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American Mensa Region 10
RVC Column
by Mel Dahl, RVC 10
January 2026
On December 5, 2025, the AMC had a full day planning meeting at our national office in Hurst, Texas. I have both positive and negative things to say about it. First the good:
The facilitator reminded us of a number of very important concepts that I think boards tend sometimes to forget. Such as being stewards rather than leaders (stewardship means leaving the group better off than you found it; leadership means winning and is zero-sum). Governance means enabling the members and the local leaders. We need to anticipate what is coming at us before it arrives and plan accordingly. We need to focus on giving our members good value for their dues money, which means leaving them better off for being Mensa members than they would be if they weren't Mensa members. All true.
The bad news is that this is precisely what was said at the last planning meeting I attended in 2012. In 13 years, our strategic plan has not appreciably changed. In 13 years we are still talking about the same stuff we were talking about then. The very same points and the very same conversation were made on December 5 that were made then. Had I dozed off at the 2012 meeting, slept for 13 years, and reawakened on December 5, I would have had no clue, other than there being different faces in the room, that it wasn't still the same meeting. It's not that I disagree with anything that was said -- that's all good -- but rather that I would have expected some actual progress over time.
Here's what we did not talk about: Everyone knows that the greatest challenge facing Mensa at the moment is the loss of members. Since this was an, ahem, *PLANNING MEETING,* and since that is our greatest challenge, I was hoping to hear some very specific steps being taken to reverse that trend. I had some fairly pointed questions I would like to have asked: What steps are we taking to identify the most fertile ground for membership recruitment? What have we been doing to this point to recruit new members and, of that, what has worked and what has not worked? How do we know what has worked and what has not worked? During the time period in which our membership numbers were dramatically increasing, what were we doing then that we are not doing now? Do we know why in those specific time periods our numbers went up dramatically? There are others, but those will do for a start.
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