Are you looking to attract more young people to your club? Would you like your current junior and youth members to be more active and engaged in club activities? Australian Sailing is soon to release a range of resources to help attract and retain more young people at your club.

There are many benefits to actively engaging young people in roles at your club. A young person’s knowledge and fresh perspective can make member services, events, activities, or decisions at your sailing club more relevant, appropriate, and effective, providing better solutions for the club. 

Young members are also more likely to act on decisions if they have been involved in the decision- making process. This could be simply allowing young people to help design a youth area in the club for themselves or getting them to help design and run a youth night once a month at the club. Providing young members with an opportunity to learn about all aspects of the club, from committee structures, volunteering to officiating will help them to develop new skills and could provide future volunteers, instructors, coaches, officials, and leaders. 

Young people are vital to the future of clubs, engaging young people now in club life will help with succession planning. As more members and officials get older and less able, clubs will need to be able to fill these volunteer roles. There is also a risk of losing this valuable knowledge from older members if it is not passed on to the next generation. 

Young people that are active, engaged members of your club have an interest and stake in a broad range of matters and have valuable contributions to make to your club not just on ‘youth issues 'but on all aspects of club life. These are your future life members and Commodores at your club! 

Creating and empowering a youth committee at your club can also help young people gain leadership and management skills, build their confidence, learn how to work as a team and gain knowledge of how club committee structures work.   

By involving young people more in club life and creating opportunities for children and young people to express their views and participate in decisions that impact them they will become more engaged in club life and will be more likely to stay at your club. 

Many Sailing clubs around Australia are already involving young people, either through setting up formal youth committees or appointing Junior or Youth Club Captains and Junior Flag Officers. Largs Bay Sailing Club in South Australia is one such club which has successfully set up a Junior Committee and whose Junior Club Captain has gone on to become a Commodore at the club. The club actively encourages the junior flag officers to be involved in club life, their roles involve volunteering on race day, arranging social events, helping at presentation nights, and reporting back the views of the young people of the club to the Management Committee. 

If you have set up a youth committee or are successfully involving young people at your club, we would love to hear about it! 

If you are happy to share what you are doing, please complete the quick online form telling us how you are involving young people at your club CLICK HERE. 

Australian Sailing is developing a suite of resources to help you engage with young people at your club and will be available on the Australian Sailing website in the coming months.

The resources include tips on: 

• How to start a Youth Committee 
• How to mentor and support a Youth Committee
• Terms of Reference Template for club youth committees 
• Roles and responsibilities of club positions for young people 
• Quick Wins checklist and ideas for engaging young people in club life

Australian Sailing will publish along with these resources a handbook for families new to junior and youth sailing who are looking to join your club which you can edit to add your own information and hand out to families at the start of the season. 

Look out for the links to the new resources in the August edition of Club News!