Draft Minutes of the September 15th, 2005 BoD Meeting

Board Minutes Sept 15, 2005

1. Check in: Mike, Steve, Jason and Joe were in attendance (Margaret arrived at 8:10). Regrets: Adrienne, Celina (Quorum was not met - so meeting was for "information only")

2. Adoption of Agenda

3. Approval of Minutes of July 7th meeting

4. Business arising from Minutes

i. Sneezy Waters - Mike researched the feasibility of holding the Sneezy Waters concert. He concluded after talking to the owner of Compac Disc that the $1000 fee that Sneezy wanted would be too much. It was not likely that Sneezy would be able to draw a crowd large enough to cover his fees.

ii. Canvassing - Logistics problems: No editing was done on the training video that we were going to use to train canvassers. Mike is pursuing the plan to get Tom Wysom to do street canvass training. However, Mike has discovered that soliciting for cash on the street may be in contravention of the city's panhandling bylaw.

"Canada Helps" has not been responding to our request to help set up our online donation system. iii. Pen Editor's contract - this item was covered after Financial report.

5. Reports

i. Financial - PERC received a $5000 donation in July from its mystery donor. This is the 3rd year that this has happened. Joe found the reason for the discrepancy between cash flow and actual figures in Bank account. PERC can now meet its financial obligations for the PEN, PEN editor and PERC Coordinator. Steve recommended that we pay for the period that Mike was laid off. Mike refused as he wanted the organization to have more financial stability. Joe mentioned that he would need to go over the membership figures again.

ii. PEN Editor - We are now able to sign PEN Editor's contract. PEN article due date is today (Sep 15th). PEN editing committee is doing well. Margaret has not approached TD Friends of the Environment yet for a new round of project funding. We will do another application to the Peace Fund in the spring.

iii. Committees

a) Admin General - PERC Users' Guide is now up on the Wiki.

b) Financial Admin - Joe continues to do a lot of the work on this committee. However, some new volunteers are showing promise which should free up more time for Joe to take care of his Board commitments.

c) IT Admin - Some good new people have joined the committee but they require leadership to be more effective. Hardware Fest got rid of over a truck-load of obsolete computer hardware that has freed up some space in the office.

d) Communications - things are still going slowly. The Video project stalled briefly but 4 new volunteers now working on it - they have to be brought up to speed.

e) Fundraising - i) Membership - no real committee at the moment, but some things getting done

ii) Special Events - Disappointing turn out for the Mayor's Walk this year.

Music Benefit is coming up in October, Square Dance in November and Caroling in December. Liz McDermott is doing an excellent job but could use more help.

f) Library - Now has 2 co-leaders of committee. Has been getting organized but requires help getting more donations etc.

g) Outreach - Not happening.

h) Participation - August has been historically a low month, however, 22 people have been interviewed in August which is a 25% increase over the norm. New volunteers take a lot of time to train. The increase may be due to increased advertising and more job descriptions done on the Volunteer Ottawa and Charity Village web sites.

i) PEN Support - may have a chair for committee.

j) Web - committee work covered under I.T. The new Media Wiki is now up. PERC's system was hacked in August - had to reconstitute many files.

k) Management Committee - Oct 6 meeting will be first in over a year. Li Shin stepped down from Leadership Support Team but Jo Wood is stepping in.

l) Coordinator - Strong concerns about membership. Happy about Video Committee as they have a lot of potential to promote PERC. "Theatre of Oppressed" - looking into feasability of getting them to come to town, like we did with "Bread and Puppet" Theatre. Will have more info for next Board meeting.

6. New Business

Lack of Quorum - Celina Tuttle has wanted to resign from the Board for a while. As she has now missed three consecutive meetings she will be automatically removed from the Board as per Policy. Steve suggested that we lower the percentage of Board turnout to reach quorum (i.e. a quorum would be 3 members out of a total of 6). The consensus was to leave the required numbers for quorum as they are (i.e. 4 members if there are 6 on the Board).

7. Next Meeting - 20th of October 2005

8. Checkout