Chicken coops plans

Every karate club that I have ever trained in has not really been a club. Each one was a sole proprietorship business. That means that one man owned the karate club has a small business, whether it was non-profit or for-profit, and he made all of the decisions and controlled all actions in the club. As such, all dues were payable to him, and all fees went through him. He was our interface to the karate association, and he determined our ranks and conducted all examinations, and he picked where we were having class. If he didn’t feel like teaching on a particular night, practice was canceled. If he decided to give up teaching, the karate club collapsed as no other person as charismatic was left to keep it going.

I have always run my karate club in that way as well. I was the instructor, and all of the other club “members” were not really voting members of a corporation who could make decisions. I was not hired by the karate club to teach classes. I owned the club. It was really my property, and when I decided that it was inconvenient for me to show up following a move across town, my karate club collapsed. I left one of my students in charge of it, but really the club was not designed to be operated without me. It was mostly just a “let’s train with Rob” club more than an organization dedicated to training in general. Without Rob, the club was doomed.

Most karate clubs are run that way, but there are some exceptions. There are some university clubs out there that operate with elected leaders, although usually the highest ranking person who is usually a professor at the college really owns the club and has full authority over it. There are also some karate clubs out there that have several black belt level members who share teaching duties at the club, but I bet if we look at them closely, we don’t find a club that operates as a group of equals, but again a group of black belt juniors to a single personality who is senior among them and their leader.

I think there is a different way to run a karate club that might work in a superior fashion to the way that we have been running our clubs. I call this type of karate club a Jefferson Karate Club. Shawn Jefferson, a Shotokan expert and friend of mine, once made a remark off the cuff about how a karate club could operate in a better fashion than they do today. I was quite stunned when I read his remark, because I was surprised that such a simple and brilliant idea would appear so suddenly and pass by most without much notice. I noticed.

This is what Mr. Jefferson wrote that sparked my enthusiasm so much:

10/10/2005 11:46PM EDT in alt.martial-arts.karate.shotokan

…I was wondering where this left the typical karate club. As you pointed out, a karate club needs a steady flow of cash to keep the lights on. There is only a limited supply of potential customers for a karate club, and certainly creating life-long students is good business practice.

I’m struck by the term that we use to describe our karate school: a club. I’ve been a member of other clubs before. Computer clubs, car clubs, even gardening clubs. There was no teacher, no lessons, no ranks, no tests. There were dues, and seminars. You knew who the experts were, and you could go strike up a conversation with one of them-maybe even learn a few things. Some of the people had incredible cars that they spent many, many hours restoring. Some had daily drivers that you could see daylight through the fenders. Everybody had some knowledge to impart, or some enthusiasm for their hobby. No one thought to tell the guy with the daily driver that he should spend his children’s college money and spend all his waking hours restoring his car. No one really cared. They just liked getting together and talking about and doing their chosen hobby.

Could a karate club work like this? I think that it could. Perhaps a mixture of the karate “school” and the karate club? Teach people up to a certain belt level and then say, “Yep, you’re done. See ya.” This is the karate school.

The karate club is just a bunch of people who pay dues, have training space that everyone can use as they please. Break out in groups or pairs for practice. Have some of the experts or anyone who is willing give a seminar on specific aspects of your art, maybe every wednesday, every second wednesday or maybe the last wednesday of every month depending on how many people you have who want to show something cool to the rest. That would be interdependence.

Yes, I know I’m dreaming.

–Shawn Jefferson

Mr. Jefferson used one of my favorite words: interdependence, the very highest level of maturity that most never reach. I was inspired by what he wrote, and decided to flesh out the idea some more for my own purposes. I plan to structure my own karate training this way going forward. I have held off on founding another karate club until my son is old enough to train, and I have been waiting for an idea to come along as to how to organize things. And then Shawn Jefferson just goes and posts it like it was an afterthought. One man’s idle whim is another man’s sand, water, concrete, and mixer.

The Jefferson Karate Club is composed of two parts. One part is the club, the other part is the school. Both are attached to one another, however, they are separate groups of people with different purposes.

