A short history of the group....for those interested!

Back in late 2008 I was trying to find a club or group of people to go rollerblading with in Wellington City. There were none. Well there were a couple of hardcore rollerblading groups, probably all spotty 14 year olds...definitely not what I was after.

However that night I stumbled upon Meetup. There were only about 6 groups in Wellington back then, most of them dedicated to IT stuff and most of them appeared inactive.

But the whole meetup concept seemed like a good way to get together with others so I thought..."Why not start up my own roller blading group and see what happens"

So in November 2008 the "Wellington Rollerblading Meetup Group" was born.

Over the next year the group grew to about 30 members. We held about 10 meetups but interest was rather slack - I'd only ever see 3 or 4 people at a meetup...kinda sad really for a Meetup group!

I was going to chuck it in as a failed venture at that stage. But I noticed that someone had started an outdoors meetup group over that last year. The group seemed pretty popular as it had about 50 members. Only problem was the organiser had gone AWOL and nobody could contact him!

Anyway, I decided that this guy was onto a good thing with this group, but he obviously didn't have the time or energy to carry on. At the same time my niche with rollerblading was kinda small and destined to failure.

So in late 2009 I rebranded my group as: "The Wellington Outdoor Adventure Meetup Group".

I emailed all the members of this other guys group and told them to "Come over to my group which is going to be way more active and interesting!" :)

Amazingly, about 50 people joined up straight away! *evil grin*

So...bloody hell... now I had members, and had to do something!

The first meetup we had as the new group was a day hike to Butterfly Creek in Eastbourne. I spent about a week planning it in the finest detail. Then it pissed down with rain on the day and we had to cancel it!

Not one to be put off however, I rescheduled it for the following week. We had an awesome sunny day, with about 15 people turning up. Considering this was about 40% of the membership at the time I was well pleased...also by the fact that nobody broke a leg or told me afterwards that they'd had an awful time.

Here's a photo from our first ever meetup:


And so the rest is really history. Egged on by that first success I continued to host events and people continued to turn up. And the group has continued to grow by the week.

We hit the 100 member mark, then 200, 300...

Once we got to 200 members some weird stuff started happening. One day I realised there were people at events that I didn't know very well, or even at all. There was the odd gripe coming through saying that there wasn't enough events to satisfy everyones taste. The group had grown so much I just couldn't keep up with maintaining it myself.

That's when I put out the call for volunteers to help me out - I just didn't have the time to host all the events that people wanted!

We formed a leadership team and this team now helps hosting events and just generally keeping an eye on things to make sure the site runs smoothly.

The group carries on today due to the goodwill of all those involved; the leadership team, our event hosts, plus of course all the members who turn up to events. Some members have been around since the beginning and are regulars at events, while some just come to a couple of events while they are touring through NZ.

I've had the pleasure to meet lots of awesome people over the past 3 years and that is one of the greatest things about any group like this. Hopefully you get to enjoy it as much as I do :)

Tim Stokes
Founder
Adventure Wellington

Addendum: In December 2011, Adventure Wellington became a registered not-for-profit Trust. The current trustees are Roy Hoogmoed, Lincoln Gasking and Michael Harvey. We are still growing...