Walleyes Unlimited Member Articles – if you have something you would like to share with other members, please send your article to the WebMaster. Please share your comments below and interact with other members.
Message from President, Don Pyrah
I hope this finds everyone well at the beginning of 2025! By the time you receive this issue we will be well into the legislative session. We have contracted with Dale Gilbert, who tirelessly advocates for a lot of issues important to members of Walleyes Unlimited, to represent WUM in the upcoming legislature as our lobbyist. Dale has been hard at work researching pending legislative action since early December. We have full faith in Dale and his ability to keep the membership informed. Dale asked specifically for streamlining correspondence, and will be communicating with Steve Harada, President Elect Chvilicek, Treasurer Ben Davis or myself. It will be up to us to disseminate the information that Dale passes to us for the membership to guide our organization’s position and support of WUM for legislative issues over the next 90 days of the legislative session.
I will promise that we will do the best we can to communicate legislative information to you as members. We will be increasing the different ways of communicating with you. Having a single route of communications through traditional emails seems to be falling short of getting the information fully disseminated to the entire organization. Looking at communications from a systems point of view, reliable systems have redundancy, to ensure that there are alternatives to the primary plan. We all need to do better at ensuring our membership is receiving the information they need to remain informed of issues that are important to Walleyes Unlimited of Montana. We are going to be “building a new airplane and flying it at the same time” is the analogy that I am trying to have you envision as we move into 2025. We currently have an email through the communications director, a website, and a magazine that are all great but often lack timely dissemination of information in as close to real time as we can make it. I have been talking about changing our communications strategy for some time and we will also be putting out information through the FACEBOOK page for Walleyes Unlimited of Montana, so that is another source we will be using to improve our information flow to the membership. I will also be asking the communications director, the webmaster, and fish tales to be keeping all materials updated in a timely fashion.
Chapter Banquets, the legislative session, the annual meeting February 8 in Lewistown are all upcoming. There is information out there for all of these, we just need to move it better!
What’s the ask? Do Something Positive! Improve our promotion of the many good things we do for the fisheries and the communities that we live in. ENGAGE! REACH OUT! PASS THE INFORMATION!
And lastly, I am going to push everyone to be better involved to keep WUM growing. Status Quo does not work, organizations either are growing or dying. Make sure your membership isn’t just about money. It must also be your commitment of time to leave sustainable fisheries for our future generations.
Don Pyrah, President WUM