The club is a group of black belts who are members of the club. All, regardless of rank or affiliations or certifications are members of the club equally, and none “owns” the club. All business of the club is conducted via pure democracy, where all members are able to vote on issues such as what days to hold practices, where to locate the club, etc. The club does not hold classes, since the members are all equals there is no instructor. Instead, the club holds meetings, and at these meetings, any one of the members may step up and teach, be appointed to teach by the others for a single session, or teach on a particular rotating schedule with the other members.

This way, you organize a group of experts into a relationship where instead of doing karate military style, where the drill sergeant marches around with all of the knowledge and tells everyone that they need to learn this and that or they will never measure up. Instead of a cult of singular personality, a democratic and loosely affiliated group of black belts who regularly met to either just practice karate or to trade around who is counting numbers that week would encourage a free exchange of ideas and open up the karate club and the karate community if more widely spread to more and more ideas as the hierarchical constraints currently enforced through tenure and status rank systems.

The club could choose to operate a school as an extension of itself. The school operation would be separate from the club in that club members would not be students in the school, and school students would not be qualified to meet with the club. Members of the club could rotate who was teaching at the school each session, and serve as a panel of guides and experts that the school students could draw upon. As the school students progressed through their classes, which would operate without a hierarchy amongst them but as a group of equal students without having any considered senior or junior to each other, the students would eventually apply for membership in the club. Membership would result in a black belt being handed over, and the student would cease attending school classes and start attending the club meetings.

This model challenges many of our assumptions about how karate clubs are organized and how karate knowledge is passed along. Those used to being in total control of their clubs might ask some challenging questions of this model such as:The students will learn contradicting things from different instructors. Who would be “right?”

No one club member would be right. The students would learn different ideas from the various instructors, and they would be free to choose among them. The instructors would have to understand each others methods and beliefs from having participated in meetings together. This is asking a lot of many karate experts who believe there should be one singular best way of doing karate. My friends, karate is an art, it is subjective theory. There is no “right.” There is only opinion where karate is concerned. None of us is allowed to test our skills, and if we dared, we’d permanently damage one another and not be able to use each other for training dummies any longer. We would have to be willing to drop our nearly religious belief in various concepts being essential to a proper understanding of karate, and work together with one another. I don’t expect that to happen overnight in any karate club, much less in most organizations, seeing as how the instant the personality who held everyone together dies most organizations shatter into oblivion. But certainly this model is workable, as it is used for many different sorts of clubs, and it works for all of them. A partnership model rather than a kingdom is what I propose to you.The members might not be able to make practices and might only be able to attend the school. How is this resolved?

I think having more than one expert in the classroom at a time would be confusing and prevent the students from focusing on the ideas of the person teaching that particular session. Just one club member in the school at a time, except on special occasions, might be the best way to do things, but each club would decide for themselves how to organize things so that the club and school remained separate entities without bleeding into each other and ruining the advantages of having them separate.

Who would get the money?

A partnership like this one would have to operate as a true partnership. The club would get the money managed by a club treasurer, elected by the membership and responsible to them to manage the finances and not dip into the club’s account for personal reasons. None of the instructors would be paid or make a profit in this model unless the school was a commercial operation and the club members all decided to split the money evenly. This model depends not upon the external structure to control the members of the club into behaving as equals. It depends entirely on each of the members adopting a true belief in the equality of each other and respecting the group consensus on business matters. Everyone would need to work together, and occasionally the members of the club would have to hold a business meeting to understand the finances of the club, plan for expenses, and discuss any issues the membership might need to vote upon.

How would the club collect money?

I envision the members of a club I belonged to as passing around a basket at every meeting into which money is dropped, and the treasurer collecting this money and keeping it in an account to which the partnership has access. If commercial operations were undertaken by the club, such as operating a for-profit school, hosting a tournament, hosting a seminar, or selling equipment, the money would be collected by the treasurer and managed in this way as it is by any club of equals with elected leadership.

This is not an outrageous set of proposals untried and previously unimagined. It is how many clubs of many types are operated. The only really big change in assumptions required for this model to enable all members to experience superior karate training is to give up the dream of being The One True Karate Master that all look to, and to stop referring to karate ranks above the lowest level of black belt as having significance. In other words, this model encourages members of the club to no longer aspire to dan ranks, but rather to practice in the service of others, even in a for-profit environment

I foresee problems. What if a member steals the money or tries to take over the club through political wrangling?

