SociaBulls: On Whole Group Ownership

 We were at Trader Joe's the other night when we ran into one of our original SociaBulls members who has been part of the group since way back here. We hadn't seen them in awhile, and we were joking about how far our group has evolved.

Back when we first started, we were a much smaller group and we were learning as we went. We were able to be a bit more casual where I would just send out an email and anyone who wanted to join just kind of came. And just walked wherever.

Since then, we have grown beyond we could have ever imagined. It was initially daunting to figure out if we could continue to grow as a group (at one point we had 70 people on our waiting list!) and how to continue to make the walks comfortable for all of the dogs. Especially when we have 2 walks each week, it takes a lot of work.

Now we have an amazing 'behind-the-scenes' crew serving as our Chicago SociaBulls Board:

Zoe's person and Nabi's person are our New Member Coordinators. We typically get a couple new member requests every week! They have been doing such an amazing job of corresponding back and forth with the many interested applicants, explaining the structure and answering all questions, scheduling members on walks when their space comes up, making sure they are matched and learning about the group on their initial walk, setting them up on the website, and lots of things that I'm sure I'm not even aware of. 

We also have Maize's person who is the guru working on pack and walking coordination. As our group grew we realized some dogs might be more successful in different parts of the pack. Each week she works her magic considering each of the dogs on the walk and working to place them where they will be most successful. This involves a lot of back and forth correspondence with the group members, working with the website and coordination google documents. We also work together to pull the reservations from the website, coordinate dogless walkers for each of the walks, provide the detailed information for each walking location, and research conflicting events for our future walks. And this is all done in a tight timeframe every week.

We also have E who built our private member website and works as tech support.

While we have such a great team working behind-the-scenes, we also love how so many people have stepped up to make the actual walks successful. 

Dogless walkers are a huge part of allowing our group to comfortably walk in so many different areas. We have had so many people step up to volunteer to help the group by coming dogless (even when it means driving in from really far away or getting up really early to walk your own dogs and fosters to be able to help the group). 

We also have a rotating role of "Weather Watchers" who will wake up way early to determine if there are any weather conditions where we need to cancel the walk.

And we have members scouting out new walking locations.

We are so proud to realize how our group has become a community and how so many people are working hard to make sure the walks are successful!

To learn more about our group, join our Chicago SociaBulls Facebook page for more photos and updates. And check out the Hikabulls page where we first learned about the benefits of group walking.

Also:

What to know when starting a dog walking group.

When it became real life.