Minutes for the Ritual for Business on 2/15/2020
In attendance: Matt, Barbara, Erin, Devin, Susi, Katie, David, Kimberly, Kitty
Roles: Kitty is Vibes Watcher, Barbara as Parliamentarian, Erin as Devil’s Advocate, and Katie wielded the Spatula.
Agenda was approved as presented.
Minutes were approved as presented (add Matt to attendees).
Treasurer’s Report: 78.9% income YTD. Pledges are only at 62.3%, Expenses at 64.79%. Checking account sits at $11,000.82. Tax letters went out to members; Devin welcomes any corrections.
Committees:
- KidSpace – Drythen continues to come intermittently. He has lobbied for going to the park when it’s nice, he will probably continue to do that. He likes having more space to somersault, undoubtedly. Devin asked that the liaison ask again about the storage space DT said we could use over there; there is stuff where we would be putting ours.
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Communication – Minutes have started to be added to the website
again. Kimberly has added events to the website, but needs blurbs.
The stock photo image will roll over to Spring soon. David noted
that the last posts on the front page are from December for now.
Kimberly noted that the calendar is acting a little wonky: it spins and spins when you try to move from February to January, but it may be transitory. - Social Justice – Blue River Rescue will be on April 4; we have volunteered to lead teams this year and they are excited about that. January 29th will be our Harvesters work day; if you are going please RSVP on Fb or directly to Kimberly so that we have an accurate count.
- Ritual teams – a critique happened, and they discussed replacing the
- Liaison – Rabbi Alpert mentioned that Congregation Kol Ami has a community garden in the Manheim Gardens plots; Barbara wanted to know if we are interested in participating in something like that. We may want to pursue wooden/cork strips again as a way to easily decorate/redecorate the walls in here; Erin suggested we add that to the agenda for future months, so it stays on our radar.
- NomCom – they are pursuing candidates for the April elections.
- Membership – greeter’s table continues to be staffed up, and Jamie is checking in with Jan to see if she is interested in joining formally.
- Stewardship – Matt reported that they are not going to try to get a storytelling event at Fringe this year, but will push it to another year. The Library would be happy to have us participate in their teen programming, but adult programming would be branch-by-branch and would require a 6-to-9 month lead time due to the level of programming they have already. Matt was surprised by how much in advance that fills up.
- Shelving – Devin will be monitoring the sales for wire-rack shelving
- Stripe – Kimberly reported that we have a Stripe account, but their native code does not accept custom amounts or recurring payments, which is exactly what we want. Kit had offered to write us some custom code for making that happen, but has since decided that volunteer code projects is the last thing he wants to do, so we need another solution. Kimberly proposed that we pursue an option (Donor Box) that is free for taking in less than $1000/month, then implements a small fee of 1.5%. This would be in addition to the Stripe fees, so we would lose about 3% of online donations for Stripe and whatever we incur if we go over that amount. Consensed. New Business
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Discuss UU Dues – we got a letter from the Regional UUA
association informing us we would not have representation at the
regional conference. No one was really sure that the Prairie Star
District had any voting power at their conferences, but this comes
from the 2018-2019 fiscal year when we chose not to pay UUA dues for
budget reasons. We now pay at least a portion of our dues to both
the UUA and the Region, but we have not been directly involved in
the Region since the changeover. It’s even larger than the old
District, and their upcoming conference is still going to be many
hours away.
Barbara and Kimberly proposed that some investigation go on to look into how dues, regional conferences, etc work now. One change is that the UUA is now operating under a percentage-of-budget dues structure, which will help us quite a bit. Consensed.