State Officers Lines

IS YOUR GRANGE INVOLVED?
by Nettie A. Kauffman, Executive Committee Member

Naturally, I’m hoping every Grange is involved in doing something for their community and their membership. But...as you and I both know, we have Granges in our organization that are just doing the status quo...same thing month after month, year after year!

Don’t you think it is time to start thinking about doing something and becoming involved? This could be for your membership or for someone outside of the Grange organization.

Let’s challenge ourselves to do at least ONE new project or activity for your membership. Then take this one step further and do at least ONE new project or activity for your community.

Are you looking for suggestions? Look no further than with the various departments in our organization as they have so many contests, projects, and activities that can benefit both the membership and community in your Grange area. Take a look at the Family Activities projects for both membership and community involvement. The Youth Department also has projects the membership can participate in. If you don’t have the information, contact Ginny Mangel for Family Activities and Martha Ebersole for the Youth Department. Even our Community Service Director, Lois Steele, could provide you with some projects. I’m sure they will be glad to share this information with you, in fact, each month you can find some of this information in your Advocate under each of their department articles.

How else can your Grange become involved? As I was thinking about this article (and my husband indicates I sometimes think too much), I decided to see how involved the Subordinate and Pomona Granges were with the annual session. I went back into various Journals of Proceedings to search for statistics on the number of delegates who have attended the annual sessions since 1990 (I only did the figures every two years when a general election process took place at the session). It was interesting to see the total number of delegates compared to the number of Subordinate and Pomona’s that could send delegates. Below is a table of these figures (all taken from the Journal of Proceeding minutes and reports unless indicated otherwise).

Year	Number of Subordinate Granges	Number of POSSIBLE Subordinate Delegates	Number Subordinates Represented at Session	Number of Subordinate Delegates Registered	Number of Pomona Granges *	Number of Possible Pomona Delegates	Number of Pomona's Represented at Session	Number of Pomona Delegates Registered
1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2007	507 485 458 430 419 380 360 334 298 280	1014 970 916 860 838 760 720 668 596 560	178 210 184 169 146 125 111 95 110 160	316 387 345 320 293 250 222 197 193 174	54 54 54 54 54 53 52 52 52 52	108 108 108 108 108 106 104 104 104 104	40 40 41 38 38 29* 30 30 34** 27	77 76 77 71 66 58 60 60 61 61

* Figures retrieved from Grange Registers
** No actual breakdown of a credential report was in the Journal of Proceedings.
Figures were retrieved from minutes and other reports.

Just where am I going with all these figures? For one, it’s not hard to see that we do not have ALL Granges involved at our annual session! It would be great if you could have your Grange involved in the 2008 annual session. HOW? Send delegates from your Grange to help set policy for the membership of Pennsylvania. Not only does your representation benefit the membership with your involvement, it also benefits the community when decisions are made on resolutions which are presented.

The statistics from the December, 2007 membership report to National Grange shows a total number of 278 Subordinate Granges in the state. There are currently 52 Pomona Granges in the state. These two figures add up to 330 Granges that can be represented at the session. According to the By-Laws of the Pennsylvania State Grange, each Subordinate and Pomona is entitled to at least two delegates, with the possibility of 660 delegates setting policy for the membership and community. It would be great to see your Grange involved with delegates at the annual session in October, 2008.