Kia ora! Our AGM is tomorrow evening on our discord server 
Committee, please feel free to post your reports below either before or after the AGM (if it’s after you’ll still need to actually read it out at the meeting).
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Secretary’s Report
South Island has had a great six months! We’ve massively increased our membership (from single digits to a healthy 22!) - most of our members have an expiry date in 2024 which means they signed up this year, likely due to the promises made by the incoming committee in February. This is awesome, because the more members we have, the more funding we get from the Society, and the greater variety of talent we have available to our community.
Currently our membership heavily skews towards Christchurch (I’d say about 70% of our members are from Christchurch at the moment). This is likely due to the fact that ex-SAGA members in the community are now migrating over to NZLARPs (as SAGA isn’t really running LARP anymore) whereas ORBS is still crushing the LARP game in Dunedin. It’d be cool to have more Dunedin members, but in order to do that we’d need to start running some Dunedin games under the NZLARPS banner, which can feel a bit redundant when ORBS is right there. Challenges for the year ahead.
We’ve been very lucky to have access to free library spaces for our series of games this year, which has made the fact that we didn’t have access to our bank account (… still don’t) much less of a problem. However, we are hoping to run something a bit… bigger… next year, and for that we’ll definitely need to be able to spend some of our money. I’m looking into possible community group grants we could use - we haven’t been eligible in the past (as we’re a branch of a national organisation, rather than a strictly Dunedin/ChCh based community group) but I’m hoping we might be able to pull the “there’s been a pandemic and we’re encouraging healthy socialising between adults” card. Watch this space.
The goal for the next year is to continue to supply LARPing opportunities for our members, to grow our community (more members means more LARPs!! More writers! More players!), and to keep the momentum going. It’s been so cool to be able to have fun dress up times again, it’s definitely done a lot for my wellbeing to be able to look forward to running and playing games again, and I’m excited to get stuck back in to writing and creating again with my friends.
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*OURS is no longer called OURS; it’s now ORBS (Otago Roleplaying and Boardgaming Society)
Marketing Officer’s Report
I haven’t been particularly busy this year. We have been starting events back up in Christchurch, but most of the advertising work for them has been handled by Ciarán or Sally, who have both done a fine job. As these are smaller events there was less marketing required and as far as I know we did not have a problem filling games, and even managed to attract some new larpers.
We already have a healthy slate of games lined up for the rest of the year and have begun discussions around plans for next year. As we look at possibly running larger events we may need to advertise a bit more, however there are some issues there which I will discuss further below.
Going forward I would like to work more with SAGA, the University of Canterbury’s local roleplaying and board game club. They have had larping in the past, but due to a generational gap, in part caused by covid, SAGA has some members who are interested in larps but nobody who knows how to run or organise one. We have already had some discussions with their exec but we should coordinate making an appearance at some of their events, either running some introductory games there or simply advertising our own events, and look further into how their schedule lines up with ours.
The main issues that need to be addressed in the coming year are fixing IT issues with the NZLARPs website (last I checked we were unable to upload images, which is frustrating) and gaining access to our bank account, as the current account issues mean we are severely limited in what we can run and our ability to make marketing materials. However these issues are largely dependent upon the National Committee to fix.
Overall I think if these issues can be sorted we have an optimistic year ahead of us.
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Oops, thank you Matt, updated (I’m old)