Calling all U.S. orienteers!

The OUSA Strategic Planning Committee seeks your input as we conduct long-range planning to inform how OUSA focuses its efforts and distributes its resources.  Whether you are an OUSA member, a local orienteering club member, or an occasional orienteer, we want your thoughts.

Please fill out the general survey at: https://forms.gle/6ezRaB9JxcmVsF9p6.  It should take 20-30 minutes to complete.

We also have more detailed questionnaires for some topics based on information from the last in-depth survey of orienteers in 2010.  We would like to validate priorities identified at that time, as well as identify new goals and individuals interested in working towards their achievement.  Depending on how much you have to share with us, each survey should take about 15 minutes to complete.  There’s no need to complete them all, but please fill out those that interest you.

Our recommendations will inform not only OUSA fiscal policy and organizational focus, but also identify achievable goals based on the passions, skills, and resources of our membership.  

We appreciate your time and thoughtful input.  Thank you for all you do for orienteering!

Sincerely,
OUSA’s Strategic Planning Committee
Chair: Clare Durand
Members: Tori Campbell, Gregory Fasig, Joseph Huberman, Ian Smith, Ellen Stefaniak

The 2019 OUSA Annual General Meeting will be held on Saturday, Sept. 7, at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California, south of San Francisco. The AGM is being held in conjunction with the U.S. Nationals hosted by the Bay Area Orienteering Club.  The meeting will begin at 4:00 p.m., and club delegate check-in will start at 3:00 p.m at the Cabrillo College Cafeteria. More details on exact location on campus will be added when available.

At that meeting, there will be voting for four openings on the OUSA Board of Directors, replacing current board members whose terms are ending this year:  Kris Beecroft, Alex Jospe, Pat Meehan, and Barbara Bryant..

Currently there are four candidates, but more may arise prior to the end of August.  Also, candidates can be nominated from the floor at the AGM (with approval of the nominee). Short resumes from the four current candidates follow (updated Aug 17 to add Jon Torrance):

Victoria (Tori) Campbell

Currently a member of NEOC, UNO and COC
www.linkedin.com/m/vjhcampbell/

I am running for a position on the OUSA Board of Directors because I love orienteering and want to help more people to enjoy it. My first orienteering adventure was in 1996, and I’ve been orienteering regularly since 2001. Over the years my husband, Jon, and I have been members of COC, CSU, NEOC, QOC, and USMAOC, and visited many other clubs through our travels. I’ve learned to appreciate how clubs can share the same love of orienteering, but have unique environments and needs. I welcome the challenge of developing solutions that move orienteering forward while providing flexibility across our diverse membership.

I believe I will be effective as a Board member because I have extensive long- and short-term planning experience from 20+ years as an Army officer. I enjoy making sense of information, developing plans to meet an objective, and collaborating with others. I see my candidacy as focused more on supporting effective processes than trying to achieve any particular personal goal, because I recognize that OUSA is volunteer-led and significant advances are only possible when a core group is willing to pour their passion into making something happen.  Regardless of whether an idea is one I am personally passionate about, if “movers and shakers” want to advance an idea aligned with OUSA’s strategic plan, I want to support their efforts and see what we can accomplish.

Besides collaboration and teamwork at the organizational level, my interests in orienteering include putting on top-notch competitions; making well-reasoned decisions about who should represent the U.S. in international competitions and encouraging those who dedicate time and effort to train for such events; advancing family-friendly events; teaching and coaching orienteering; and orienteering in education.  I hope you will support my candidacy and I look forward to the opportunity to give back to an organization that has given me so much over the years!

Clai Gardner

I have orienteered since 1980 and I am a lifetime U.S. Orienteering member.  I really love orienteering.

•    Club leadership: Lone Star Orienteering Club founder and current president
•    U.S. Military Orienteering team member at CISM World Championships 1994 and 1997
•    Geographic Information Systems Master’s Program Training
•    Assisted in organizing numerous national orienteering events

My planned focus if elected as a BOD member:

•    Facilitate map production
•    You cannot play baseball without baseball fields and you can’t orienteer without maps, so I will facilitate map production
•    Facilitate map production so we can involve more youth participation
•    Listen to suggestions that will help facilitate map production
•    Assist clubs in partnering with universities, community colleges, and all levels of education that have access to GIS software to produce maps

Joseph Huberman

I believe that the Clubs form the foundation of Orienteering.  A Club event is where new people are introduced to Orienteering.  Without a vibrant community of clubs, potential world class orienteers will never even try our sport.

OUSA membership represents only a small fraction of the active orienteers who participate at the club level.  In order for OUSA to involve many more recreational orienteers, OUSA must provide services to the clubs at the local level that will make hosting orienteering events easier for the club’s volunteers and more convenient for the recreational orienteer.

