The 2023 Chronicle

A CLUB FOR LIFE

A YEAR IN REVIEW

lives of OMs, was the fulcrum upon which we successfully matched mentors with mentees. And when the club called, OMs who had matriculated in the past ten years answered in full voice, putting up their hands to pay it forward and provide the types of advice and guidance for our young men passing through the gates at the top of Warriors’ Walk that the school and parents simply wouldn’t be in a position to impart. The success of the programme in its first year has been a gratifying game changer, and approbation from parents, staff, Old Boys and the communities of other schools quickly matured from a trickle to a flood! The proliferation of younger Old Boys involving themselves energetically and meaningfully in the affairs of their branches and of the central committee has been a cause of tremendous satisfaction. In days of yore this type of engagement was seen as the preserve of OMs who had somehow earned their stripes, while all along a shared passion and willingness to be involved in the grand direction of the club were in fact all that were required. In this context, improved communication between the central committee and branches, and also with individual Old Boys on more meaningful and prolific scales, has ensured a marked step change in levels of trust between the club and its constituents, which in turn has ensured this fertile ground for engagement sooner in the life cycle of an Old Boy. Further evidence of the successes of constant and consistent communication was the proliferation of branch events – not just the frequency of gatherings, but more specifically the variety and appeal, along with the fact that events were taking place in “frontier towns”, locations where Old Boy events of any sort had hitherto never take place: Grand Baie, Amsterdam, White River, Mazabuka… Cricket matches, barge cruises, bird-watching walks, quizzes and networking events emerged as comfortable adjuncts to the more traditional golf days and dinners. In some cases, new life was breathed into flagging regions like Zululand, Eswatini, Johannesburg and Western Australia, and in the final tally our worldwide network of 11 branches and seven affiliates were able to achieve, on balance, almost an event a week during the course of 2023! Much of the success of these occasions can be attributed to the power of OM+ in its ability to trace, contact and connect Old Boys, but by August a new and highly effective megaphone for communicating with OMs was the advent of branch/affiliate WhatsApp groups. In short order, almost 1,500 Old Boys were instantly kept in the loop as the concept took root. By the end of the year the UK, Durban and Cape Town branches were vying for the mantle of being the most connected WhatsApp groups, with the lads in the Western Cape eventually claiming the honours with over 300 (and counting) members keeping their fingers on the pulse of branch activities.

Written by Murray Witherspoon

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he year 2023 was the backdrop to the second year of the club’s conscious delivery of our mantra of providing opportunities for Old Boys to ask for help, offer help, share knowledge, share war stories, and do good business – in short, to become more useful in the lives of the men who have shared the unique bonds created at a school cupped in the Balgowan valley of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. Since the earliest days, Old Michaelhousians have communicated readily with each other and with the school but the effects of the Old Boy diaspora, coupled with the growing distractions of modern everyday life, required the club to become more proactive in industrializing ways of greasing the paths of connectivity across generations and geography. To this end, the Director of the club, enthusiastically assisted by two full-time Friendraisers (one online and the other in the world of face-to-face interaction), set about joining the dots to deliver on the club’s oft-quoted slogan. The Ambassador Programme slid into cruise mode with no fewer than 24 OMs – professional sportsmen, awarding winning musicians, globally published authors, world-famous photographers, documentary film-makers, ground-breaking chemists, and business leaders in fields as diverse as finance, mining, artificial intelligence and sustainability – coming back to Balgowan to give freely of their experience, expertise, advice and enthusiasm for their old school. It’s next to impossible to quantify the value of these engagements to our academic and sporting departments, and to our clubs and societies. Unlocking this willingness on the part of our Old Boys to come back to where it all began has been a major feather in the cap of our club. Delivering on our ambitious programme of pairing every A Block boy with a mentor by the time he applied pen to paper during Finals was a significant area of focus during the first half of the year. The programme also allowed us to introduce our matriculants to the power and potential usefulness in their lives of being members of our club; to demonstrate that the club is more than an attractive and tastefully appointed pile of bricks overlooking the new aquatics complex, and that membership is more than dusting off your tie every five years for a song and dance at one’s gaudy dinner. The programme also allowed us to prove the verity of the idea that one is never too young or inexperienced to be a useful mentor. OM+, our powerful online tool for facilitating much of the value the club brings into the The fruits of our labours tell a story of connection between Old Boys like no other time in the club’s 12-decade history.

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