English Chess Forum

Has anyone recently put together/revised a formal Constitution for their chess club?

Our Zoom AGM tonight has decided we need to do this, so if anyone has a template it would be very handy, thanks

The English Bridge Union have a Model Club Constitution which you may like to peruse. Please find it attached.

I am not aware of any similar document for English chess clubs.

Thank you David

Guildford CC did one recently (you can find it on our website: www.guildfordchess.co.uk) and we based it on the St Albans one after looking at a few alternatives.

Thanks Mike

Or https://watfordchessclub.org/index.php/ ... nstitution

Our club rules (not quite the same thing, I know):

https://richmondchessblog.files.wordpre ... -rules.pdf

Thanks both

By a strange coincidence, an old paper copy of our club's constitution has recently been discovered by a member, after we assumed for many years that we didn't have one! So it is on the agenda for revision at next year's AGM. It doesn't contain as much detail as some of those mentioned above, so these will be useful when we come to revise it.

It'd be good if the ECF had a Development Officer with a focus on supporting clubs and grassroots chess who could come up with, among other things, a template constitution for clubs.

A few thoughts...

Beware unrealistic quora. Imagine if a few people leave the club for whatever reason. There are real life cases of organisations unable (constitutionally) to call a meeting or replace officials, etc.
Don't state an address unnecessarily. Venues are lost quicker than constitutions can be changed.
Do state that the club is "not-for-profit" (if it is) as this public statement may prove useful when seeking sponsorship or concessions.

I don't think we have one at Poulton-le-Fylde. It has been talked about for many years at various AGMs but never got round to actually doing it.
I think we did have one when George Ellison and Fred Clough originally founded the club, sadly it was mislaid.
We have one for Cleveleys Chess Club for Juniors.
One thing is worth doing is checking your members list.
Every 6 months at our club, each member receives a paper copy of a members list with contact details, which has come in very useful when writing my Christmas Cards particularly this year.

Angus French wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 09, 2020 11:50 pm

It'd be good if the ECF had a Development Officer with a focus on supporting clubs and grassroots chess who could come up with, among other things, a template constitution for clubs.

Possibly, but isn't this thread demonstrating that the community of chess clubs can manage this task by itself?

Sure, but it's a lot of duplicated work - it's a lot easier to make slight adjustments to a template than it is to come up with an entire document from scratch.

The ECF doesn't even need to produce a template - there is no obvious reason why the development officer would be competent to do so, but the website could hold examples used by other clubs. Surely that is preferable to a general appeal on an independent website? Perhaps it has been assumed that all clubs have proper constitutions, this thread suggests otherwise and would seem to suggest it would be a useful resource in supporting grass-roots chess.