I have seen the title of this thread a dozen or so times now and keep avoiding it but I will weigh in with some preliminary thoughts and comments. These are MY views alone, not the Toymods Boards.
As a general rule I am against anything that further segregates the Toymods Car club.
The forums themselves are a big place with thousands of members from all walks of life and all over the globe. It works for allot of reasons and one of them is that you can be a part of it 24/7, no matter where you live or what you drive. Another part is that I beleive we have a set of forum sections that work and encourage people not to segregate to far into small sub groups and promote interaction. I know my entire social life revolves around the friends I have made though Toymods.
The Toymods Car Club itself is a much smaller entity, we enjoy a membership base of only 86 financial members (thats less than 1% of forum members) and struggle to maintain/renew each years members every year. Every year the Toymods Board is re-elected with little interest from members to become a part of it and those of us who have been on it for a while (Myself in particular) have considerable less free time to dedicate to the club than when we started. We (Toymods) currently has 1 event and 1 cruise each month for which attendance is minimal its not unusual to have an event where board members are the majority or even the only attendee's (There is a very real likely hood this will change next year to only one event or cruise each month due to lack of support)
Your probably wondering how this relates to a Celica sub group. The point is that the existing Toymods infrastructure strugles to cope each year and there is very little new assistance offered by new or existing poeple who have enough drive to make a difference and reduce the load or expand the club. The Classic Celica Cruise this year was one of the few events run by non board members and was a great success, as a result we have planned this as an offical event each year and hopefully it will be as well supported. If there is a clear need or desire for Toymods to host specific events we will always do our utmost to do it.
Rather than promoting a seperate club and segregating the small number of people who actually support whats in place now why not just encourage participation to what we have. If celica owners attended the existing events and cruises in any sort of number wouldn't it be just the same ? Toymods is only what you make of it
I honestly admire your drive Ibz and I have no problem with there being a dedicated Celica Club in Sydney, once apon a time I was going to start one myself but then I met this Luke Sheerman guy who had started this little Toymods group or 20 or so people and it seemed a silly idea to start a new one. For the record tho I don't discourage any clubs existance.
If starting a new Club doesn't pan out for you then I hope you can dedicate some time and effort to enhancing what is already available through Toymods because I would love to see a lot more celicas and there owners at the events we have now. I know you can do it and would make a keen ambassador for such a group if you have the time.
If in time enough Celica owners did show up and support the existing events, and there was a person such as yourself who was willing to committ to organising things and running it then my personal board vote would then support a sub-chapter for Celica owners as long as it could be structured to compliment what we have now. And thats goes for any enthusiasts group within toymods (MR2's, KE Corolla's, mini trucks etc)
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