Minutes  Newlands Greenlands Steering Committee

January 24, 2012

Present:  Kay Bingham, Vernita Cannon, Cathy Conery, Tim Eaton, Alison Rogers, Deborah Yin

City of Boulder Sustainability

Cathy gave a brief update of the last meeting she attended.  We thought it would be a good idea for Kristen Hartel to set up a table outside Ideal Market as an outreach effort.  We are also wondering if Kristen might get involved with the summer film at the Ideal parking lot. Cathy has emailed her film contact, Suze Bragg, at Ideal about this summer’s film, but has not heard back from her yet.

Events

Vernita spoke with Nancy Peter and the two of them have decided to head up the Progressive Dinner if we want to do it this year.  After much discussion about what time of year we might want and how locavore we may want to be, we finally decided on Saturday, May 19.  We will probably call it a Community Progressive Dinner and ask participants to support their community businesses and food sources.   We will use it as an introduction to smaller locavore dinners to possibly be held later in the growing season.

With that on the agenda, and the idea of having a newsletter out by March 17, we started thinking about what else we could plan to be included in the newsletter.  After much discussion again, we finally decided to see if Kristen would be interested in helping us organize (and pay for) an event at Foothill Elementary sometime around Earth Day (April 22) that could possibly include a few other north Boulder neighborhoods.  Ideas include Energy Smart, Foothill Elementary gardens and/or the Community Gardens, and speaker Al Bartlett.  Cathy will contact Kristen about this.  Once we know what Kristen might be interested in doing, Kay can find out who is charge of the Foothill Elementary gardens and Alison can contact someone with the Community Gardens.  We will also see about being involved with the Ideal summer movie again.

The remainder of the agenda was tabled until our next meeting so we could adjorn and listen to the State of the Union Address.

Action Items

• Vernita will look for the old progressive dinner signup sheet in her computer and will get in touch with Nancy Peter to inform her of the proposed date.
• Cathy will contact Kristen regarding an April event and will also follow up with Ideal regarding the summer movie.

Minutes  Newlands Greenlands Steering Committee

September 27, 2011

Present:  Kay Bingham, Vernita Cannon, Cathy Conery, David Cook, Diane Merker, ML Robles, Alison Rogers

RTD

David Cook presented information to the group regarding the proposed 2012 changes to 14 RTD bus routes.  Of most concern to our neighborhood is the SKIP.  The proposal would reduce the frequency during peak hours from every seven minutes to every 10 minutes.    This amounts to a 30 percent reduction.  There will be 23 meetings throughout the RTD district.  The Boulder meeting, which will be held Monday, October 3, 2011 at the East Boulder Senior Center at 7 pm, will likely be very well attended.  David suggests that we notify any friends who may live near some of the other locations to help boost the other public meeting turnouts.  If we want to send emails, it is probably better to send to individual board members rather than to send to an email address that says it will be read by all board members, because they may not really see it.  ML will post to the website; Kay will send out a mass email.

Business

We currently have $26 in our cash box.  We received some donations during the garden tour and also sold an online ad.  Rules for the online ads were reiterated:  Advertiser must live in Newlands, have something green to say about their business, and pay $10.  Steering committee members will receive an ad free of charge.  We currently have 157 registered users.  We will try to start having a featured advertiser on the homepage each month including a short interview with the advertiser.  We will send out a questionnaire for the advertisers to answer and then post it on the website homepage.

Fall Book Club

The book Low Carbon Diet is set up like a workbook and begins with figuring out your own individual carbon footprint.  It then goes to address various typical systems, such as washing dishes and clothes and then looks at household systems such as furnaces.  The goal is to reduce your footprint by 5,000 pounds in one month.  We would meet once a month and begin by figuring our carbon footprints.  We will wait to make a final decision on this until after we see what kind of interest we have in the Reskilling Groups.

Energy Smart

Kristen would like us to have a house party and invite neighbors who are interested in an audit.  The general feeling was that this is probably not worth the effort, because of a potential small turnout.

Progressive Dinner

We would like to see about resurrecting the Progressive Dinner.  In the past it was usually held in April and was headed up by Chris Munro and Nancy Peter.  All agreed that April would be good.  Vernita will talk to Nancy Peter to see if there would any interest from Nancy and Chris to do it again.  Alli Angoli has expressed interest in helping out.

2B & 2C

Our program will be held at the church on Thursday evening (September 29, 7 pm).  Vernita will reconfirm with the people from the church and will meet them there early and help them set up.  We will not serve refreshments.  Kay will bring her program box including a sign-up sheet.  Cathy will bring ballot literature.  Alison and Cathy will bring signs.  Those people who have the Greenlands yard signs will all try to get something on them about the meeting and put them up to advertise the event. Cathy passed around a sheet with the names of people and businesses who are publicly endorsing the ballot measure.  There was a discussion about whether or not Newlands Greenlands could/would list themselves as endorsing the measure.  We quickly discovered that whether or not we could/would publicly endorse anything was an issue that would take a meeting of its own and time was running out.  We decided to table that and devote a separate meeting to it one evening in the near future.

Reskilling Groups

ML offered to lead a group around the topic of using green materials for home remodeling, such as paint and cabinetry.  Time was running out and we decided to continue this conversation at our next meeting.

Action Items

• ML will post the RTD info to the website; Kay will send out a mass email.
• Vernita will talk to Nancy Peter to see if there would any interest from Nancy and Chris Munro to head up this spring’s Progressive Dinner.
• Kay will work on our idea of featuring an advertiser on the website each month including a short interview with the advertiser.  We will send out a questionnaire for the advertiser to answer and then post it on the homepage.
• For the Thursday evening program:
• Vernita will reconfirm with the people from the church and will meet them there early and help set up.   Kay will bring her program box including a sign-up sheet.
• Cathy will bring ballot literature.
• Alison and Cathy will bring signs.
• Those people who have the Greenlands yard signs will all try to get something on them about the meeting and put them up to advertise the event.

Present:

Kay Bingham,

Present:

Present: