CPC - State of the Club

[Cascade Paragliding Club]

Hello Friends! It was great seeing many of you at the Oceanside Open this year! I thought I’d send out a newsletter and give everyone a heads up to what’s going on with the club.

If you were at the Open you heard me talk about this a little bit, but we need to rethink the club a little bit. We have a great community of pilots here. But right now, we are losing a bit of traction with the club itself. This is a problem, because the club does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of keeping sites open and us able to fly. The club has been around for quite a while and over the years, pilots have put a lot of time and effort and money into making the PNW free flight scene what it is today. Today, there is a lot less participation, and things are being held together by a few volunteers. We owe these folks a big thanks, but we can’t keep taking their efforts for granted. They won’t be able to keep things going forever on their own, and without greater community engagement things are going to start to break down

I can’t blame anyone, because in the past few years, I haven’t been particularly observant of club meetings either. They can be a bit tedious and feel unfruitful. Many of you have stepped up as officers over the last few years, and you understand the difficulties firsthand. It’s extremely rare that any meeting has enough members present to get a quorum on votes, and filling officer roles is tough.

So, over 2025, I really hope that as a community we can come up with some ideas to make participation in the club feel more rewarding. I’ve already heard some great feedback from many of you, but I encourage you to keep thinking about what this might look like and discuss among yourselves. The bottom line is that if meetings aren’t fun to go to, nothing will change.

Here are a few ideas that I’ve heard from people that I’d like to try to implement over the next few months. First, it’d be great to start having quarterly club meetings that are a bit of a bigger deal that hopefully more people could plan on attending. These meetings should offer more than a standard business meeting.

We’d want them to be in person and ideally have food of some kind. We want there to be time to socialize with other pilots. Informal discussion builds community and that’s where good ideas are born.

Another thing we’d like to do is have some kind of presentation. For example, one of us could give a quick refresher on forecasting and share some of the site-specific local wisdom, or we might have a speaker come talk to the club on some flying related topic. Finally, we’d have a short and sweet business meeting. I will send out an agenda well ahead of time, and hopefully people with more complex questions will have a chance to discuss those with me or another officer before the meeting. We need to find a good balance between discussion of club issues and keeping things concise so that we keep everyone engaged. We’ll be making an effort to be pretty strict on time and keeping things from bogging down.

The next meeting is Tuesday May 6^th at 7:30, and it will be online. We haven’t yet figured out a schedule yet, but hopefully the first “big” meeting will be in either June or July.

Hope to see you all in the air soon!

-Seth Tucker