The Future of YBRT

YBRT -- Part Two -- Call for Proposals for hosting a tour

Now that you know YBRT Inc's history, we would like to ask you to support one of our main objectives alive: to keep the Yellow Brick Road Tour as a low cost, non commercial annual gathering of Ozzies. Up to and including last year's gathering in Virginia, the efforts to organize this event has mainly been done out of our personal resources from within the YBRT board. However, all of us have moved on in life and - without forgetting how life was in OZ - relocated as much as possible to Kansas, with the exception of Elyce, who professionally deals with bpd's as a Licensed Professional Counselor, and therefore maintains a home base in Kansas but has at least a suitcase in OZ.

With this transition to establishing -- somehow -- normal life styles, each of us experiences a significant decrease in personal enthusiasm, which doesn't allow us anymore to put in the same effort of going through the entire process of organizing and hosting the Yellow Brick Road Tour as in the years before. On the other hand, we KNOW how much our initial meeting benefited each of us, while we were in a virtually - but not really - hopeless situation in which many of you are. Instead of just letting go of the annual Yellow Brick Road Tour, we would like to encourage and support you in start hosting YBRTs at your locations.

While we always encourage folks to gather locally and be self-organized, the idea of the official YBRT is something else.

In principle, it is open to all who feel the wish and need to meet in person as a group of individuals affected by a relationship to people with bpd. This means that we don't hand-select whom we invite, but invite whoever feels addressed by the idea.

We would like to provide the umbrella of the non-profit YBRT Inc: our support, our limited personal resources, our planning experiences, promotion through LOO and website and include Elyce's presence in the package.

We would like those of you:

• who feel capable of doing the brunt of organizing and planning,
• with an idea of a low cost location,
• with maybe other resources like relatives or good friends living with you or close by who could help out and support our and your efforts

to step forward and propose their hosting of a YBRT, in cooperation with YBRT Inc.

We would then examine the proposals, and try to pick the best possible proposal. We may also ask you all to vote on choosing a proposal after an initial selection process. When this process was done by YBRT board, the process wasn't any different and what's not chosen one year may turn out to be next years YBRT. We are still in the process of determining the requirements for a successful proposal as well as determining the selection process itself. As soon as we're through writing the requirements, we will post it on LOO and ask for your proposals.

In the meantime, you might want to spend some thoughts on this idea in general, and ask yourself if you could have the motivation and resources to focus on something like this, with the support of YBRT Inc. in the months to come, to stage this event in the fall.

If you have further questions in regard of hosting a YBRT, feel free to email us anytime at ybrtboard@yahoo.com.