Such things happen. The partnership would need a formal charter and set of by-laws that all members were required to sign in order to join. It would contractually and legally obligate them as partners in a business to operate as responsible corporate owners of the club and any mistreatment of its assets would therefore leave the realm of vague dispute and become crimes. Really, that kind of thing happens more than anyone would like, but not as often as the TV might make you think.What if someone joins who has many more skills than we do?

Then he becomes an equal member of the club. Membership in the club is not determined by skill or supposed karate knowledge. Membership in the club is an equal relationship to all other members. Anyone needing to be king of his own castle would have to go found his own club somewhere else and leave if he could not tolerate being a member of an equal relationship like this.What about in the school? What if the teacher needs assistants?

The teacher does not need assistants. The teacher should be able, as any teacher of any class, to teach without having students step in and reinforce his message. The modern karate club practice of having “senior students” or “senpai” who serve as caretakers of the club and bellmen to the club instructor as an elite guard are unnecessary, in my opinion. I believe the only reason such status is granted to students is because there is no “club” to graduate to, and the instructor is trying to hold on to power while giving his senior students the impression that they are acquiring power subordinate to his own. It is a way of building a multi-level marketing operation or a military organization, but it does not work because the top man is never unseated to allow for anyone else to step in and take his place. When he leaves, and his senior student takes over, often the club falls apart, as mine did.

I believe the Jefferson Karate Club provides a model for karate training that changes everything for the advanced and junior student in many important ways. Senior students are encouraged to work together, and cults of personality are eliminated. Club business is no longer for the sake of a person, but rather for the sake of the training and meetings themselves. Loyalty and other such issues become non-issues as members are all equals and answer to no one. The pursuit of personal acquisition of additional dan ranks is subordinated to the pursuit of wider understanding of others’ ideas and sharing of one’s own ideas.

Add to the Jefferson Karate Club a culture of creativity and practical karate tests using requirements, and you have created an organization of people that is self-sustaining, self-perpetuating, and encouraging of members to give to one another and to newcomers rather than putting them into an institutionalized system where they almost fear to advance because they wish to avoid a confrontation with a controlling, parental organization or instructor.

I have been, for a long time, wondering how I would organize a karate club were I to operate one again. This is the model that I will start off with. I will find somewhere to offer a class, and I will teach students until they are ready to join the club. If black belts come from elsewhere, I will offer them some mandatory time in the class and then allow them to join the club if they agree with the principles of democratic operation and tolerance of differences of opinion on karate practice. We will then be the first two members of the club, and we will have our own separate practices away from the school which students are not invited to. There we will cultivate this culture of openness and hopefully welcome others.

The cynic within me says this will never work, and that I may as well hope for a unicorn to come flying out of my own rear and see it leap over a rainbow under which I find a pot of gold. But I intend to try this out and see it happen. I would rather enjoy being in a group of equals who were not constantly worried about what “Sensei” wants, and I think it would be more like the culture of Okinawa where the various experts were all available to one another and shared students back and forth to learn various specialties. I believe such a model would preserve key aspects of karate training, bring back lost methods that worked quite well, would reduce the number of people who quit from boredom and lack of recognition, and would embrace our own Western culture while encouraging our highest ideals: individualism and democracy.

I’m having trouble seeing a downside to this sort of karate club structure other than the fact that I do not get to be King of the World and tell everyone what to do, gradually increasing the number of dan ranks I have to indicate my preeminence in the world. But I can swallow that. I’m tired of being the king of my karate club.

To those of you with high dan rank currently king of your little karate clubs who have several black belt level members, I dare you to try this and let go of your need for authority. The question is, do you have the humility to admit you can learn from those you outrank? This is a dangerous idea, as it renders the concept of highly advanced rank irrelevant. The higher the rank you hold, perhaps the more resistant you will feel to taking your framed credentials from behind your desk and putting them away so that others can work with you instead of follow you.