Easy-Peasy. Piece of cake. A doddle. Child’s play. Like stealing candy from a baby. As easy as pie …
It’s the sort of descriptors that bowling clubs are using to describe the process they’ve been through to renew the constitution of their incorporated societies.
And that’s quite different to what many of use feared would be the case.
Having said that, most of the 500 bowling clubs and lawn bowls centres have yet to register their new constitutions … perhaps anticipating trouble. But the news is good.
For the few that have done the business, they’ve found it easy. Surprisingly so. And the tools and templates provided by Bowls New Zealand have been a big help in smoothing the way.
“I’d started off creating a constitution from scratch,” says Marty Braithwaite, Secretary of the Tai Tapu Bowling Club. “But after going to the Mark Cameron and Martin Mackenzie Roadshow, I was persuaded to instead use the Bowls New Zealand template, and all the other paperwork they provided.
“It made the job a breeze.”
Marty didn’t even bother to compare notes with the existing constitution. “I found the last one registered was dated 1986,” he laughs. “So it was miles from the way we operated now. It included being a men-only club!”
Marty ended up giving the committee 5 pages of explanatory notes with a new draft constitution he’d created. “They took 5 minutes to approve it and The SGM for all members didn’t take much longer. And once the Incorporated Societies people received it on-line, they took even less.”
“I think I had a Certificate of Incorporation back in my hands before I even had time to log out the computer!”
Janet Olliver of Waitarere Beach Bowling Club had a similar experience.
“I wanted to get the job done by our AGM,” says Janet. “So it didn’t hang around into the next year. I worked on the assumption that Bowls New Zealand knew what they were doing. So went about amending the template.”
“There was surprisingly little to do. I think we added a few more into the committee .. we wanted to include the Club Captain, the Women’s Match Convenor and the Men’s Match Convenor .. and tidied up a few other things.”
“We then notified members of an SGM to approve the new constitution, and sent them the draft at the same time, asking them to come back with any changes prior to the AGM. There was absolute silence!”
There was also absolute silence at the SGM, so Janet went ahead with the on-line registration process.
“The Companies Office only took 2 minutes to come back with their approval. Goodness knows how they could do it in that time!”
“I initially had a few misgivings that the whole process might have been a bit hasty … but I soon realised that if found we’d missed something, we could simply make an amendment anytime in the future.”
86 year-old Bruce Gover from Maungatapere Bowling Club in Northland had a similar story to Marty.
“Our current constitution was only 3 or 4 pages, so when Mark and Martin presented us with a 28-page version at the Road Show, it was another cup of tea.”
“But after reading it, and calling Martin Mackenzie a few times, I realised that the new constitution was rightly detailing things that were missing from our original version. Despite the detail, it was easy to change, and we only ended adding in a couple of things.”
“The Special General Meeting took only 10 minutes.”
Bruce has posted off the paperwork to the Companies Office and is waiting their approval. “I’m too old to grapple with the challenges of ‘RealMe’ and ‘authentications’”
“They’ve come back to me with some minor technicalities, but fingers crossed, all will be good.”