SC minutes 11/17/2021

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EEAC Steering Committee Meeting Minutes
November 17, 2021
Wed 5:30 pm – 7 pm
Online Zoom Meeting

Attending: 
Shig Matsukawa, Bonnie Ralston, Bonnie McGuire, Fran Agnone, Mary Leou, Mary Most, Mike Zamm, Andrew Stone, Ray Pultinas, Robert Wallace, Isa Del Bello

Visiting: Ilana Weinstien

Committee Reports and Updates

  1. Approve previous meeting minutes: 

EEACminutes20210921 and EEACminutes20211020 (in process!)

  1. Program Committee (Fran acting program chair)

Planning Annual Meeting Document: Year-47-2021_EEAC-Annual-Meeting_Faciltators-Guide-20211208.pdf 

 General Annual meeting logistics

  • Shift to “State of the Field” update — Panel: State of EE in K-12 / school / government agency / non-profit / for-profit 
  • Sarah unable to attend but setting everything up via zoom in advance 
  • Bonnie McGuire will act as MC (Give intro, overview of talking points, and facilitate transitions)
  • Fran will be the behind scenes person (zoom, q&a, panel, etc.) 
  • Isa will monitor chat 
  • Sarah will send out the email to google group for promo

Panel Discussion: 

  • Fran curated panel with 180 degree approach: 3 different perspectives in the field, Consensus that 3 panelists is enough
  • EEAC will provide a stipend through paypal for the moderator.
  • Mary L volunteered to provide a lens to the panel question bank and collaborate with Fran.

Slideshow updates

  • Mike and Mary L. will collaborate in creating memorial slides honoring Sam and Terry   
  • Communications will create individual slides to promote newsblog entries and youtube
  • Nominating committee
  • Mike will send slides to fran 
    • asking for volunteers 
    • Deadline for noms is dec 10 — meeting is 2 days before (if anyone is feeling inspired, email us) 
      • Tell how to nominate and self nominate 
      • Elections in january  
  • Fran will reach out individually if there are any issues with slides 

Networking and member feedback

  • Group consensus is in favor of breakout rooms with attendees randomly assigned
  • SC members will be distributed evenly in breakout rooms
  • Bonnie R will generate prompts for breakout rooms

Additional thoughts

  • Update on River? Or, they might attend…

Fran will walk Sarah through tracking the number of attendees through her zoom account.           

  1. Communications
    1. Communication Committee Meeting and updates
      • Held a meeting on 11/3/2021 at 5:30
        • Much time spent was onboarding new acting secretary (Isa) 
        • Need for streamlining document storage (Dropbox & Google Drive)
        • Change ownership of eeac.info@gmail.com? 
      • Rebranding/Logo Redesign:
        • Still looking for a volunteer graphic designer!-  
        • EEAC Rebranding Plan 
          1. Rebranding/Redesign of Logo
          2. Identity system for print and web
          3. Templates for regularly produced ephemera (e.g. ballots and flyers)
      • Member engagement:
      • Marketing Plan: (Annual) – status report
  1. Website and Database Updates: eeac-nyc.org
  1. Newsletter-blog using WordPress.
  2. Social Media (current numbers, posts that were successful, future posts)
    • Facebook – facebook.com/eeacnyc (feed in homepage: eeac-nyc.org)
      EEAC NYC @EEACNYC  Facebook page created 2/8/2012.
      • As of 11/3/2021:
        1. Likes: 300
        2. Followers: 348
        3. Posts: 
    • Twitter – twitter.com/eeacnyc (feed in homepage)
      EEAC-NYC @EEACnyc  Joined June 2014.
      • As of 11/3/2021:
        1. Followers: 248 (to see list of followers, sign in to twitter)
        2. Tweets: 134
        3. Following: 376 (to see who we are following, sign in to twitter)
    • Instagram – instagram.com/eeac.nyc (feed in homepage)
      eeac.nyc Env. Edu. Advisory Council  12/10/2020.
      • As of 11/3/2021:
        1. Followers: 63 (to see list of followers, sign in to instagram)
        2. Posts: 12
        3. Following: 2 (to see who we are following, sign in to instagram)
    • Eventbrite – eventbrite.com/o/eeac-4619649759
      EEAC  First event via Eventbrite 11/13/2013.
      • As of 11/3/2021:
        1. Followers: 18
        2. Events hosted: 30
    • YouTube – youtube.com/channel/UCqBe8uXo9bPXgSHKHgmR1oA
      EEAC nyc  Joined 2/23/2021.
      • Need 100 subscribers before we can get a custom URL link,
        example, youtube.com/channel/eeac-nyc 
      • As of 11/3/2021:
        1. Subscribers: 7 
        2. Views: 41
        3. Videos: 2
    • Ways to increase engagement? Project for 2022? 

