Greetings, my lovelies!
With the growth of our community, so grow our infrastructure needs. We have many volunteers who work tirelessly so that everyone is safe. Although every Apogaea department is important, there are a few without which we couldn’t function safely including trained Rangers, DPW, Parking, Gate, and the medical professionals volunteering with BAMF.
BAMF is a little different from these other departments in one important way; their volunteers have specialized medical training. Since the pool for recruiting these qualified volunteers is much smaller, filling shifts presents a unique challenge.
In 2013, it was difficult to fill burn-night BAMF shifts. This year we have a larger population and two burn nights, which will most likely provide a greater challenge to fill BAMF shifts. If we continue to grow our event at the rate we have been, this will be a problem year after year. One solution is to hire an ambulance and EMTs to staff burn nights, as some other regional events do. An alternative, recommended by our BAMF leads, is to donate tickets to BAMF personnel who are willing to work Friday and Saturday night for 2014.
BAMF plays a critical role in maintaining our relationship with local authorities. Our ability to easily obtain a permit for our admittedly unique event without excessive government intervention is in large part based on our extensive BAMF department and their professionalism. Even if we hired an outside ambulance, the absence of an effective BAMF department could have ramifications for our relationship with local authorities. It is also important for our community to have access to effective onsite evaluation and first aid during particularly busy nights. And, of course, BAMF always can refer participants to local emergency services when a case requiring something more complex than basic first aid presents itself.
However, we recognize that offering complimentary tickets to BAMF represents an incremental change in the ethos of our organization. In the past, we have only given away tickets to three groups of people: one for the theme contest winner, one for the ticket art contest winner, and two for the new landowner the year before we switched from Happy Ass Ranch to Phloston Peak. The Board and representatives from BAMF have discussed, at GREAT length, the need for 20 complimentary BAMF tickets this year – 10 for Friday night and 10 for Saturday night. However, given this change, we would like to hear from you before casting our vote. It is our intention that the offer of tickets to BAMF will not be extended to other departments and that the policy of offering these tickets will be evaluated on a yearly basis and renewed only if needed to adequately staff the event.
Effectively managing our volunteers and staffing the event is a difficult task. The Board explored a variety of avenues to address this situation and will continue to do so. To continue growing Apogaea progressively yet responsibly, the board feels that offering complimentary BAMF tickets is the viable solution. With help from our AMP Team, we have created an info-graphic to illustrate the factors involved in this decision. We want to know what you think – has Apogaea grown to the point where we need to offer complimentary tickets to our medical personnel or is this too big of a change to our core values?
We had a survey regarding this topic that was posted to all of our social media outlets. Thank you to everyone that responded with your input. The survey is now closed. As soon as we go through them all, we will post the results.
Apogaeans, for your integrity, concern, high standards, creative problem solving, and understanding. We look forward to hearing from you.
Flaming Art and The Apogaea Board of Directors
