What We're Working On: November 2020 Board Meeting Minutes

Written By Slow Food Minnesota

Here’s what we talked about at the November board meeting. If I missed anything, please add it in the comments below the article.

AGENDA   

5:00 p.m. Check In

5:15 p.m. Slow Food MN Business 

X:XX p.m. What does equity mean to us and why do we care about it?

X:XX p.m. What do we want to cover for the all member call December 3rd

X:XX p.m. Food justice local highlights page - who are the essential people/orgs to include?

X:XX p.m. What do we want this month’s newsletter to contain

X:XX p.m. What do we want to budget for the IDI inventory?

7:15 p.m. Other Business 

7:30 p.m. Adjourn

5:14PM
Financial Report Review 

Cedar going to look into the 1and1 charge that went to Jane, we’re looking at it. Ann has the credit card and so will call to resolve the charge

5:18
Gather Screening

  • Promoting advertising & promote donating in lieu of a ticket.

  • Board members post to your facebook and email to friends you think will be interested. Say it’s free to attend (you can see it while we foot the bill) and we’re asking you make.

  • Could put a UTM link on the donate links to see who at least clicks through to donate.

  • Tell NATIFs and Dream of Wild Health that we put this link there to donate to them instead of buying a ticket, invite them to join.

  • May want to send out an email a couple days before the movie screening for Gather to our email list.

5:28
All Member Call

  • Opportunity for Anna Mule to talk about the State of the Organization, what they’re focused on, key commitments.

  • Interview period where we have some pointed chapter related questions we can engage her in

  • Open it up for a conversation with anybody on the call

Vidya: instead of leaving it so open ended, will we know who is joining and can we ask them for questions up front? So not to limit it to those people but initiate the conversation to get it going.

Ann: let’s reach out to our network beyond the member list, to expose people in our network, to Slow Food, and to people who might want to get involved. Whether they come from members, board members, but let’s have the board members make a personal invitation to their network.

We want to get some kind of RSVP so we know how many people are going to be on the call. And we ask them to come prepared to ask a question to participate in the discussion.

5:38
EIJ & IDI inventory

→ Anna: The IDI has felt useful and non-linear (who was her facilitator?). Has helped her understand the difference between where she thinks she is and where she actually is. Helpful to have a plan. Important to have no judgments. The goal of the IDI in my mind is twofold: provide each of us individually the opportunity to reflect on what on what are our strengths when it comes to racial justice work and where do we need growth, so we can look at as a group how we can work together. Enable all of us to see how we can frame the conversation. One of the pitfalls of groups I’ve been a part of—they’re really well intentioned but because it’s such a loaded conversation, the act of having the conversation can sometimes not be as productive as it could be3 without stirpping away some of the walls that each of us put up. Approaching the conversation witha  little more vulnerability will allow the conversation to go forward faster and with more purpose.

→ Doug: we’ve been so introspective as a small board. If we could just find some addt’l board members and then as a group. We should get more board members before we do more introspective activity as a board. Maybe what we need to talk about is how we get those new board members on.

→ Vidya: yes let’s get more people on the board first. Maybe we wait until we have a few more people on board to do it. Unless we have a timeline by which we want all of this to be done. Let’s give ourselves a little time, let’s say January/February and if we’ve reached the point where we’ve onboarded a few more people, it will make it a little bit richer.

→ Ann: there’s something in getting an understanding of where you are in relationship to others. Because I can think that I’m doing great, but when that sort of assessment is done as a good facilitator, it can be a really important conversation on where there are gaps. Also, interested in our work being dedicated to this and applied in community doing the work that we are charged to do and intend to do on behalf of the movement. Trying to find the balance between the introspective, deep personal work and doing that in the context of the kinds of things we’ve been talking about doing and engaging our networks in the work of Slow Food. And as we do that, being connected to these goals. 

5:57
Growing Edge

Do we want to have the conversation with them about shared leadership?

  • Introduce ourselves to one other

  • Share Mobius communication model to guide our conversation and create a better understanding of one another

  • Collect information to understand what is needed in order to create a sustainable and vibrant Board to support local Slow Food membership

  • Identify and prioritize the possibilities to improve the Board’s ability to grow your Slow Food chapter

  • Clarity about next steps

  • Evaluation of this process

If equity is present in our desire, then it’s missing in our actions (for example)

Want to make certain that we’re staying focused on delivering these obligations and engaging our networks. 

6:14
October Newsletter FeeDback

6:15
User Persona

Sending out a surveymonkey via email and facebook and whoever responds is our target audience - that is to develop the persona

Not doing aspirational profile: we want to reach out and see who’s interested in what we do instead of pre-defining the people we want to join. This is a service for the community, so we need to understand who is interested in contributing to this with a diverse background. By seeing who responds, then we can define/create a better profile of our needs here. Recommend that we do aspirational persona as stage 2 after we get a better idea of who our current users are. 

6:20
Food Justice Slow Food Page

→ This page should answer the question of how is Slow Food related to food justice/social justice.

→ This is the conduit where people can find all the great work that’s happening that we’re capturing in the Slow Food community. So people can see everything slow food is doing that might have an impact on our local food system.

→ Link in the newsletter

→ There’s an opportunity to make some of these very discreet social media posts, because there’s a lot here so let’s invite them into single instances of this and realize there’s a lot here. One part can lead them to another and another so we can engage them with the website. 

→ If once a week we have one callout being posted on social media/outreach to link back to this page.

6:25
Snailblazer Awards

→ Alert Sean Sherman that we nominated him

→ Put it out to Anna to plan it out—hit her up to let us know if any of them will be awarded so they can be on the member call. Need to confirm a time to jump on the phone with her to go over agenda for member call - ask about a need-based grant for quarterly $ from Whole Foods

→ Where does the money for the event go? All the money goes to National Resilience Fund
→ And why is it only one person who can win?

6:30
Food Justice Orgs & Leaders

  • LEAFF

  • Brightside

  • Appetite for Change

  • Dream of Wild Health

6:33
Newsletter (Upcoming)

  • Member Call

  • Snailblazer Awards (invitation to thing)

  • Share something about thanksgiving from an indigenous perspective — look for an article/video/content and reach out to Slow Food Turtle Island

  • Link a piece of content from Food Justice page

Slow Food Minnesota
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