If you are involved with running a club or society that studies historical fencing then you can affiliate your club to our organisation. The process is relatively simple and painless, and there are several benefits to being affiliated with us.
We have many clubs affiliated to us across the UK, and represent several hundred HEMA practitioners. Because of the size of our organisation, we have been able to negotiate better rates for things like insurance, and have also been able to influence how some of the insurance rules have been written and how they apply to clubs in our organisation. Pulling together like this has allowed us to make things better for practitioners across the UK, both directly and indirectly.
Contents
- Information about insurance
- Benefits of affiliation
- Requirements for affiliation
- Price of affiliation
- Next steps and the affiliation process
- Members-only content
Information about insurance
Please see our page with information about insurance for affiliated clubs.
Benefits of affiliation
Benefits of affiliation include:
- advertising for your group through our website;
- access to advice and help with marketing, fundraising, lesson planning, teaching and recruiting;
- our membership management software to keep track of memberships and renewal dates;
- public liability insurance for each of your students;
- access to instructor public liability for instructors who wish additional cover;
- all club members become eligible for discounts for purchases through our online shop;
- all club members become eligible for discounted attendance fees for AHA-managed events.
We are working to improve the club-management services offered through our website, to reduce the day-to-day paperwork and administrative burden for club officials. Hopefully our club-management services will be a welcome tool and aid to affiliated clubs!
Requirements for affiliation
It is the Academy’s goal to make the hands-on study of the historical arts as safe and professional as possible, while remaining as open and accessible to as many people as possible. As a result, there are a few requirements that affiliated clubs must meet:
- the club must meet the Academy’s health and safety policy for HEMA and for protective gear (and may choose exceed them). But it’s not just a matter of adopting the policies and paying them no attention thereafter – the club must be run in a genuinely safe fashion.
- if the club accepts under-18s, then the club must meet or exceed the AHA Child Protection Policy.
- the club must meet the minimum standards set out in the AHA Equal Opportunities Policy and our general equality and inclusivity statement.
- the club must protect participants’ data in line with the GDPR and the AHA Data Protection Policy.
- the club must have a digital media policy to set out clearly the rights of photographers and the subjects of photography (both for images and video), and what consents and permissions are assumed by default. The AHA Digital Media Policy sets out these rules for sessions, events and activities run by the Academy of Historical Arts; affiliated clubs are welcome to borrow it, or to write a different policy for handling digital media at the club.
- furthermore, there must be a Complaints Policy and a Disciplinary Policy that sets out how these issues will be handled within the group. You could use the AHA Complaints Policy for reference.
- the club must have a constitution document, which must include a suitable termination clause. You could use the AHA guidance for writing a constitution for reference.
Groups are welcome to use these policy documents or to develop similar documents in-house. However, the rules within these policy documents must be met and should be viewed as the minimum recommended standard for professionalism, legal obligations and safety of individuals.
Price of affiliation
The membership fee that we require from all your club members is £15 per person. This includes instructors. It does not need to include people whose only participation is with the admin of the club, who do not do any physical practise.
Membership will run for a year from the date when the membership details are entered into our database, and insurance will run for a year from the date when we process and arrange it (we aim to do this within two working days of receiving the membership details).
Everyone who attends your club should be registered for membership and insurance – there is no scope for allowing people to attend more than a few sessions without signing up for membership. We accept that it is quite reasonable to allow people to trial a few sessions first before committing to it, but by people’s fourth session, they really should be getting their membership sorted.
Next steps and the affiliation process
If you have any questions about affiliating your club to the Academy, please contact us to discuss the matter in more depth.
If you would like to affiliate your HEMA club to the Academy of Historical Arts, then this is the process we will follow.
- Please read the information on our website about affiliating your club, and contact us if you have any questions or to let us know that you would like to go ahead with affiliation. If you would like to go ahead, then:
- Please send us an email with the following information about your club:
- write a short description of your club (ideally around 100-250 words) for inclusion in the Groups section on our website, so that people know what your club does and how you go about doing it;
- please let us know if your club is located within any of the regions already listed on the Groups page or if you are located in a new region of the country (so that we can list your club correctly);
- the address of your training venue (so that we can add you to our map of affiliated clubs);
- any contact information you want to be seen by the public (by which we mean a website, a Facebook page, and suchlike – we would rather not put email addresses or personal phone numbers online because of how this can be harvested by spammers);
- a club logo if you have one.
- We will set you up with a page on the website, and will give you access to our online membership database so that you can manage your club membership.
- You should then fill out the online “add new members” form through the membership database with details for all your club members, and then we’ll send you an invoice for the cost of the memberships and insurances.
- We will arrange the individual insurance policies with our insurer and will update the membership database to reflect this.
Once your club is listed on our website, and once you have sent membership details and payment for the current members of your club, you can consider your club fully affiliated to our organisation.
Whenever you gain new members, you should fill out the “add new members” form through the members database, and we will arrange the insurance policies accordingly.
Please note that we are in the process of updating, automating, and generally streamlining all of this.
Members-only content
We have recently become able to offer members-only content to our affiliated clubs.
To access this, you must be a club leader of an AHA affiliated club, and must be signed into your user account.