now that I’m reviewing this particular one, it reads like a title of a Big Bang Theory episode.  Anyway, this is a follow-up post to the one entitled Back to the Future:  About 2008 and Membership Dues.  If you haven’t read it yet, stop right now and do not continue reading until you’ve read it.  This one will make no sense unless you’ve got the background down pat first.  Re-reading it is probably not a bad idea either.

Now that THAT’S out of the way – you did read it, right?  Where I said that the National Board did NOT have the authority to raise membership dues from $15 to $25 in Jan of 2016?  Let’s fast forward to 2017, where a proposal to amend the lifetime membership dues amount has been presented for the upcoming 2017 National Council Session.  You can download a copy of all of the proposals here:  Early Alert 2017  The proposal in question starts on pg. 16.

I’m not going to walk through it here, because it’s pretty straight forward.  Basically the National Board is asking for the Credentials section in the Blue Book of Basic Documents be modified so that lifetime membership dues have a less expensive price tag.  Right now it’s set at 25 times the amount of yearly membership dues (did I mention the National Board did not have the authority to raise them in 2016?), and $625 would be crazy expensive.

In and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with this proposal in my opinion, but the National Board contradicts itself when you look at what it’s doing here versus what it did when it voted to raise membership dues all by its lonesome in January of 2016.

Just to review, only the National Council is authorized to modify the Credentials section, not the National Board.  The first mention of the lifetime membership dues amount is in the Credentials/Membership Requirements section on pg. 25 in the latest April edition of the Blue Book.  It seems to be updated every few months now, but I digress.  It’s stated again along with the regular membership dues amounts in the Credentials/Membership Dues and Procedures for Registration section on pg. 26.

The National Board claimed they had the authority to raise membership dues at some point.  They didn’t, but just for argument’s sake, let’s go with that train of thought.  If that’s the case, here are my questions for the National Board – if you’ve got the ability to raise membership dues and even create a whole new level of them, then why ask for the National Council to vote on amending the lifetime membership dues?  What’s the difference between yearly and lifetime dues other than the amount when it comes to governance?  If you can change one, then shouldn’t you be able to modify the other without a vote?  Why are you asking for a vote now?

Let’s look at this another way!

Does this make sense or seem strange to you?  No one ever contacted me with proof showing that the National Board had the authorization to modify the Credentials section after my last post.  It seems like it’s all a word of mouth thing wherein people mistakenly think the National Board was given this power by the National Council at some point in time.  Or even worse, they believe the false notion that the National Board actually has the same powers as the National Council and can act on behalf of it.  I’ve asked multiple times in multiple GS forums, and nobody can even settle on a year as to when this happened.  2008?  2011?  2014?  Nobody knows, and they are just assuming what they vaguely remember or what they’ve heard others talk about and aren’t going straight to the source – which is the Blue Book.  This sets a dangerous precedent if this is the case.  A VERY dangerous one.

So – what to do now?  I’m not a national delegate for my council, so I obviously do not have the ability to have any input during the session.  But, if you ARE a delegate and you see my point and it also strikes you as odd, please ask these questions, and ask them often.  You owe it to not just your council, but to all of us.  Please do not just sit there whether it’s during the session or local meetings with your fellow council delegates.  And if you ask and don’t understand the answer, don’t be afraid of asking for clarification for fear of looking stupid.  Silence means consent.  People count on others keeping their mouth shut in order to push through what they want.  Guess what?  They get away with it every single time that happens.  And let’s be honest – we don’t like confrontation, and we don’t want to be seen as a possible troublemaker.  But we’re being pretty hypocritical if we as volunteers talk to our girls about standing up for what they believe in and being a leader, but then we turn and tuck tail just because we’re afraid of asking an uncomfortable question for fear of whatever that might be.

The right and correct thing to do would be to invalidate the previous membership dues increase by the National Board in 2016 and put that raise to a vote by the Council.  I don’t know the procedure on how that could be accomplished.  If that could happen, the record would be set straight, and we could get back on the right governance path.  But if the previously unauthorized actions of the National Board, whether intentional or not, are ignored and this proposal is a way to smooth over or cover up past transgressions so that everybody smiles and nods their heads and forgets the bad thing happened, then we are setting ourselves up for a governance disaster down the road that we might not recover from.  Ever.

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” — Alice Walker

Next:  But What If There’s an Emergency?

Addendum 7/7/17:  Just to reiterate as I did previously, the issue is NOT how much the membership dues are.  The cost has absolutely nothing to do with the issue I am raising.  It doesn’t matter if the dues were raised 1⊄ or one million dollars – it was an unauthorized modification to the Credentials section of the Blue Book.