Dear WPCSA Friends,
As you may, or may not know, the WPCSA has reinstated the “Area Rep”, or “Regional Rep” Program, in an effort to help establish better communications with all of our “Welsh” friends. This past February at the AGM, the board asked Debbie Elliott-Fisk and Judy Hubert to be the Area Reps for the Southwest Region. The SW Region includes AZ, CA, CO, NM, NV and UT.
We have recently received a listing of all current members, and both of us were surprised at how few members we have from Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah. While we have a large number of WPCSA members from California, the numbers are definitely down. Are there really that few Welsh ponies and cobs across our southwestern states, or are people not renewing their membership for various reasons? We would like your insights on this.
We are also anxious to hear from you about what activities you do with your ponies and cobs, as well as generally, what kind of activities are available in your area. Do you have a statewide club? As an individual, what benefits does the WPCSA bring to you? How can they help otherwise? And, if you have a statewide association, club or group, how can the WPCSA help your group? Do you have other news to share with us, such as new foals, a new member of your herd, or participation in a new discipline? We know that as versatile as our Welsh ponies and cobs are, that our members are engaged in many activities with them. Please share with us what’s happening in your world.
There are currently several avenues of communication we are using with our Southwest Region WPCSA members:
(1) In March, we started a WPCSA Southwest Region Members Page as a Facebook group (see https://www.facebook.com/groups/1391422291178354/). Debbie is the administrator of the group, and you can bring up the Facebook page to request to join, if you do not already belong to the group. All members can also post there, and Debbie approves the posts.
(2) The WPCSA board of directors also recently set up a blog site in the members only sub-directory (wpcsamembers.com) of the WPCSA website (welshpony.org). If you have not logged onto the members site before, you need to input your membership number, and the WPCSA approves your addition to the site. You only have to log in the one time. The blog site is under the WPCSA Members tag/menu, and you can scroll down and read the various blogs (http://wpcsamembers.com/blog/). We will try to add new blogs for our region on a regular basis.
(3) We still the use the two Yahoo.com groups, the wmp2 and ponycob groups/lists (see groups.yahoo.com).
(4) Lastly, we all use email, and we will be sending out some group emails to our new WPCSA Southwest Region members list. We are going to email to everyone using the “bcc” blind copy function in email to keep your addresses private. You should know however that the WPCSA does have a members directory available on the wpcsamembers.com site under the member services tab, organized by state (http://wpcsamembers.com/member-services/member-breeder-directory/). You need to log in a second time to access or download (as an Adobe pdf file) the directory.
We would also like you to help us build our WPCSA membership. Do you know of people in your area that are Welsh pony or cob (and this includes part-bred) owners who are not members of the WPCSA? We would like to encourage them to join us. An organization is only as good as it’s members, and the more we have, and the more involved we all are, the better the organization will be for all.
Please feel free to contact either Debbie (debbieef@wildblue.net ) or Judy (jph@softcom.net ) by email, through the Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1391422291178354/, or by scrolling down to the Southwest Region blog (http://wpcsamembers.com/blog/). We’d love to hear from you!
With appreciation,
Debbie and Judy