Not yet a site, but an invite
The Vancouver Artillery Association - Now Recruiting
The first question most ask is - why do we need another Association?
There are three groups set up at the moment that involve retired Gunners, The 15 Fd Museum and Archives Society, the 15 Fd Regimental Society and the Associate membership of the 15 Fd Officers Mess. The Museum and Archives deals with the museum, artefacts and Regimental history, the Mess Associates are mostly retired Officers who have Associate memberships in the Mess but don`t operate as a separate group. The Regimental Society was set up a couple of years ago to act as a Regimental Trust to look after the good and welfare of the Regiment. It has Charitable Status with all the reporting requirements to and oversight by CRA. I had tried to get the latter group to expand its membership to become the local Gunner Association but the board members decided that they wanted to keep membership limited to the basic board of directors and not get into the complications of a general membership with elections etc, so we had to look at other options. We assembled a small group of retired Gunners to discuss the issues and decided to create a new, non-charitable Association. We chose to call the new group ‘the Vancouver Artillery Association’ because we wanted to encompass all Gunners of all ranks in our area. 15 Fd is just the current Artillery unit operating here and we wanted to perpetuate predecessor (and possible future) local Artillery units as well as retired Gunners from other units. We also knew that we would run into problems with the Society branch in Victoria. The Regimental Society had to jump through many hoops to get to use the 15 Fd name, as the Branch thought there was a conflict with the Museum name. Much confusion too, has been created between the different groups operating with the 15 Fd name with correspondence meant for the Society being passed to the Regimental Fund ( A DND fund administered by the Regiment) and vice versa causing delays and many problems for both.
We wrote a Constitution and Bylaws (see attached)then applied for, and were formally incorporated under the BC Society Act. Membership is open to all retired Gunners and friends of the Gunner family. We intend to create two types of membership:
1) Associate Members, who can take part in Association activities but will not be entitled to a vote at meetings. Associate Members will only be members of the Vancouver Artillery Association.
2) Ordinary Members, who take part in Association activities and are entitled to a vote at meetings. Ordinary members will also be members of the Royal Canadian Artillery Association and the 15 Field Museum and Archives Society.
Qualification for both types are identical. You only have to decide if you want to be actively involved in supporting the Aims and Objectives of the Association or not.
We have set the dues for 2012 at $75 for Ordinary and $60 for Associate.
As many of you know, the Museum has a working 25pdr with limber and Field Artillery Tractor. One of the first projects of the Association will be to form and work up a detachment of members, in appropriate dress, to operate the 25pdr for parades, displays, etc, including firing blank ammunition.