Meeting Notes 9/10/08

Meeting goals/agenda

1) Talk about when a regular meeting time will be set

• Set for once a month on Friday mornings scheduled at the previous month's meeting
• Next mtg is set for October 3rd, 9am, in the student commons
• Decided that it would be worthwhile to have some form of treat (suggestion of of coffee and bagels) for all monthly meetings that rotates between all of us - Ann volunteered to go first. If you have any bagel or cream cheese allergies you should let her know.
  

2) Binder contents and info from previous cohorts

• Didn't really say too much about this except that Becky noticed that there were guidelines how to start a class, should we decide to incorporate that into what we do
• The binders were returned to 175C and are available for everyone to look whenever they get the chance

3) What are we actually going to do?

• One thought was to break our work into three sections each with roughly equal number of us
  a) work on the retreat
  b) work related to the Institute
  c) work directed at the University and/or community at large
• This thought was later balanced by the idea that we don't really necessarily need to be in groups of three since other partnerships may already exist (e.g. Kevin Gibbons and the Discourse idea).
• In effect the total number of projects and the division of labor for each of those projects was tabled until after the retreat.
• As for specific ideas a few standouts emerged from the list generated during our May meeting
  a) Organizing the retreat
  b) Bringing in Wellstone Action Training to help run a personalized activist training course
  c) Environmental Issue Discourse Series
  d) Lobbying especially as part of work with a partner organization (e.g. League of Conservation Voters)
  e) A Doris Duke Fellows (as many as possible from all schools) retreat or service learning trip down to New Orleans using Ashleigh's contacts
• These ideas were combined into chunks
  a) Discourse + potentially a connected class
  -> Paul and Emily
  b) Retreat Organizing
  -> Julia, Ruth, and Becky
  c) Lobbying & working with partner organizations like Wellstone or Conservations Voters
  -> Nina, Ann, Debbie, Emily
  d) Potential New Orleans spring break trip
• At this point we decided to table further discussion until after the retreat. The thought was that we should take these ideas with us and flesh them out, or use energy from the retreat on other ideas that form while there.

4) Other

• Emily and Becky expressed interest in exploring the microloan idea more
• While we were meeting Julia and Paul's former student, Annie, was holding a meeting of rethinkwi.org which has just started a recycling ambassadors program at football games. This was seen as another potential group to partner with as well as something that we could help promote since they are always looking for more volunteers.

Feel free to add to this post with anything that I missed.