In attendance: Jackson (secretary), Matt, Salem, Ty
Start time: 7:10 PM

Upcoming Events – We have two events this weekend! We’re hosting a Garden Day on Saturday, and our “Ancestral Culture and Modern Identity” discussion with Dr. Fredrik Gregorius. Jackson got fliers printed for the latter event, and put them up in the greater downtown/Near South area.

Next Week’s Events – We also have two events next weekend! We have our Israelism movie night on Friday night, and are tabling at Lincoln Earth Day on Saturday. Marc has the sticker order ready to be placed. Marc and Ty have been pressing buttons. Salem is making progress on preparing our display. Matt will be providing transportation to Innovation Campus.

Library Donation – Jackson has two books to offer the lending library. We’re adding them!

Reimbursements – Marc will be paid $227.64 to order our next batch of stickers. Ty will be reimbursed $50.92 for getting blackout curtains for our event space. Jackson will be reimbursed $11.26 for getting the fliers printed for our event this week with Dr. Fredrik.

Yard Sale – We need to get to advertising for it! Ty will try to get something drafted and posted this week. We’ll start accepting donations on April 22nd. Ty will be staffing the sale, but doesn’t know how much help he’ll be for pricing beforehand.

Summer Calendar –

We will not return to Star City Pride this year. We’ll be on the lookout for Free Pride events instead.

Blackout Dates: Star City Pride June 7th and 8th; Heartland Pride July 13th; also check Discord for Matt’s collection of powwow dates

Movie Nights: Strange Victory [June/July?]
To Wong Foo? [June/July?; still wating on Salem’s opinion]
Something Godzilla [1954 vs. Minus One; August]

Discussions: LGBTQ Damage Report?
Anti-Amazon

Does Winslow’s Wardrobe want to do a distro here? Maybe in August (Back to School)

Save for further consideration on Fall Calendar:
The Breadwinner movie for September? (Salem)
Come and See anti-war movie (Marc)
Discussion about upcoming election for October? (Matt)

Meeting adjourned: 8:10 PM

Meeting start: 7:00 PM
In attendance: Jackson (via phone) Matt, Salem, Ty (secretary)

1. Event Review: “Christmas’s War on Us” was a bust. Probably the same issue with our last event, that there was little advertising ahead of time. We need to be MUCH more on top of advertising, both in event descriptions being posted online, AND in getting our spring events decided upon earlier so that calendars can be finalized and printed sooner.
   
2. January Events: In the interest of getting the events online sooner, Ty will share a draft of the 2023 Labor Wins event tomorrow. Matt agreed to write a description for Space Sweepers, and Jackson will work on the counter-protest. The counter-protest may need to be up with more lead time, in order to give us time to organize counter-protesters and volunteers.
   
3. Calendar – Distro + Design: Distro is still ongoing. Salem reported putting up calendars at Matt Talbot, as well as some public transit spaces. Hurts Donuts still, unfortunately, doesn’t have a place to put up calendars. They did miss a few spots but Ty can hit those up on his distro.
   
   Matt whipped up a set of five different cat-head logos to be able to put The Black Cat House name in a more prominent way on smaller prints like our calendar handouts. We’re tabling deciding anything for sure tonight, but we discussed font choice to be dyslexia-friendly.
   
4. Remote Meeting Procedure: After weighing some accessibility issues (internet access, how to spread the word, etc.) we’re opting to just host weekly meetings in-person for now. Obviously, we can call folks in on request (like Jackson tonight and last week), but it will be much easier for folks to keep track of if it’s in-person. We’ll reserve the right to cancel due to weather or other outside factors, which we’ll update on the news box on the front page of our website.
   
   We discussed briefly whether we should move the weekly meeting to a different day of the week, but we’ll have to table that discuss as well.
   
5. Button Parts: Jackson is going to look into buying button parts for us. We’ve got enough in the treasury to order a purchase.

Meeting adjourned: 8:08 PM

Tabled: Logo, weekly meeting times

Meeting Start: 7:09 PM
In attendance: Jackson (over phone), Salem, Ty (secretary)

1. Events Review: “Killing Gaza” on Friday was a bust as far as attendance. We have really dropped the ball for advertising; the calendars were not distributed by that time. It’s also freely available on Youtube so people may have just opted to watch it at home. Winslow’s Wardrobe did much better, we had a few folks stop by to gather some new identity-affirming clothes. We will be working with Winslow’s Wardrobe to host other pop-ups in the future. We also probably could’ve gotten more people from getting the calendar distributed by that time. We did try to improve street traffic by putting up a sandwich board sign on the street corner.
2. Upcoming Event: Christmas’s War on Us is finally live online! Tell your friends.
3. Calendar Distro: Ty and Salem are splitting the majority of the calendar distro. Salem is planning to swing by Matt Talbot and a few other potential 27th street spots that they will report back on.
4. Meeting Cancellations: We will not have a weekly meeting for December 25 and January 1. Ty will update the notice box on the front page of the website with this news.
5. January Events: We’re going to try to draft the January events as early as possible to make up for dropping the ball on the advertising for December, and because we will not be holding most of the rest of the months’ weekly meetings, we want to start work on this as soon as possible. Ty will work on a draft for the Labor Wins event this week, Jackson will take care of the counter-protest, and we’ll see if Matt will be ok with drafting a description for Space Sweepers.

