From the Registrar - Jan L. Wassink

Membership

Welcome to fall! Now that summer vacations and activities are complete and school has started again, the flow of registrations into office will begin to pick up again. If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to register your summer cria and make sure you take advantage of the “less than twelve months” price for registration. Also, if you couldn’t resist collecting another llama or two over the summer and you haven’t transferred ownership into your name yet, make sure you do it soon to get in under the “less than ninety days” transfer price.

We checked today to see how many members we have this year compared to last year and the results were very encouraging. In 2004, we had a total of 881 members. So far this year, we have 1464! That is an increase of just over 60%!

For those of you who are currently members, “thank you” for the vote of confidence in what the ILR is doing for llama owners. We also hope you are taking advantage of all the benefits of membership, and not just the reduced price for registrations and transfers.

For those of you who are not yet members, please consider joining the rapidly growing ranks of ILR members and take advantage of the opportunities membership brings.

We will be starting our annual membership drive in October so you will be receiving some communications from the ILR encouraging you to become a member if you are not already a member, or to renew your membership if you are currently a member. If you are actively breeding and selling llamas, the reduced registration and transfer costs for members quickly offsets the cost of the membership fee.

However, don’t dismiss the thought of becoming a member just because you are not actively breeding and selling llamas. We have many members who are not in the “business” of llamas who use the ILR website extensively. As time goes on and the llama community grows and matures, we are seeing more and more owners who have between one and three llamas. While some of these owners eventually decide to do some breeding and selling, many of them simply love their llamas and do things with them. ILR records show that the number of these “users” has more than doubled over the last ten years.

The ILR believes “users” function as important ambassadors to those outside the llama community and so are critical to the llama community as a whole. The ILR would like to provide more services that would benefit them, and, in turn, the entire llama community.

One of the services we are developing is the “I Want a Llama.com“ website. On that website, we hope to provide much of the information any “user” would need to care for their llama, have fun with their llama, contact other llama owners in their area, participate in llama activities, and so on.

In future ILRe-ports, I will outline some of the other plans for services that we believe will benefit the entire llama community. For now, keep in mind that the ILR is a non-profit member organization and the future direction of the ILR will be determined by its members. If you want a say in where we go from here, you need to get on the wagon.

However, joining is only the first step in supporting the llama community through the ILR – involvement is also very important. Next month I will devote this column to enumerating some of the ways in which you can get involved in the functions of the ILR.

Later,

Jan L Wassink
ILR Registrar