Thanks Jake. I fully agree with your view, and you did a great job of articulating what I meant in an earlier post about working together not necessarily being "popular."

The biggest hurdle is probably going to be getting the balance right between this 5-families approach being a help or hindrance.

I can only go off of personal experience here, with the NE example that I gave. Did this solve all schedule conflicts? Absolutely not, but at least people made more informed, risk-based decisions when scheduling events on top of one another. Healthy organizations will respect the difficult choices that their constituents make, but it helps when they're all part of the process, or at least have the info (and rationale) well in advance.

EDIT: While this would be under the national umbrella organization, the intent is for the bulk of the effort to happen regionally. Where regions meet, there can (and should) be further discussion, but there is no intent here to add more national bureaucracy. Honestly, there is no intent to add bureaucracy at all, this is truly intended to help.

Mike