I belong to a group called the Carolina Maritime Model Society. ( http://carolinasalt.com/?p=1751 ) It's an extremely congenial bunch of guys (and some ladies) that meets at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort. (Meetings the last Saturday of every month at 2:00, September through May; new members and guests always welcome.) One big characteristic of the club is that it's completely non-competitive. We don't have contests; we do have an annual exhibition, which is always a big hit with both the membership and the museum-going public. The organization celebrated its 20th anniversary last week. I, at age 64, am one of the younger members. (New blood is always most welcome.)
Much of the meeting time is taken up by what we call "show and tell." Members bring in their models and tell us about them. One of them gets picked as "Model of the Month," to be displayed for the next month in a case the museum provides for the purpose. (The club website seems to imply that the Model of the Month is chosen by competition. Not really. We talk about what model would best fit the case, whether the builder really wants to part with it for a month, etc. And sometimes we forget to pick a Model of the Month altogether.)
To join the club a person has to join the Friends of the North Carolina Maritime Museum. ( http://www.maritimefriends.org/Get-Involved.html ) To join costs $35, and an additional $5 gets you into the model club. So we always have a bit of money in the treasury, and have to figure out ways to spend it.
A few years ago I got elected president, and it occurred to me that a good way to spend the money would be to set up a club library. The members voted to spend $200 on the project, and asked me to come up with a recommended list of books. I picked some old classics (Longridge, McNarry, etc.) and some more recent titles - all with any eye toward spreading the books out among the membership's huge range of interests.
It worked. We keep the books in the little model shop next to the museum's boat shop, and use an old-fashioned card catalog to keep track of who's borrowed them.
There are more good books on ship modeling today than ever before in history. Unfortunately they do tend to be rather expensive. Seems to me that pooling resources is a great way to make them available. If you're in a model club of any sort, it's worth thinking about.
Another way to spend the money: guest speakers. We've heard from the captain of a Chesapeake Bay skipjack, a professor from ECU who's investigated WWII wrecks at Saipan and Tinian, some grad students who'd worked on the Wasa, two who'd been conserving artifacts from the CSS Neuse, etc., etc. We also occasionally buy DVDs for the museum. (The most recent is a terrific, two-disc documentary on the Battle of the Atlantic for the BBC.)
I've always looked askance at model clubs because so many of them tend to generate hard feelings and rivalries. This club is different - and I'm convinced that the reason is that we made the conscious decision twenty years ago to keep competition out of it. In the course of those twenty years I don't think I've ever heard an unpleasant word exchanged. (Well...there was one time when, at the annual exhibition, a little kid yanked a radar mast off a member's enormous scratchbuilt Aegis cruiser and started running around the room with it. What I yelled at him certainly qualifies as unpleasant.) Beaufort is a two-hour drive from Greenville, where I live, but I've always found the trip worthwhile. And I've met some mighty nice people in that club.
Non-competitive model clubs are a great way to enhance the experience of the hobby. I know some people are proud to call themselves "naturally competitive," and that's certainly their privilege. But if a club like ours can last twenty years, I think the idea is worth considering.