Bonnie R. will join the communications committee at their next meeting (Dec. 1, 2021) to finalize membership benefits to be posted on the website. There may be time to discuss potential transition to an integrated membership system embedded in the website. Regarding a marketing plan, Bonnie M. will share planning document with Isa so that she can begin working on next steps for this project.

Mike raised a question as to why we have less submissions in the professional learning database that anticipated. The response was that the first strategy was to build a database and “people will come” — this did not happen. They then decided to take a different approach by EEAC preliminarily posting materials and then reaching out to respective orgs for approval to put on the website. This was also tabled due to bandwidth. We have since decided to use the annual meeting as a push for folks to submit on their own. We will assess further need for outreach in the new year. If outreach is needed, Mike has draft press release but we will hold off until database is more robust.

Bonnie M is looking for any EE related topic to go on newsblog — she has continued outreach for submissions to no avail. She clarified that blogs can be shorter than the size of articles that went into the newsletter — it can be a paragraph as part of anthology (book reviews) or content that is just a few paragraphs. Essentially, submissions can be varied in length and all are useful. In gathering ideas for the newsblog, Mary L. has student reviews of braiding sweetgrass. She will also think of collaboration for students in future. Ilana is interested in writing nature highlights to contribute — she has a whole bunch of stuff to share. Other ideas include member highlights as well as using social media to boost outreach.

  1. EEAC and NYSOEA Partnership
    1. Conference was great! 
  1. Projects Forum
    1. REPORT ON SYLLABI BANK and FOLLOWUP ON PROJECT IDEAS FROM FORUM V- focus on outreach in support of the proposed environmental rights amendment to the state constitution

Mike thanked everyone for their support of the environmental rights amendment effort; there were 2m votes. For TEEP database there have been 900 downloads. Unexpectedly, there hasn’t been much participation from NYS colleges although parks and community associations in the state have downloaded syllabi. Mike will reach out to Eban Goodstein to see if he will submit a course. Mike next wants to start an effort “right to learn of how nature works,” and idea that came from forum last year. Mike also mentioned the weather stations that City College is distributing. It’s 5k to put a weather station in a school. Mike will provide a list of all schools that are currently participating. No updates for the climate solutions center on GI — it was a highly competitive bid.

  1. Adaptive Plan Accountability
    1. Retreat — purpose and date discussion — to be discussed
    2. COOP (Bonnie M.)

Bonnie R. reported that member engagement work is the biggest item in next steps. This year we had virtual semi-retreat. In the coming year, Bonnie would like to have a larger scale retreat once we have new SC members. Everything else in progress. 

  1. Membership and Finance: Mary Most 
    1. Finance Report (see separate file)
    2. Question: Usually memberships received in October (eg with registrations for Nov Annual Meeting) are good through Dec of the NEXT YEAR. I suggest we offer that again?  

TO DO: zoom

  • Create “2022 Membership Drive” Eventbrite, then edit link on website at www.eeac-nyc.org/membership — invite all GoogleGroup subscribers and Eventbrite subscribers to join or renew. We’ve held off since the pandemic. 
  • Current Link: https://2021-eeac-membership.eventbrite.com 
  • Create “invoices” for organizational memberships, email each organization’s primary contact including a chart showing their current members, titles, and contact info. 
  1. TO DO: Contact the remaining senders of checks dating back to Nov 2019 recently (spring 2021) located by Mary Leou at NYU, and make arrangements for replacement payment via PayPal or Eventbrite. 
  2. For the record: Amalgamated Bank still shows Judith Hutton at NYBG as primary contact. River is also on the account. Requested in Jan 2020 that they update signatories to Mary Most, Sarah Pidgeon (remove Jacqueline Pilati, Judith Hutton). 
  3. Eventbrite list maintenance should move to Programs or Communications. Has this happened yet? 

Mary has no additional updates since the PDF she shared last month. She is Looking forward to getting new members through on Eventbrite. She suggested that we get an EEAC annual zoom account as it is only $150 and we have regular use for it. There is also the issue of switching names on the banking account. That is still in process. There was also the suggestion that we move away from Gmail as a main email account, although it was mentioned that google drive is very useful for shared working documents. We will continue to think of ways to organize our existing accounts. We will assign the task of setting up an EEAC Zoom account at the next SC meeting.