I believe that the OUSA website should become a central location for recreational and competitive orienteers to learn about, register, and pay for events at both the national and club level. This should be accomplished by offering incentives and free services to the clubs to facilitate event registering, results, and reporting. OUSA would then shoulder many of the unrewarding bureaucratic jobs freeing club volunteers to focus on the fun parts of hosting events. Bringing OUSA down to the grassroots club level will increase its relevance and attract more national memberships.

With my decades of experience leading my club and directing both local and national events I believe I can advocate for the recreational club perspective on the OUSA BOD so that more recreational orienteers will become part of OUSA and transition to competitors at the national level.

I have been orienteering since 1978 and the president of Backwoods Orienteering Klub since 1980, shortly after its founding in 1978 when we had only 8 members.

I served as USOF Rules Committee Chairman during the years we were modifying our rules to conform with the IOF rules. I have been Event Director for (at least) 10 National Events including: a fundraiser in cooperation with the US Senior team, Long O Champs, Relay Champs, Classic Champs, Interscholastic and Intercollegiate Champs as well as ARDF US & Region II Champs (radio orienteering) and two International Training Camps. My breadth of experience will serve the BOD well.

Jon Torrance

Currently a member of QOC and OOC (Ottawa Orienteering Club)

After starting orienteering in spring 1990 — not counting a couple of high school gym excursions (thanks alma mater no one reading this would have heard of, and also to TV Ontario for once showing the short film “Thomas the Orienteer” when I was channel surfing as an adolescent, and to Hal Higdon for featuring orienteering in the plot of his novel ”The Electronic Olympics”) — I moved from Canada to the DC area for work in 1997; since that time I’ve been an active member of Quantico Orienteering Club. 

Within QOC, I’ve:

• directed a handful of local events
• set courses for a much, much larger number of local events
• served as club secretary
• won the club’s Volunteer of the Year award in 2006
• fieldchecked and drafted a handful of maps on a volunteer basis, two of which were then used for a national meet
• served from 2010 to 2014 as club president, during which years the club grew local event starts from between 2100 and 2500 in 2005–2009 to more than 4000 in each year of 2012–2014, while membership more or less doubled compared to 2007–2009 (somewhat less than doubled compared to 2005 and 2006). Not, in my opinion, due to my brilliant leadership — I give most of the credit to a major revamp of the QOC web site, in which I took some part, boosted by other publicity efforts — but apparently my leadership wasn’t bad enough to prevent breakneck growth given otherwise favorable conditions.
• served as chief vetter for two U.S. Classic Championships
• created the basemap for, fieldchecked, and drafted a new map of a longtime QOC venue for pay in 2018
• served as event director for national meets held in 2014 and 2019, both including national championship races

Outside QOC, I’ve had an elite orienteering career including several years in the Canadian High Performance Program, running on the Canadian WOC team from 2005 through 2010, and winning 4 elite Canadian Championship medals, and the APOC 2006 long distance championship. And in 2016, I spent the summer mapping professionally in Canada, fieldchecking and drafting two maps for OOC, including the forest map used for the 2017 Canadian Middle and Long Distance Champs.

That has probably sufficiently established that I’m a useful person to have around if you want lots of orienteering and if I could be cloned in quantity, every U.S. club would want one of me. Regarding my current desire to serve on the OUSA board, after a few years now of competitive elections for and apparent new energy within the OUSA board, I was disappointed to see initially only 3 candidates announced for 4 available seats on the board. I think the board has recently been doing a generally decent job keeping the lights on and  has been working on some promising initiatives to identify and spread best practices at the club level, where the rubber meets the road in any effort to sustain let alone grow orienteering nationally.  If there aren’t four other new people out there eager to work on furthering those initiatives, I’m not currently committed to direct any upcoming national meets so I’m available. And since a reliably abundant supply of orienteering throughout North America for me to enjoy during the rest of my lifetime is probably riding on the success of those initiatives, fervently willing.

Which said, just because there are now, including me, (at least) 4 candidates for 4 open seats, doesn’t, in my view, mean everyone should relax.  If any OUSA member reading this thinks they have as much to contribute or more as any of the candidates currently running, I encourage them to throw their hat into the ring. And if you don’t win this time, try again in the future, other commitments permitting. We should aspire to have competitive OUSA board elections and a vibrant, growing OUSA now and indefinitely into the future.

The following Bylaws change proposal was approved by the board to be considered by the membership at this year’s AGM.

Bylaws , Article IV, section B.1.f

Current language:

A family membership consists of two or more individuals related by blood or marriage living in the same household.

Proposed language:

A family membership consists of multiple people with a single primary address with at most two over the age of 24.

Rationale:

This change is intended to have two effects.

1. Allow for more flexibility by deleting the “blood or marriage” requirement and allowing family memberships based on shared residence alone.
2. Insure that adult children begin maintaining their own memberships instead of remaining indefinitely on parental memberships.

The specific age requirement matches the newly adopted age limit for student memberships.

