After twenty years of arguing about one dollar

We spent years discussing the amount and almost no time discussing the expectation.

One of the things that fascinated me during my time on the AMBA board was how difficult it was to have conversations about money.

Not because people didn't understand that the organisation needed funding. Everyone understood that. The challenge was that people often wanted the outcomes without wanting the mechanisms that made those outcomes possible.

For almost twenty years, motions to increase affiliation fees appeared at convention. Usually the proposed increase was tiny. Often a dollar per family. They failed repeatedly, despite ongoing conversations about sustainability, volunteer workload and the growing expectations being placed on the national organisation.

Then COVID happened.

After years of conversations about sustainability, affiliation fees eventually increased by twenty dollars per family.

Twenty.

After twenty years of arguing about one dollar.

Which raised an uncomfortable question for me. If one dollar had been impossible for twenty years, what had really been happening?

The longer I spent in volunteer organisations, the more I realised these conversations were rarely about money itself. Most people understood that AMBA needed income. They understood that advocacy, communications, insurance, member support and administration all cost money. They also wanted the organisation to do more. More visibility. More support for families. More resources. More advocacy. Better systems. More presence at government tables. None of those expectations were unreasonable. In many cases, I shared them.

What became increasingly difficult, however, was reconciling those expectations with the organisation's capacity to deliver them. Volunteer organisations can continue functioning for a remarkably long time because good people continue stepping up. Somebody answers the email; somebody writes the submission; somebody takes on another project; somebody stays up until midnight preparing papers for a meeting. The work gets done, which creates the impression that the organisation is coping, even when the people doing the work are becoming increasingly stretched.

I found myself sitting in strategic discussions wondering who exactly was going to deliver the growing list of things we wanted the organisation to achieve. The ideas were usually good ones. The problem was that there always seemed to be more ideas than time, more expectations than capacity and more work than people.

Convention provides a good example of how these tensions played out. Historically, the Convention Planning Committee was responsible for raising sponsorship to cover the costs associated with the event, including director attendance. That meant finding sponsors to cover venue costs, meals, supplies, entertainment and everything else required to run a successful convention. Other attendees paid registration fees, which gave the organising committee some financial breathing room.

Over time, the idea began to emerge that directors should not rely on convention organisers raising sponsorship in order to attend. I agreed with this. Directors attending convention was not simply a personal benefit. It was an important part of governance, relationship building and understanding the experiences of member clubs. During my time as Chair, the board made the decision to fund director registration costs directly. Of course, that funding came from the organisation itself, and the organisation's primary source of income was affiliation fees.

The irony was difficult to ignore. We wanted directors to be visible and engaged. We wanted strong governance. We wanted continuity and leadership. Yet conversations about the income required to support those things often remained uncomfortable.

The same tensions surfaced elsewhere. Questions about the value of affiliation fees arose periodically, particularly from larger clubs. One Brisbane club eventually de-affiliated after concerns were raised with members about the value being received from AMBA. At the same time, there remained expectations around advocacy, representation, support and national coordination. These discussions were rarely straightforward because people were not simply debating money. They were debating value, expectations, responsibility and what they believed the national organisation existed to do.

For me, this is why funding conversations in volunteer organisations can become so difficult. Money is often treated as though it sits outside the mission, when in reality it determines what the mission can realistically achieve. Better systems require investment, advocacy requires time, research requires expertise, support services require people. Partnerships, communications and growth all require resources of some kind. None of this diminishes the extraordinary contribution of volunteers. In many ways, it highlights just how much they have been carrying. AMBA achieved an enormous amount through volunteer effort, goodwill and commitment. But goodwill can also mask problems. It can delay difficult conversations because the organisation continues functioning, even when the people sustaining it are becoming increasingly exhausted.

I don't think the affiliation debates were really about one dollar, or even twenty dollars. They reflected something much larger: an organisation trying to balance growing expectations with limited resources while remaining true to its purpose. COVID perhaps made some of those tensions impossible to ignore, but they had existed for many years.

Passion and purpose built AMBA and volunteers sustained it. The more time I spent in the sector, however, the more I came to believe that funding is not separate from the mission. It is one of the things that determines whether an organisation can continue delivering on that mission at all.

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This article reflects on experiences from my time on the AMBA Board between 2014 and 2021. While the examples are drawn from that period, the observations continue to influence how I think about governance, sustainability and organisational capacity today.