TigerOars - Balmain Rowing Club

Page 8
BRC’S COMMUNITY HALL
My first contact with
Balmain Rowing Club
long before I started
rowing was through a
friend hiring the hall for
a family party and telling
me how impressed she’d
been with the club
members she’d met.
Not the venue or the
view, but the members.
If I’m asked now about
hall hire I think this
remains my strongest
impression: renting out
our hall gives us the
chance to connect with
our community.
The hall is a great asset
to the community because
of its location and
because halls like ours
are becoming a rarity.
We rent it out for parties,
weddings, wakes
and christenings so we
get to meet people – and
they meet us – at an important
and memorable
time in their lives, and
my experience has been
overwhelmingly they go
away with a very positive
impression of the
club and its members.
Lovely as they are, our
club can’t survive on
warm fuzzies alone, so
now for some numbers.
Hall hire generates almost
half BRC’s annual
running costs, meaning
that every dollar you pay
in membership is
matched by a dollar generated
by hall hire.
It sounds almost magical;
you come down to
row one morning and
the hall’s been transformed
with swathes of
material or fairy lights
for someone’s special
event, and equally
magically, money
appears in the bank
account.
The reality is not quite
like that.
Like many things at BRC
there’s a huge amount of
team work going on
behind the scenes.
I want to take this
opportunity to highlight
the essential roles
played by:
Joe Grech who streamlined
the system to make
it as simple as possible;
Felix, Chris and David
who keep the hall clean
and things working for
our discerning guests;
Ian who makes the web
site work;
June our ‘calendar girl’;
and
Anne who handles the
money in her usual unflappable
way and picks
up problems before they
happen.
Beyond this group, all of
TigerOars
us at BRC are to some
extent involved in hall
hire. Everyone who contributed
to the major
clean up and repairs
done before Christmas is
responsible for helping
present the hall as a
good location for prospective
hirers.
Once they’ve decided to
hire the hall, people are
often anxious about leaving
everything set up,
knowing that rowers
will be walking through
the hall before their
event. I’ve always felt
quite confident in assuring
them our rowers
won’t touch anything, so
for that I want to thank
all of you.
The bottom line is that
hall hire is a team effort:
we at BRC need hall hire
to continue so we can go
on doing what we enjoy.
Inevitably there are occasional
glitches and it
takes team work and
flexibility, but it is well
worth while. Polly Pickles