At the People’s Alliance membership meeting on December 11th, the board will be submitting this proposal to amend Article III of the PA Bylaws. You can refer to that link for the specific language. This blog post explains the rationale behind the changes to Sections II and IV.

Currently, Section II ties PA memberships to the calendar year, and such memberships need to be renewed on that schedule, even if a member joined more recently. This cadence was originally established due to technical constraints on our capacity to set up auto-renewals in the past, and allowed staff and volunteers to make a concerted effort to remind members to renew during the last part of the year, rather than having to deal with a constant stream of renewals throughout the year.

However, our database software has since introduced the capability to have annual memberships auto-renew. Auto-renewals are more convenient for both members and the PA, but we can’t set the system up to bind auto-renewals to the calendar year, so we need the proposed amendments to Section II in order to allow them to happen at all.

The changes to Section IV simply establish a new timeline for when any future changes to dues will go into effect, given that payment of annual dues is no longer bound to the calendar year.

If you are a current monthly donor to PA these changes wouldn’t affect you (since your membership will automatically renew for 2025, so you’ll still be in sync with the calendar year even though the Bylaws would no longer require that of all memberships) and those of you with annual memberships will still need to renew for next year. In the future, however, your membership will renew automatically, if you choose to have it be set up to do so.

I hope this post has helped you to better understand the implications of and reasoning behind these proposed changes. Please feel free to raise any questions or concerns in the comments below, as well as at the membership meeting on December 11th.