Meeting adjourned: 8:25

Tabled: Remote meeting policy

In attendance: Arya, Jackson, Marc, Rae, Ty (secretary)
Meeting Start: 7:12 PM

Yard Sale: Our yard sale is coming up this Friday and Saturday! We’ll be doing some pricing after the meeting adjourns today. Jackson will make yard sale signs. Jackson will also be out and setting things up on Friday + Saturday really early, at 6 AM, and would appreciate some assistance in set-up and tear-down on both Friday and Saturday. Rae and Arya think they may be able to come over early to help set up.

Calendars: Summer Calendar has been printed, and we split up the handbills and full-size calendars for distro purposes. We also had an extra stock printed for distro at Pride. We’re reimbursing Jackson $30.83 for paying for the calendar prints.

Pride Planning: Marc went over the designs he has for pride buttons, and we’re thinking to make 100 of pronoun buttons and 500 total of the historical buttons. He also showed a design he made that would make for a good sticker if we wanted to get those printed. Ty bought tablecloths for this and future tabling events, as a donation to the House. He also needs to get zines printed, as he wasn’t able to since the House is very full of yard sale donations.

Work time for yard sale pricing!

Meeting adjourned: 7:57 PM

Meeting Start: 7:04 PM
In attendance: Arya, Jackson, Rae, Salem, Ty (secretary)

Event Review: The film was good, the turnout was good, the discussion was good!

Sustainable Supplies: Some discussion was had regarding single-use plastics at the House, specifically in reference to the plastic cups we use for water during events, though the discussion could be relevant for other House supplies. Jackson mentioned that most of what we have is hand-me-downs from other people, and that it’s been since 2019 or even earlier that we’ve had to buy these supplies ourselves. Rae brought up that for visitors that might not know this, they might think we’re like too many other community orgs that verbally support sustainability but aren’t sustainable in their actions. There was agreement that modeling sustainability is worthwhile, but we need to address what we should do with our plastic cups, since we don’t want them to go unused at all. Ty asked that we table this until we had some more opportunities to chat about options.

Yard Sale: The yard sale is coming up quick, the 26th and 27th! Jackson will draft a description and a call for donations to post online. Then it’s a matter of pricing donated items and setting up days-of.

Pride Tabling: We have a table! Ty was already given some funds to cover what we thought the table may cost, but he will need to be “preimbursed” for $110 to cover the remaining price of the table. We will need to have this booth staffed from 4-9 PM Friday June 9th, and 12-8 PM Saturday June 10th. We’ll also need to make sure we bring our own table – Wyatt has one that folds in half that we can ask him about using for that weekend. We’re not concerned about material costs, and Marc is working on button designs.

Website: We want to continue working on this so that it’s in a more complete state for the Pride booth. Tabled.

Summer Calendar: Marc sent a draft of the summer calendar to look over in his absence, and those at the meeting looked over it and sent him suggestions to edit. Rae will draft a short description of the workshop in July. Once these edits are made, we can send them for printing and start getting them distro’d.

Meeting adjourned: 8:15 PM

Tabled: Sustainable house supplies, website edits

4/17/2023 Minutes
In attendance: Arya, Jackson, Marc, Rae, Ty (secretary)
Start Time: 7:10 PM

Event Review: Earth Day went well! Quite a few organizers and volunteers thanked us for going for the greenwashing angle. We passed out the entirety of the handbills we brought, all but a couple of the zines, and a good quantity of stickers. “Compost the Rich” was the most popular by far!

Rae did note that passing out the calendar handbills and noting that people could go to our website to keep an eye on upcoming summer events was awkward. This reinforced our need for a formal listserv, so for future events we can just have a sign-up sheet for emails.

Upcoming Event: We’re showing Snowpiercer this Friday! We just need to clean up.

Black Musicians and Liberation: This year’s edition of Black Musicians and Liberation fell through. We’re going to aim to start organizing for next year’s much earlier, in order to accomplish the “emerging scholars” theme we tried to do. Marc came up with a handy reminder for ourselves: “On Black Friday, we start Black Musicians”

Black Cat House photos: A friend of The Black Cat House reached out offering use of their drone for aerial photos! We’re super excited, and Marc reached back out on our behalf.

