First Meeting And Ride

Pick a date, time and meeting place for your first meeting and ride. A central location is best and coffee shops can be great places to meet up. Plan a short meeting and then a ride to follow. Most people want to ride and not sit through a lot of meetings anyway. Make your first ride relatively easy and keep it under 35 mph so 50cc scooters can come along. A lot of 50cc scooterists don’t want to be left in dust.

If it's the dead of winter, you may wish to wait until spring to do this. I have found that most of our gay and lesbian scooter riders are fair weather riders (though we do have a few die hard scooter heads in the club as well).

Your chapter name will be SQREAM followed by the name of your city, ie. SQREAM Denver, SQREAM Seattle, etc. SQREAM is always used uppercase.

Press Release

Send out a press release to all your gay newspapers in town about starting the club and announcing your first meeting. Make sure you allow enough lead time between sending out the press release and your first meeting/ride. Some publications have deadlines a few weeks before they are printed and need the press release early. Send a copy of the press release to David. He will then set up a web page for your city and put up your first meeting information on the page at www.sqream.net.

Below is a copy of a press release you can send out. You can copy it and modify it with your own information.

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Queer Scooter Club Now Forming

A new gay and lesbian scooter club is now forming in (Your City) called SQREAM. SQREAM stands for "Scooter Queers Riding Everywhere and More". The group is open to all gay and lesbian scooter riders and will get together once a month for fun rides in the city. The first official meeting of SQREAM will take place on (Date) at (Time) at (Location). After filling upon on caffeine, the group will spin through (description of your ride).

To join SQREAM, send an email to (Your email), or call (Your Name) at (Your Phone Number).

(NOTE: if you don’t want to publish your phone, you can just use your email)

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Flyer

Create a flyer with the press release information on it. Make copies and leave them at your local scooter shops. Many scooter shops are happy to help new clubs get started. When you are out and about and see scooters with gay stickers on them (rainbow flags, etc) leave a copy of your flyer on their seat. When you run into other gay and lesbian scooters, give them a flyer.

First Meeting

Have a sign up list at the first meeting to collect people's names, addresses and emails. Email is the best way to communicate about upcoming events and rides. Build an email list for the club. Some members may not have email and you may need to communicate with them by phone and/or snail mail.

Website or Yahoo Group

Having a website or Yahoo Group gives people a place to look for information about the club. You can announce upcoming rides, post pics from past rides and collect emails from new people wanting to join the club. If you set up a website or Yahoo Group, we can put a link on the home page of www.sqream.net to link to your site. When people log onto

http://www.sqream.net

They will have choices to go to Denver, Seattle, Chicago, etc.

Questions?

If you have additional questions about starting up a chapter of SQREAM in your city, send them to David.