This is a policy that is very misunderstood. This is not about greed, but rather is about fairness to everyone. Your family membership includes immediate family (parents and students) living in your home as well as grandparents.
Please understand for many of our events, we are personally, financially responsible for contracted headcounts, deposits, etc. In many cases, we prepay tickets in order to offer you the best seating and pricing available for events. We are not talking about a small amount of money….it is thousands of dollars per school year. We have had too many people leave us hanging with unpaid tickets without regard to the effect on us personally and that is why we have a membership fee. We do not charge a significant amount at all and it does not cover all of the expenses we have running this group, but it does help with some of the financial liability.
- Many events have limited spaces available. It is not fair to take seats from another member family by bringing your non-member friends. They are always welcome to join HFC.
- Many friends have told members they want to attend but they refuse to pay a membership fee. That’s fine and totally up to them….but they should not benefit from the group discount pricing if they are not willing to pay $30 (especially when in most cases the discount they are wanting to use more than covers the membership fee).
- We have had families go against this policy and the friends not be willing to follow our meeting instructions (or not be informed) leaving our group waiting and losing access to best seating. VERY frustrating and not fair to have members affected this way.
- We are always happy to book a date for a group of members wanting to attend together if minimum requirements are met. If an event is ticketed assigned seats, we are happy to seat you and your friends/group together. All attendees simply need to be HFC members.
- We are happy to serve as your group’s “fieldtrip coordinator” which gives us a greater standing as a community with venues than a bunch of smaller groups! Your group gets the benefit of offering your families access to a ton of events and our group gets the benefit of better negotiating for everyone for events. It’s a win-win.
- OCCASIONAL EXCEPTIONS: (If an event has an exception, it will be posted; otherwise, our group listing will be for current members only)
- If we are short meeting required minimums, Admin may open to non-members to avoid cancellation of event
- If an event has a large financial commitment for Admin personally, event may be opened to non-members to help lower everyone’s cost
PLEASE NOTE: We try to be as fair and transparent as possible; however, there are a few exceptions to who we will approve to join/re-join HFC:
- Previous members known to use our work to arrange events to pad a group event calendar (especially when they use our event list to help justify high membership fees.
- Previous members known to have caused conflict/drama in our group or known to not respect rights of others to have differing opinions etc.
- Group leaders known to support the purposeful, intentional overcharges to their members by presenting events as higher cost than actual without disclosure to families.