December 2008 Archives

Meeting held on thurs Dec 11th 2008 at 2nd Moon Cafe.

Attendees: Unny, Dave, Mindy, Anu, Susie

Some of the agenda items we talked about were:
1. guest speaker - still investigating
2. theme - we decided to go with a animal (probably pig) theme where all tables will be named after a rescued pig. Each table will have pig facts and personality traits of pigs, etc.
3. sponsorships - still investigating whether we can get corporate sponsorship and how much
4. other items such as invitee list, invitations, etc seem to be on track.

If anyone has ideas or suggestions, please post your comment to this blog. Thanks.

Carolyn, Ivan, and I met today to talk about applying for University of Minnesota student fees. Lauren G. will also be helping out. This could provide significant funding to expand our outreach at the U of M.

Here are some updates from the most recent board meeting. For all the details, you can read the minutes in the wiki.

Strategy Day Review

We talked about what to do next as far as these sorts of retreats go, and came up with several things. First, Matt, Unny, and I will be meeting this coming weekend to go over the budgets we have and put together a budget for fiscal year 2008 (which started back in August).

Second, the board will meet in January to work on a concrete 3 year plan. The goal is to produce something like our existing strategic plan, but which also includes things like staff, office space, and other things that require spending money.

990s and State Filings

The 990s have been filed. Our filing with the state attorney general will be done in January.

Bridges of Respect

Bridges of Respect is merging with CAA and becoming a CAA program. We will be formally announcing this in the near future.

About a month ago, we applied to the Animal Welfare Trust for a grant to help fund TLOV 2009. We just heard back that we'll be getting $5,000.

This is less than the amount we asked for, so I'm not sure exactly how we'll use it. I think it will probably go towards some combination of staff time, reducing entry fees, and a scholarship/travel stipend program to help bring people to the conference who otherwise couldn't come.

This is pretty exciting news, especially coming after we just recently had another grant approved to fund Veg Week 2009. All told, this is more grant money than we've got from non-UMN sources in a long, long time.

Casey, Cara and I met last night to discuss the silent auction that will take place at our 2009 banquet. The banquet is our biggest fundraiser of the year. The biggest change from 2008 is that we're going to display the items at the auction better to raise more funds. If you have anything to donate to the auction, please let me know. See some of the items we're considering including in this year's auction.