Ask not what SinC can do for you. . .

[Sisters In Crime]

posted by Donna Andrews, SinC Chapter Liaison and author of the Meg Langslow & Turing Hopper mystery series.

Potential SinC members often ask what benefits they can get from joining the organization. And most SinC members--including me--have very
decided ideas about what benefits SinC could or should offer.

But just to play devil's advocate--or possibly prove that I'm still a
child of the sixties--I'd like to suggest that we all need to shift our
focus.

Take a look at our mission statement (which you'll find, any time you
want to refer to it, on the home page of the national website):
"To combat discrimination against women in the mystery field, educate
publishers and the general public as to inequities in the treatment of
female authors, raise the level of awareness of their contributions to
the field, and promote the professional advancement of women who write
mysteries."

I suspect a lot of SinC members, even those who participate actively in
their local chapters, rarely if ever give those goals much thought. And
yet they're what SinC was founded to do. And I would argue that the
main benefit we should all expect from participating in SinC is the
knowledge that we are working together for a shared cause--ensuring that
the mysteries we all read (and some of us write) get fair treatment by
the publishing industry and continue to be published.

SinC wasn't founded to promote any individual mystery writer and enhance
her (or his) sales. Yes, we published writers benefit from belonging to
SinC, but that shouldn't be the primary reason we join; it's an
ancillary benefit. And our primary mission isn't to help individual
aspiring writers improve their skills or get published. Providing
educational resources to aspiring writers is a very appropriate activity
for SinC--comes under that "promote the professional advancement"
clause--but again, those resources are an ancillary benefit to members.

And our mission isn't, finally, to serve as a social center for people
who happen to love mysteries, though obviously that's another important
ancillary benefit, at least for members who belong to a chapter that has
an active meeting calendar or who participate in the SinC list.

In pragmatic terms, we're an organization composed of several diverse
groups: published writers, aspiring writers, and avid readers with no
plans to write. In coming up with programs and activities, we all,
chapter and national, need to remember that if we focus too heavily on
any one of the ancillary benefits--promotion, education, or
affiliation--we shortchange some of our members. And more important, if
we only care about the ancillary benefits and ignore the mission, SinC
will lose something important--the passion for equity that led to SinC's
creation in the first place.

So along with asking things like why doesn't National do this to help
writers or why doesn't our chapter offer more programs of interest to
readers, I'd like to encourage everyone to ask, at least occasionally,
"What are we doing to achieve our mission? What am I doing about it?"

Or in words that appeal to a boomer like me: ask not what SinC can do
for you; ask what you can do for SinC.