Running an Independant club supporting organisation ( trust, supporters association ) can be a truly thankless task , when I resigned as a Director at Leigh my wife ( Dick Jones on here ) took up the position of secretary of LISA ( Leigh Ind Sup assoc ) , originally founded to help bail the club out in a period of financial difficulty
The original stated purpose was to pay a players contract, and we had several interesting discussions about the money raised being used to pay bills, travel costs, being tipped into the ' Black Hole ' of the clubs bank account, not to mention a near riot when I suggested due to potential salary cap issues that like the Fax Trust LISA s funds could pay for junior development ( basically take ownership of it )
We have recently had fans and club directors suggesting that LISA was underperforming when compared to other official club income streams , suggesting the volunteers that run it should concentrate on increasing its membership and organising events to raise funds
The type of organisations only really come to the fore when crisis looms , our last big successful push was on the back of us loosing the support of our former Chairman, the late Arthur Thomas after the collapse of his business due to a serious bad debt
In the past LISA along with the agreement of the club has tried to engineer ' Exclusivity ' of information about signings and the like at meetings, Although the information has usually quickly been passed on
It seems things at Fax are a little tense at the moment, the pressure created by the new structure and the financial ' carrots ' available from the RFL seem to be causing fall outs