Membership Life

Membership has been a passion of mine for 56 years which means I was a very early starter. At the age of ten I recall that I took a very active interest in my late father's application to join what was then the British Institute of Management - now the Chartered Management Institute. He was already a member of a number of engineering professional bodies having earned his precious Chartered Engineer status through the five year apprenticeship/HND route. I had a discussion with him about his application and what he hoped to get out of his membership. From that moment on I was hooked on the subject of all things membership. In my working life I have joined a very large number of Institutes and Associations. I have also sat on a number of committees as a volunteer and then from 2002 worked in full time roles running Trade Associations. Along the way I have amassed a very large (far too large for the available space) collection of books charting the history of membership organisations together with a lot of printed ephemera - certificates, rule books, journals etc etc. An ambition remains to set up he Museum of Membership if I can find a big enough space to house it. I strongly believe that membership can solve a large number of the Worlds problems and to that end invented the concept/practice of membership engineering. I decided to write a newsletter as a first step towards the book that has been in my head for far too long. I plan to write on the widest possible range of membership subjects and hope to attract the interest of fellow membership 'nerds' as my wife would say - professionals as I would call you.