As president of both the Toronto Gay Sailing Club and the Toronto Gay Ski & Snowboarding Club, I am faced with a yearly decision that all sports leagues member of OUTSPORT TORONTO are faced with:
Why renew your OUTSPORT TORONTO membership?
Granted it's free to become an OUTSPORT TORONTO member organization and also free to renew. So that should be an easy enough decision right?
For me it is. It reminds us every year of why we registered our organizations in the first place.
For the Toronto Gay Sailing Club, it was a matter of local recognition: after being invited to join GLORY - the Gay & Lesbian Organisation for Racing and Yachting 24 hours after our inception, it was important for us to be recognized locally.
But for the Toronto Gay Ski and Snowboarding Club, joining OUTSPORT TORONTO gave our club something more. We didn't need recognition: we have been around for 15 years.
But skiing and snowboarding is frequently seen as an elite sport (which it's not!), so we needed to reach out to the community and we still need to, and continue to.
OUTSPORT TORONTO gives us a platform to communicate with members' organizations and promote our club and activities. It also provides our club members other opportunities in the Toronto LGBTQ sport world: information about other groups activities are funnelled back to our members providing them with more options to be active.Â
When thinking about renewing your OUTSPORT TORONTO membership, write down a note for yourself about what you want OST to help your organization achieve. OST is our umbrella non-profit organization that promotes a healthy living through sport and is dedicated to it's member organizations.
Just speak out and tell OUTSPORT TORONTO what you want them to do for your team/league: I did and now I am writing this blog. Because OST listens to its members - actually, their members are in charge, you just needed a remember of that.
