Enrich your life! Volunteer

by Valorie Zimmerman

You're busy, I know. You barely have time to do your genealogy work. So why would you take on yet another job?

It's really quite simple. Think about how you want to make the world a better place, and make your life richer and more valuable. Working with partners whom you respect has a lot of value in itself. However, bringing a big project to fruition with those people feels incredible! And there is still time to do genealogy research.

Almost a year ago, two women whom I barely knew - Dorothy Pretare and Marilyn Schunke - and I began meeting to review and improve our society bylaws. Looking back, I see that we were extraordinarily well matched for the work, although we didn't realize that at first. Fortunately they both knew how to start, which was with lots of research. We reached out to our contacts in and out of SKCGS, to get our Articles of Incorporation, all the old SKCGS Bylaws we could find, as well as many other Washington and US societies. We read and re-read, argued, debated, and began to come up with a plan.

We noticed that the bylaws we liked the best were well-organized and simple. By contrast our old Handbook seemed disorganized and complicated. So we began to tease out what we could keep, what we could move to "standing rules" and how we could organize them into something that people might want to read! Then we argued and debated about how best to express the concepts on which we all agreed. We found lots of help in other society's documents as we went along, and also how wise previous SKCGS bylaws writers had often been - once the complications were out of the way.

Marilyn did something really valuable early on, by finding all the Articles of Incorporation filings, and creating a single document with footnotes to make clear where each part fit in. This was fundamental to the rest of our work. The longer we worked together, the more fun we had. In fact now that our work has been adopted by the membership*, we're joking about how we come up with an excuse to continue to get together!

The Special Membership Meeting to consider the Bylaws:

Of course we're not quite done because the new standing rules have not yet been adopted by the SKCGS Board of Directors. But the end is in sight, and it feels really great to have done this service to the Society that we'll enjoy seeing for the next few years.

There is short-term volunteer that's a lot of fun too! Look at these smiling faces this Fourth of July.

Our society can do a lot of things in south King County to further genealogical research and interest in family and local history which after all is what we're all here to do. In fact, if you think of something that SKCGS should be doing that we're not, and you would like to do it, step right up and volunteer! There are jobs that you have the unique skill and interest to do. That's how I got the job of Twitter administrator for our society -- I made it up! Follow us at @skcgs1

* There were Black Diamond Bakery cookies at the Special Meeting!