February Meeting (6 Feb 2021 @ 10:30AM)

News, events, & meetings
#1

Our next meeting will be held on Saturday, February 6th at 10:30AM.

One thought: Should we start doing Zoom meetings? I know that Zoom often has less connectivity issues than Google Meet. I am not as familiar with Zoom and do not know how to schedule/run one, but it seems to be easier to run for most folks (this might not be true). If we aren’t opposed to having a Zoom meeting instead of Google Hangouts would anyone be willing/able to set that up and share the link here? Let me know!

Please use the comments to chat about agenda topics for our February meeting.

Agenda:

  1. Chat about using Zoom vs. Google Hangouts
  2. Review some of our 2021 goals from our December meeting
    • Chris Watkins & resilience work (feeding stories to the newspaper?)
    • Sierra Club organizing
    • post-waste meeting energy, there was a lot of it! (a whole year ago! what!)
  3. How do we want to take next steps forward into actualizing these goals?
  4. How can we bring more people into the work without creating more work for ourselves?
    • How does this website play into this? How can we use this space as an engaging place to discuss and connect with content & people?
  5. From comments:

Meeting Notes in comments

#2

Zoom does have some limitations regarding number of participants/session length if using the free version (I think if you have 3+ people on the call it is limited to 45 minutes). That said, if there is interest in switching platforms, I have access to the Morris city paid account and could set up a recurring meeting and host them going forward.

#3

I can’t make it this weekend, I have an idea of a thing we can do. I think we should kind of copy FREC’s model of existence. FREC or the Fighting for Racial Equality Coalition is a grassroots organization that is dedicated to educating people about racial injustice. They hold regular meetings and make plans for a bigger conference to learn about climate. We should basically do the same thing except on a much smaller scale because we don’t have money. We can dedicate meetings to think of things we want to know or we think people would want to know and then figure out who we can learn that from or how we can teach it.

This is kind of what we already do, but giving it a name and some structure. We can even pick a topic like recycling or renewable energy credits and a date like July 15th and then spend the March and April meetings doing research and picking a venue (venue can be online) and then present the information. And if we think of people that would be better at presenting the information than us, we just give them a platform to speak and don’t have to actually do the work of researching stuff ourselves.

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#4

That’s a great list. @Nic_McPhee will be at the meeting and we can pick his brain about the googleVSzoom options. (Getting on the City web calendar might be helpful in many ways but then we would probably need to pick time and stick to it. So far we’ve taken advantage of being flexible but are not necessarily reaching widely in the community.)

For item 4 we should also encompass discussion of this website. The more this site can work as a resource hub the more people we might draw in. But that takes time and energy. In a time of pandemic the human capital we have is a little depleted.

Item 5 on the agenda should be Sue’s bamboo toilet paper promotion. Check out the Reduce/Reuse section.

#5

Meeting Notes

  • Zoom vs. Google Hangouts
    • Other groups are using zoom so it seems more familiar to folks across the community. It is also smoother, we will try to use it at our next meeting March, 6th @ 10:30AM. @Nic_McPhee will set up the meeting, thanks Nic!
  • How can we bring more people into the work without creating more work for ourselves?
    • How does this website play into this? How can we use this space as an engaging place to discuss and connect with content & people?
    • Syd wants to be engaging
    • Lets do a question of the week! Let people talk about what THEY are up to in a very non-commitment way. We share conversation and updates that have an environment/climate/energy theme but are very based in our friend/neighbors experiences and thoughts.
    • QOTW Ideas: share a vegetarian recipe, how did you come to realize the environment is changing, who do you look up to as an environmental leader, climate policy?? what are your thoughts, how do you alter your lifestyle based on your climate values, there are bigger themes within climate organizing (i.e. its not a consumer problem, its a corporation problem) what are some of the big ideas that you think about but haven’t fully flushed out answers for? what is something you think about but dont have an answer for?
  • Other thoughts:
    • Who Gives a Crap: @Susan_Gilbert & Nic recommend, if you want to try a roll talk to them! They got a lot! It is not killing trees, it is sending money to building toilets in communities.
    • Sue is now using Willies curbside pickup and there are pros and cons. Sometimes you don’t get all the right things. But overall its good and its only $1 and you don’t have to go into the store.
    • We had great discussion about time & safety & community & how THE FUTURE WORKS??? We have no answers
    • As we plan for a March meeting we understand that its harder to attend a meeting that doesn’t have a firm agenda. We also don’t want to invite people to something that requires way too much energy and effort for us to put together. We are trying to find a happy medium of action yet the WCMNCN not utilizing up all of our energy during a pandemic. We welcome thoughts. Please share them.
    • We wonder if @Chris_Watkins has any ideas of how people/brain/thinking power could be utilized to further help him in his work.
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