September 5th, 2007 by Ascelyn
What follows is bits and pieces of a (very long) email I wrote to our seneschal last night, along with my various interspersed comments, regarding starting a canton in my home area. It might not flow perfectly, but you’ll get the picture.
I live about two hours from most of the baronial meetings, practices, etc., which makes it difficult to do much other than a few select workshops or important meetings. My day pretty much has to be planned around going down due to the driving time, and the gas money adds up pretty quickly. The cost of fuel alone to get to a meeting is more than the gate fees and feast combined for most events I attend. There are a total of four other adult SCAdians up my way, as well as a good number of people who are either interested in the SCA but can’t put the time and money into the long drives for meetings, or would be interested if we could get out the word.
I think Their Excellencies really want a canton going up here for some reason. Anjuli has wanted to get one started, as well. I thought it was just kind of a given that, if we were to have any kind of an geographically all-inclusive local group (not just a “me and my friends want to play, so we’re kind of a loose sort of group” household), it was going to be a canton. When Adriana asked me why we wanted to have a canton and not just hold local get-togethers and practices informally, I was kind of floored. I’d never really thought about it.
Previously, I had put a good bit of time and planning into how it could be accomplished, but never why it should be done in the first place. In all honesty, I didn’t care overly much whether there was a canton or not, so long as there was a local group of SCAdians. If that group existed outside the bounds of any “official” organizational level, then so be it. I greatly enjoy being part of the barony, and I really like the people in Hagerstown and Frederick, just not the drive. I’m willing to come down occasionally, just not on an almost weekly basis (plus events!). I have no desire to “break off” and give up the responsibility I have toward the barony itself. I know I don’t do much right now, but I’d like to. So far it’s only been circumstances that have prohibited most of what I can think of doing–HRM taking place while I was out of the country, meetings falling on Thursdays when I already have obligations, etc. I’m very grateful that any canton that might be started up here would still be within the bounds of the barony, not a separate group entirely.
Like I said before, to start with it didn’t matter too much to me whether there was an official canton or not, just so there was a group. I’d really like to get an active group growing here, regardless of whether or not we have a future canton. Right now I know five people (a family and a single woman about my age) who are very interested, but simply can’t come to things in Frederick all the time because of the time invested in the driving alone. I took the Chatelaine 101 class at Coronation to try to get some ideas of ways to attract and help out new people without having to solely rely on barony members two hours away from them. I’ve started putting together a loaner garb/feast gear box, and I have some information packets to give people, as well as a lot of ideas on ways to help people learn about the Society and find their way into it. I think newcomers is really where having a canton could help.
I think it’s really important to have an organized group to plug newcomers into when they discover the SCA, and I know it’s important for them not to have to drive too far to be in that group, especially with today’s busy schedules. (I’ll probably say “I think” a lot here, since there’s not much I know for sure, only what I’ve learned from other people and from my own experience. I hope people will correct me if I’m too far off, or if I’m missing things.) I think having a formal canton will make it much easier to have that necessary organization. If I were just hearing about the SCA, I wouldn’t think much more about doing so if the local group I could find was disorganized and hard to contact. Personally, I would’ve been involved much sooner if I could even have found someone to answer my emails when I first found that I’d be moving back to the Cumberland area. I emailed several times and waited a total of over a year before finally emailing the baronial chatelaine, who forwarded my message on and helped me out greatly. After emailing back and forth for a while and driving down to Hagerstown for a newcomer’s meeting, I was hooked. If I weren’t foolishly stubborn at times, though, I probably would have taken the lack of any response to my first few emails as meaning the group was defunct or not interested in me and moved on. I understand now what caused the confusion and don’t have any regrets over it, but it’s been statistically shown that most people aren’t going to bother. (It was even mentioned in the chatelaine class, so maybe I learned something good after all!)
If it’s important to show an organized front to interested people, then it’s just as important to be able to efficiently organize things to do with them and with each other. Yes, we can have workshops and practices and meetings without being a canton, but I think it would help streamline things and make coordinating these efforts much easier. It would also be easier to help the newer people get plugged into activities if we can say, “This person does this and if you want this, this person holds that office.” It’s all of our jobs to help people, and we should be willing to take on the responsibility regardless of officies or titles, but having those in place makes it that much simpler.
I fought with myself for the last few days over whether or not we should need or have things like offices and specific duties. After all, if those of us in Allegany/Garrett counties (right now only Allegany, I think?) aren’t willing or able to take on the responsiblities without having those titles, are we really in the right mindset to be holding an office? Should it be willingness to serve first with the duty to serve second, or duty alone leading to serving? I was trying to explain my problem with this to Jason when he pointed out that, philosophy aside, it’s really whatever gets the service done the most efficiently. In the end, I think he’s right. If you’re willing enough to take the job, then just make sure you get it done well. I still think that those of us here should be willing to take on the responsibilities necessary even if no canton forms in the next thirty years, but having that structure in place would make things much nicer. Granted, I haven’t held any kind of an “officer” position since partway through college, and certainly not on the level of the SCA, so maybe I don’t have any clue what I’m talking about here. It’s just the way I think of things with my limited view.
The third reason I think a canton would be useful is the financial side of things. Especially as a group that will have mostly very new members as it grows, we will need a decent Gold Key collection and will need to be able to provide some local activities to get people started. Without a canton, preexisting members (right now, I think it’s just Anjuli, Ras, Honora, my brother who’s away at college during the week, and myself) would need to pitch in and donate what materials they can find out of pocket. While this would be necessary to some extent anyway, and I would certainly be willing to do what I could, I think the potential scope of newcomers that we might have coming in would put a strain on what people could contribute. Though I very well might be wrong, as part of a non-profit group we would be able to do some fundraisers, even as minor as holding a bake sale in front of the local market, to raise money for canton activities and belongings.
So in the end, I think it all comes down to organization and being able to help the future members of a local group (canton or otherwise) get started. It certainly doesn’t hurt that we would have a “real” local group to belong to, not just a loose collection of people belonging to a group that’s mostly several hours away. I’m pretty set on trying to get together some kind of group out here, even if it’s not a canton, so long as the barony doesn’t expressly forbid it. I like to have things organized and at least loosely structured, though, even if it is an informal group. I believe it will make it easier to attract and maintain new members if there is a canton here, while still supporting and being supported by the barony as a whole.
Discussing why other people think we should form a canton–since I was originally somewhat under the assumption that to form a local group, that’s just what we were supposed to and expected to do–and how we should go about doing that, as well as what we should do with it once we’re on our way, is the main purpose of the first meeting/get-together I hope to have. Maybe other people think very differently. Maybe I’m very wrong. At least I’m trying, though, and I’m willing to learn. That’s got to count for something in the end, even if it’s not much