Library Donations: Ty donated a couple of books he got from the Earth Day event to the library.

Website Reimbursement: Jackson paid $34.99 to pay for our secondary domain name. Everyone says it’s fine to reimburse him for that.

Summer Events: We’re still working on it!

Thursday, June 1st, 7pm: Sorry to Bother You… but We’ve Been Here 10 Years!
Saturday, June 24, 1-3p: TRANSport article reading discussion

Date/Time TBD: Conflict transformation workshop
Date/Time TBD: Gaming the System – ideas include, Atiwa, Trains, Anti-Monopoly, Bloc by Bloc

Further event ideas: Ancient labor organizing? Anti-Amazon? Antifa history? Right-wing cults, possibly tying in the assassination of Shinzo Abe?

Movie night ideas: How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Clerks, Triangle of Sadness, Hail Satan? (maybe not this one – need to do further looking into The Satanic Temple)

Meeting Adjourned: 8:52 PM

In attendance: Jackson, Marc (late), Ty (secretary)

Meeting start: 7:04 PM

1. Upcoming Event – We’re showing Behind the Shield this Friday! We have the means to show it, except we still can’t get the HDMI port on the projector to work. Ty and Marc will swing by tomorrow to see if they can work it, but the folks we initially brought it for repairs said there was a working port on it. We’ll have to fiddle with it more and see!
2. Calendar Distro Updates – Jackson got calendars across the downtown area, Marc and Ty got a good chunk of their spots done but got some calendars to do tomorrow. We also considered adding a few other churches and a temple to our calendar rotation. We’d have to reach out to see which of these have community boards AND would be good with us posting there.

3. Library Donation Sorting – We have a backlog of library donations to approve or not approve, and some possible room to create on our shelves. Those in attendance have decided to have next week’s regular meeting be mostly devoted to library sorting.
4. December 26 – We will be cancelling our weekly meeting on Monday, December 26.

Meeting adjourned: 8:23 PM

In attendance: Jackson, Ty (secretary)

Meeting Start: 7:05 PM

1. Event Review: Low turnout for the film but the discussion went well! Weather may have messed up the turnout more than our late posting of the event, as it got more interest on Facebook than our past few events.
2. Winter Calendar: We worked on the event description for our December movie night, which Jackson posted online tonight. The other events have been finalized, which are listed below.
   Marc had gotten a template for the calendar made, so all we need is to plug the events in and send to the printer. Maybe there will be room to include event blurbs? We’ll ask Marc about this.
   We also discussed whether the January discussion should be in-person or online given potential for heavy snow – we decided it would be better to have it be in-person but to include a note to check the online event pages in case of inclement weather.
   Our 2023 installment of Black Musicians and Liberation is still being worked on, so we will make a separate poster for it if we schedule it over winter.
3. Library Donations: Jackson came back from an event celebrating Malcolm X’s long-overdue induction to the Nebraska State Hall of Fame, and with books and a zine in hand. They were all obviously great additions to the lending library.

Winter Calendar
December:
Friday, December 9, 7 PM – Movie Night: Behind the Shield: The Power and Politics of the NFL
January:
Saturday, January 14, 1-3 PM – Corporate Control Over Public Space (A video and community discussion)
Saturday, January 28, 10 AM – Counter-Protesting the Anti-Choice “Walk For Life” (On the north side of the Nebraska State Capitol)
February:
Friday, February 10, 7 PM – Movie Night: The Killing Floor (1984)
Saturday, February 18, 1-3 PM – Gaming the System: Class Privilege in “The Great Dalmuti”

Meeting adjourned: 8:31 PM

In attendance: Jackson, Marc (sorta), Nate, Ty (secretary)

Meeting Start: 7:20 PM

Upcoming Event: Intersectona-LEE-ty is going to be this Thursday, 7pm! The event was posted very last minute so we’re sharing in several channels. We have some YouTube videos that Dance will use as part of the presentation, so just something we need to keep in mind.

Ty will pay for expanding our Dropbox again so that we have the space to record it as well.

Movie Night: Showing Judas and the Black Messiah on the 18th at 7pm! Jackson’s going to draft the event description and we’re hoping to get that up tomorrow.

Winter Calendar:

Any month: Potential guest speaker? E.P.C.O.T. documentary/company town discussion? Sci-fi film?

December –
Friday, December 9, 7 PM: Movie Night: Behind the Shield: The Power & Politics of the NFL

January – ?
February –
Black Musicians and Liberation?
Political Game Night?

Meeting Adjourned: 8:45 PM

Tabled: Winter Calendar