The Board needs YOU!

SCA Ltd (Australia) Posted on by

If you’re an Australian SCAdian and have some time spare, we could use your help!

The workload of the board of SCA Ltd (the governing body of the SCA in Australia) never stops, as we try to keep abreast of changing legislation across 8 jurisdictions, making sure the SCA isn’t in breach of any laws, ensuring the insurance keeps flowing, adjusting and moderating SCA Inc (America) decisions, completing bureaucratic requirements, administering membership funds and trying to find time to work to improve your SCA experience.

We are only a small band of people, who also have mundane jobs and would love the chance to have some spare time to make it to SCA events after we’ve finished our duties to SCA Ltd. That’s where you come in – we know the membership of the SCA in Australia is a multi-talented group of people with interesting skills in their mundane lives. We’ve often heard the refrain, that people would like to be helpful, but couldn’t possibly commit to the very high workload and 3 year term of a board member. Well here is your chance to make a vital contribution while doing only a smaller workload or a short term commitment.

We are looking for people who we can call upon who have skills that may be useful in our work to register their names on a list of ‘useful people’ who we may call upon when a particular speciality is needed.

We are especially currently looking for the following help:

  • Researchers – we often want to know background information about something, for example the definition of a term or how other groups are managing a certain area. There are people in the society who are skilled at finding out information on the Internet quickly and easily.
  • Legislation Experts – trawling through laws to work out which bits are relevant to SCA Ltd is a tricky job (especially with so many states), but some people are good at it. We’d love to have some people who can read a piece of legislation and summarise which bits we need to know about or read ourselves.
  • Policy Writers – some people are very good at turning ideas into a nice watertight well expressed policy with few loopholes. We are looking for people who can take our notes on policy content and turn them into a draft policy for the board to debate and approve.
  • General Writers – we need people who can explaining things well, to help write guides and such material for the membership. We’ll explain everything to you, but your writing will be even clearer than our words as you ask questions to make sure you understand and the audience will too.
  • anything else you think might be useful to us – lawyers, financial specialists, proofreaders, minute takers, the list is endless …

If you have a skill that you believe may be of use to us, please write to the Chair and tell us about your skill and what kind of availability you have (e.g. can you spare a couple of hours regularly over a long time, or would you prefer a higher intensity job over a shorter timeline?).

Chair Update: June 2013

SCA Ltd (Australia) Posted on by

June 2013 letter to Pegasus from the Chair of SCA Ltd.

I never expected my term as Chair of SCA Ltd to begin so busily, but here I am, and you’ll find this and the last issue of Pegasus packed full of signs of our work, both those we are proud of accomplishing, and those decisions we greatly regret having to make.

Talking of regret, I regret to announce that at the request of the group, SCA Ltd voted to close the shire of Boesenberg on Monday 6 May. It always saddens us to be the ones who formalise decisions like this, but the cycle of life goes on and we are gladdened to announce a new proposed canton of Oxington Chase under the sponsorship of the Barony of Mordenvale. We hope this new group based around Port Macquarie will prosper and flourish into a full group.

I probably should also take this chance to talk about what SCA Ltd actually does. SCA Ltd is the legal entity for the SCA in Australia, it’s the equivalent of SCANZ in New Zealand, and takes on many of the roles SCA Inc does in North America. We are the people who make sure the SCA in Australia complies with mundane legislation so that we don’t get in trouble, occasionally we intercede with mundane authorities to negotiate a more favourable outcome for the organisation and mostly we create policies to ensure that we won’t get in trouble with the law. This includes difficult areas such as child protection, weapons legislation, and bullying and harassment. We also monitor SCA Inc policies for their compliance with Australian law.

SCA Ltd is structured as a non-profit company, with each SCA branch in Australia as a sub-branch of the company. This makes us the body that gets in trouble if contracts, grants, leases and such agreements are not made properly. It also means we are responsible for financial legislation such as GST, income tax, maintaining our non-profit status, and generally overseeing the finances of the SCA in Australia. We are responsible for approving the formation and closure of new groups as we become legally liable for them. We are responsible for administering your memberships, making sure there is insurance cover and even this newsletter. Of course we do this with the vast majority of the work being done by wonderful people like our Pegasus editor and registrar.

Basically, SCA Ltd does all the messy bureaucratic mundane things that let us continue to do medieval recreation. And with that, I’ll leave you to read about what else we have been doing this year and last.

Regards

Baroness Teffania de Tuckerton (Tiffany Brown)
Chair, SCA Ltd

2012/13 Annual Report

SCA Ltd (Australia) Posted on by

On March 29, at Rowany Festival, the annual report of SCA Ltd was given for the period since the previous Rowany festival. An expanded summary is presented here.

2012 was a very busy year for the Board. We had a record number of Board meetings to deal with the sheer volume of urgent business.

We saw a large number of changes in the board membership, with Board stalwarts Andrew Ross-Gowan departing at the start of the year, Tina Bean in the middle and Glynnis Hollindale retiring at the end of the year, all 3 after serving more than their terms and long stretches in executive positions. Matt Dolton retired during the year, and the end of the meeting sees retirement of Steven Baker as a board member as well as chair. New members were welcomed onto the board during the year: Jeff Nicholson, Louise Hollingbery, Kylie Maynard, Laurence Cooke and Margaret Sleigh. It’s been a time of rapid learning for these new members.

Finances were a key aspect of the year, with the unfortunate need to start paying GST. Treasurer Glynnis worked very hard to make this work as smoothly as could be expected for such a disruptive event. She also introduced a long and detailed finance policy during the year – we are not sure where she found the time. Membership fees were increased to offset the cost of rising prices including GST, insurance, and tax compliance. SCA Ltd moderated the influence of GST by covering the costs of GST for the first quarter and for already advertised events until policies and advice could be firmly established.

This year was also a bad year for compliance with the unfortunate need to introduce event memberships. The board spent considerable effort trying to find sustainable alternatives to introducing this levy and then creating guidance material on best implementation methods. New indemnities was introduced to accommodate the new insurance policy, and also to enable simplification of indemnities, reducing the the amount of paperwork to be signed.

A large amount of policy creation was completed with new policies created including; Policy on Proof of Membership and Indemnity, Financial Policy, Board Membership Policy, Bullying and Harassment policy created as well as numerous existing policies being updated. A new affiliation agreement with SCANZ was also completed.

A new and improved Board Registry Webpage was introduced thanks to the hard work of Jeremy Gregson and many others, while the main SCA Ltd website was kept up to date by Steven Maynard.

Many projects begun in 2012 are still under way, nearing completion – updated policies on  alcohol, privacy, definition of dependants and a code of conduct as well as negotiation regarding Victorian weapons legislation. Two subcommittees were established, one to investigate the impact of weapons legislation nationally and in each state on SCA, and a Social Media Sub-committee formed with SCANZ and Seneschalate to look at social media policy for the Kingdom. These foundations will show in a strong output by the board in 2013.