The format of these minutes has been adapted for the wiki. See the file attached to this page for Oliver's original document containing tabulated items.
Chair: Jemika
Minutes: Oliver
Item 1: Belong Report
- Our relationship with Belong has been really fraught in the past
- Belong has a new CEO named Christine Grouse
- Liz has maintained effective communication between her and the CEO over text message
- Liz and Indy met the new CEO 4 months ago to voice concerns and problems with previous CEOs
- New relationship has been a breakthrough and our immediate problems with Belong are solved for the time being
- We have been able to hang onto our our autonomy through this
- Meeting planned with CEO for 10 days to communicate our principles and programs (mutual aid, etc…)
- ACTION: Meet with Belong CEO and report back to the group
Item 2: Cafe, Free Shop, Garden, Catering Discussion
- Are we going to continue with these?
- MOTION: Continuing with the Social Space - ADOPTED
Item 3: Working Groups
- Structuring our work around working groups will make sure things are done and ensure that people are upskilled.
- We are looking for people to sign onto working groups which will make sure the jobs are done in the short term and work out long term processes
- We will work out the details of what these jobs will involve and their mandates in the working groups
- Management
- Coordinating with Belong to find out what groundskeeping and maintenance needs to be done.
- Jemika, Ru
- Groundskeeping
- Includes making sure maintenance of the Social Space and surrounding grounds is happening. This includes doing big, semi-regular
- Ru, Tom, CB, Jenny, Kelly
- Shopping/ Stores
- Doing the shopping, knowing what's needed in the kitchen, doing stocktakes and creating a shopping list based on what will be needed. (Car required)
- Nancy, CC, Kelly, Liz, Izzy, CB, Oliver
- Financial
- Currently the banking system is counting the money from cash donations and keeping it under liz’s bed with the shopping receipts
- This working group will figure out a banking system, create a finance procedure and set up an Aus Bank
- Jemika, Camila, CC, Cam
- Recruiting, rostering and procedures
- Making sure new vollies are being recruited, retained and trained
- Preference for a culture of upskilling rather than a rigid structure
- Are volunteers having a good time in space?
- Beris raised that when she went to volunteer she got onto the MSS Facebook but we didn’t get back to them. It was only later talking to people at the cafe that she was able to sign up.
- We need to liaise with the Social Media working group to connect with vollies reaching out.
- The group should be trying to get more local community involvement would be a good thing
- We should develop a database or procedure for the roster rather than a week by week thing in order to organise the meeting better.
- Talking to people while you serve them is a good way to get people interested in the space and volunteering here
- We need to develop a long term plan to get local people into the space
- Indy, Kevin, cam, CB CC Nancy, Annika, Elisa, Oliver
- Laundry
- Doing laundry and liaising with local government to get a laundry
- Jemika, Jenny, Tom, Camila, Beris, Rowan, Ru, CC
- Free Shop
- Running the free shop to sort, organise, put on the racks drop off thing to op shops that we don’t want
- As a side note: Donations don’t go into the free shop straight away, they go into the back to be sorted.
- Issy, Elisa, Jenny, Nancy, CB, Camilla, Beris, Ru, Tom
- New Manifesto
- We need a new manifesto to define our values and develop our ideas since we wrote the last one.
- Oliver suggested that they should come up with some ideas and run a discussion group and use the notes from that for the new manifesto for that to be confirmed by the groups
- Emphasis that the whole group should be engaged with developing these ideas and this group is just to streamline the writing of the manifesto
- Issy, elisa, jemika, indy, lachlan, kevin, liz, ru
- Kevin raised that perhaps the definitions of the working groups are to adhoc, we may need a strategy work group to coordinate everything
- Working groups will have to work this out
- Oliver raised that ultimately most of this will fail in some shape or form and we will need to tweak it, we need more meetings to develop these discussions
- Management
Item 4: Housekeeping
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- Documentation
- Unfortunately there is is little documentation of what we have been doing for the past few years
- Kevin will be taking pictures of people in the space with permission
- Also recording testimonials from vollies and locals
- Finance
- 4073 bank balance
- 750 income from catering
- Laundry
- Laundry has been slowed by BCC red tape
- Peter Russo has donated a washer and dryer and will pay for install
- People doing it tough can use the laundry
Item 5: Incorporation discussion
- We need to legally exist to get grants, work with pollies,
- Incorporate we need to create a board of directors
- we can use model rules provided by the government or make up our own
- Arguments raise against incorporation because we are against the state and capitalism. Incorporating is a buy in into the system
- While we need more structure, do we need more money via grants?
- Arguments raised for incorporation (still against government and capital) we exist in this society and we need grants for that if we want to be more ambitious than the kitchen,
- By incorporating we can lease spaces from the government, we can have more legal autonomy from Belong, and people can make tax deductible donations
- Liz and Kev started the space with an arts grant
- The choice lies between limiting autonomy and ideals (not incorporating) or resources and future projects (incorporating)
- We can get grants to do so many more projects
- If we do this we are not still doing Mutual Aid but that may be ok and we can support genuine Mutual Aid groups in the space
- The radical politics are a big draw for some people
- We should be cautious of the road to incorporating and not get into pitfalls
- Let's be critical of the use of a board of directors
- Grants could be used for special projects and we could try rely on donations for the day-to-day operations
- Incorporated associations can work if we make them all work.
- An alternative is getting a separate incorporated group made by activists involved in the volunteer group. This would not be officially associated with the Social Space but SS would use this for grants.
- It was raised that we should put a pin in this for discussion in a general meeting in 3 weeks time for further development of the groups ideas and Lachlan to flesh out more of a proposal
- Oliver was tasked with organising the next meeting
- Kevin mentioned Belong may be having board meeting then.
- Oliver proposed that we end the meeting which was adopted by a vote