Board Meeting Notes, November, 2011

Present: Karen, Peggy, Harold, Doug, Suzanne, Christine, Lisa

Peggy will moderate

Harold bin gardner

Doug will take the notes

Opened with Silence

Checkins held

Calls with Christine, Ed, Suzanne—leave for next time

Kai Degner: never heard back, remove from bin

Add annual open member meeting: open invitation to December Board call; Harold will write the invitation and prepare for posting a financial report, in a simple format

What per cent of our Budget to devote to any one project?

• Do we spend it all, first come first served? But we are not here to have a bank account....

• Prefer to spend some time on awareness, and not adopt a specific policy

• Articulate a few incentives; what are we intending to do with our funds; different from Access Queen; how do we make these decisions?

• Not easily, complex, emergent

• It was good to have a little bit of the naiveté; we'd ought to be able to be flexible to meet the needs; not sure we can be informed by the past;

• Do we say there has to be an hiatus, and they have to have a year off?

• Haiti does so much good work; could have used more money in Chile for the WOSONOS--that was good work too; more of a conversation of with Haiti, not shutting the door

• Everybody does not have the same cultural ability to ask; both Chile and Haiti helps a lot of people for a little bit of money

• Not clear what the issue is; is there some other principle that needs to be named?

• May be we should have a per centage for projects; Haiti depleted our treasury; maybe 75% of our funds will go to projects; as against a Dollar amount; Need to keep it flexible; let's say they ask for 3500 and we only have 4K in the treasury

• Access Queen does not just say, "OK," but says "I will see what we have"—no promises, no funding of one person twice in a row; very fluid; "I only have $X, does that mean you can still go?"

• We had over $5,000 when Haiti request came in; as of now we have less than $3,000; we have Checking and PayPal accounts

• We have not had a lot of requests for money; we don't have a list of projects all waiting; we need to have a conversatino with them, so they develop other opportunities; their fund raisers could be developing some fund raising, too.

• Temporary conclusion: we are wanting to be as flexible as possible, but do not want to go over a certain per centage

• Let's agree we do not need to talk about it more today, but want to create a placeholder; we seem to create the wheel all over again each time; and the shared willingness to let things emerge; see no reason to keep it in the bin;

• We will mark it done; but there is something for us to consider this again face to face; we should put out that other people can request support; and we would probably get more donations

• Suzanne will speak with John Engle about what the capacity is in Haiti to get more donations elsewhere and become selt-supporting.

December 19^th is our next meeting.

Checkouts concluded the meeting