Help Us Help You!

We can help MH owners more if there are a lot of us. So it is beneficial to every member to help us grow! And we don’t just need to grow more members – we also need to grow leaders and Chapters!

Three Ways You Can Help Us Grow:  Re-up, Reach Out, Step Up

RE-UP!

• • • The obvious thing is to keep renewing YOUR membership each year. Your membership dues pay for the operation of our organization, including our Home Office and office staff, The Californian magazine, our website, our lobbyist in Sacramento, and our attorney.  A pretty good deal for about seven cents a day!!

REACH OUT!

• • • Tell your friends and neighbors about GSMOL. If they are online, send them to our website, where they can find information about us and, hopefully, join us.
    • If they are not online, let them look at one of your Californian magazines, or download our basic handout, called “Who We Are”, for them. The handout includes an application form. (This handout is available in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese on our Forms, Handouts and Booklets page under the Resources tab.)
    • EACH ONE REACH ONE – if every GSMOL member encouraged just one other homeowner to join GSMOL, our membership would double!!  

STEP UP!

We need two important contacts in every mobilehome park in California!

• • • A Legislative Contact (LC), who acts as a liaison with the Legislative Action Team (LAT) Committee to help encourage residents to support our bills. See more about the LAT and LCs under the LEGISLATION tab.
    • A Membership Coordinator (MC), who is a liaison with the Membership Committee, the Leadership Training Committee and the Zone and Region leaders to help “recruit” new GSMOL members in the park, find potential leaders, and build a GSMOL Chapter.

These important helpers act as “boots on the ground” for our Zone and Region leaders, who cannot be everywhere at once.

Any GSMOL member wanting to volunteer for either of these positions in their park should contact their GSMOL Zone Vice President.  Find their information in The Californian or send an email on our Contact Us page.

The Nine Pillars of Growth

When you see the word “Membership” and the names “Membership Committee” you probably think Oh, these are the people who work to bring more members into GSMOL. And that is true. And we DESPERATELY need to do that! But there is a lot more to it than that. There are actually NINE goals. They are called “pillars” because the purpose of pillars is to support something. And we call it Growth because it’s not just about the members!

• • • First, in order to grow, we must Get Members.
    • But no matter how much water you pour into the bucket, you won’t be able to fill it if the water keeps leaking out the bottom, so we must also Keep Members – encourage everyone to renew their membership whenever it comes due.
    • And the best way to Keep Members is to Support Members, so we must constantly work to ensure that our members get something of value from GSMOL and have access to the leadership pipeline to get help and information.

And we also have to apply those three goals to Leaders and Chapters.

Our “Nine Pillars” can be illustrated in the chart below.

The Chicken and the Egg

Growth of members, leaders, and Chapters is a three-way chicken-and-egg situation.

• • • Statistics show that parks with Chapters have more members than parks without a Chapter – about half of all GSMOL members live in parks with a Chapter. So to get members, you need Chapters.
    • To get leaders, you also need Chapters, because most Associate Managers were Chapter officers originally.
    • And in order for Chapters to be established, you need leaders – both within the park and at the Region or Zone level.
    • And to have either leaders or Chapters, you have to have members.

So it’s not a question of “where do we start?”  We have to be working on all of these, all the time!

We have resources that are related to these goals, for our members, Chapters and leaders to use, and you can find them on our website.