The Annual General Meeting of Orienteering USA will be held on Saturday, September 7th, in conjunction with the Nationals, at Cabrillo College in Altos, California. One of the highlights of the AGM will be the naming of the recipients of the 2019 Silva National Service Award and 2019 Golden Service Awards. There are a lot of orienteers who have given a lot of themselves to advance orienteering in this country. The Golden Service Awards program is a wonderful way of honoring these people. We hope that you, and other members of your club, take part this year by submitting a nomination. Read more about each program below.

Nomination deadline for both awards is Sunday, August 18, 2019.

All award nominations should be sent to Susan DeWitt

Silva Award
Call for Nominations

Purpose:

The Silva Award is given annually to an orienteer who, along with being a member of Orienteering USA, has demonstrated outstanding service to orienteering in the United States over the past five years. The recipient need not be a terrific orienteer, and orienteering skill is not considered in determining the award winner. The essential quality of every winner has been service to promoting and sustaining orienteering, to making the sport work in this country, and in helping to build the organizations needed to make orienteering successful.

Eligibility:

Previous winners are not eligible to win again. In addition, the members of Orienteering USA’s Executive Committee are ineligible (the President, the three Vice Presidents, and the Secretary) as they will do the final voting. (Clare Durand*, Kris Beecroft, William Jameson, Alex Jospe, Pat Meehan, and Barb Bryant* are ineligible this year; *as a past Silva Award winner, Clare and Barb remain ineligible whether on or off the board).

Rules for Nominations:

Each Orienteering USA member club may make one nomination. In addition, each member of the Orienteering USA Board of Directors may also submit a nomination. Individual members may not submit nominations, but are encouraged to work with their club to submit a nomination. Any orienteer can prepare a nomination, but the actual submission must come from an Orienteering USA club or member of Orienteering USA’s Board of Directors.

How to Nominate:

There is no required format you should follow when making a nomination. However, should you choose to submit a nomination, please be as comprehensive as possible, as to what your nominee has done during the past five years, and why you feel these accomplishments are important and make the nominee worthy for the Silva Award. The information you provide is the information that will be presented to the OUSA Executive Committee, who will conduct a vote amongst its members to determine this year’s winner.

Nominations made in previous years are not automatically carried over, although clubs and Orienteering USA Board members are certainly free to nominate the same OUSA member that they did last year. (Updating a previously submitted nomination is fine; rewriting it from scratch is not necessary). Clubs are not restricted to nominating only their own members but are free to nominate any Orienteering USA member belonging to any club.

A club submits a nomination by having one of its officers or directors send it, by e-mail, to skdewitt {at} snet {dot} net, indicating that they are a club official and the nomination being submitted is that of the club. Something along the lines of, “As Secretary of XYZ Orienteering Club, I’d like to submit our club’s Silva Award nomination” is fine.

Please submit nominations or questions via email to Susan DeWitt

Nomination Deadline:

The deadline for submitting nominations is Sunday, August 18th. However, it is always appreciated if a club, or Orienteering USA Board member, submitting a nomination does so in advance of that deadline.

Previous Silva Award Winners

Those of you recognizing some or all of the winner’s names no doubt see that the contributions they have made have covered a wide spectrum. Some winners are associated more with club and regional activities. Others are more linked with national and international ones. Some were recognized for their contributions to an event, while others were chosen for their work with a project, program or the OUSA itself. Any and all contributions to American orienteering may be considered.

Orienteering USA Golden Service Award
Call for Nominations

Purpose:

The purpose of the Orienteering USA Golden Service Award is to recognize those individuals who have provided exceptional service to the sport of orienteering that extends beyond the local club level.

Rules for Nominations:

Clubs or individuals may make nominations for the Golden Service Award. One awardee will be selected from among the nominations received from each club. The nominee does not need to be a member of your club; they may be from another club. Nominations from individuals are deemed to come from the primary club of the person making the nomination. In the event that more than one nomination is received from members of the same club, the volunteer recognitions committee will determine which single nomination from that club is the most deserving for that year. There is no limit to the number of clubs that may have an awardee each year. Awards will be presented to one nominee per club provided they meet the award criteria.

Any individual may only receive the Golden Service Award once.

Golden Service Award Criteria:

Please be sure that the description of service for the nominee clearly meets the two following criteria:
    1) Service is as a volunteer (no profit was made in performing the service)
    2) Service extends beyond the club level

Examples include serving on national board or committees, holding key positions at A-meets, putting on training camps or events that serve a regional or national base, etc.

How to Nominate:

Please submit nominations via email to Susan DeWitt
Nominations must be received by August 18th to be eligible for a 2019 Golden Service Award.

Include the following information:

    Nominee’s name and Club
    Name and Club of person submitting the nomination
    Description of the nominee’s volunteer service to orienteering. Please be sure to address both required criteria.

Previous Golden Service/Golden Troll Awardees:

This list shows that some clubs have made good use of the Golden Service program to recognize their members, but many worthy volunteers are still not on this list. Every club is encouraged to make nominations showing their appreciation for key national level volunteers.